Nietzsche and The Shadow of God

NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD
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Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology
and
Existential Philosophy
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Founding Editor
General Editor
James M. Edie
Anthony J. Steinbock
Associate Editor
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John McCumber
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NIETZSCHE AND
THE SHADOW OF
GOD
Didier Franck
Translated from the French by Bettina Bergo and

Philippe Farah
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
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Northwestern University Press

www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2011. All rights
reserved. Originally published in French as Nietzsche et lombre de Dieu in 1998
by Presses Universitaires de France, 108 boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris
1998.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-0-8101-2665-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8101-2666-4 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[CIP to come]
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
000
Introduction
000
Part 1. From the Resurrection of Body to Eternal Recurrence

1
The Body Under the Law
000
Justice and Faith
000
One Vision Out of Another
000
Circulus Vitiosis Deus?
000
Part 2. The Shadow of God

1
The Double Status of the Body
000
The Self-Negation of the Will
000
The Great Coincidence
000
Speculative Theology
000
The Prophetic Translation
000
Zeus or Christ
000
Part 3. The Guiding Thread

1
The Plurality of the Body
000
The Criterion
000
Pleasure and Pain
000
To Will, to Feel, to Think
000
Organization and Reproduction
000
vii
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Part 4. The Logic of the Body

1
Dehumanization as a Method
000
Fear and the Will to Assimilation
000
Simplication and Judgment
000
Part 5. The System of Identical Cases

1
Sensation and Evaluation
000
The Formation of Categories
000
Space and Time
000
Representation
000
Coordination and Necessity
000
The Subject of Causality
000
Part 6. From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body

1
Memory
000
Consciousness
000
The Decisive Instant
000
The Incorporation of Truth
000
The Priestly Revaluation
000
The New Justice
000
Notes
000
Index
000
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Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to Hlose Bailly, Universit de Strasbourg II and Universit de Montral, for her scrupulous work on footnotes and translation questions. Gabriel Malenfant, University of Iceland, followed the
preparation of this text from start to finish; he is responsible for corrections as much as for inspiration. Thanks, also, go to Lukas Soderstrom
(Universit de Montral) for extensive research into philosophical and
historical questions. Marc-James Tacheji (McGill University Law School)
provided invaluable help on the final translation. Thanks are due to the
Universit de Montral, Dpartement de Philosophie, to Joseph Hubert of the Vice-Rectorat la recherche, and Yves Murray, directeur de
la recherche, Facult des arts et sciences, for their combined material
support. Thanks to Babette Babich (Fordham University) and Christine
Daigle (Brock University) for help on questions of Nietzsche scholarship.
Finally, sincere thanks to Claude Pich for help on questions of German
Idealism.
ix
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NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD
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Introduction
I
Only a god can still save us,1 Heidegger confided by way of last testament. Whence the curious testamentary tone of these words, if not from
the sheer movement of thought that gathers in them and is recapitulated
there?
What is this movement? How to understand it without abandoning
oneself to it, that is, without being straightaway caught up in it and by it?
How to describe its appearance and adventure without being concerned,
even shaken by it in advance? Indeed, how could we not be so, when it
is a question here of our own protection and salvation? If to be saved is
to be out of danger, then what is the danger to which we are exposed
and from which only a god could now save us? This could hardly be one
threat among others; it must be a danger that tests our very being. Now,
we could not be the bearers of an imperiled essence unless that peril
came from our essence itself. The question therefore is not only: How
can the danger arise from our being? But again and especially, how does
the danger belong to being itself, and to its truth, which governs us and
for which our being is to be its sentry? The danger could nevertheless
never belong to being unless being were itself the danger. However, if
being only ever gives or destines itself under the stamp of an age, and
our age is that of technology in which being is in its essence the danger
to itself,2 then we must begin by determining by what right technology
isin its essence and for our essencethe danger.
What then is the essence of technology and how do we reach it?
The moment that the essence of technology at least governs all apparatuses and technical systems [tous les appareils et dispositifs techniques], it is
possible to accede to this essence starting from one of these latter. What
happens when, for example, we activate an electrical switch? By reestablishing the passage of current in a circuit, we switch a lamp on to give
us light. The electricity that brings the filaments of the bulb to incandescence is energy that, to be consumed, must have been produced in
advance. How and where was it produced? In a hydroelectric or nuclear
3
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4
I NT RODUCT I ON
power station that, situated on a riverbank, captures the water to feed the
turbines or serve as cooling fluid. Thus produced, the electricity is then
transported by a network of cables suspended from pylons to be distributed and consumed everywhere, at will and without delay, through the
simple flick of a switch.
The preceding remarks suffice to show that the slightest technical
mechanism refers to the totality of what is. But how does it do this? It
refers to the world as that which it requires; a world in which the river is
one element in the power station, and the plains, the site for the pylons.
Technology is thus a mode of appearing. What is its essential feature?
The hydro-electric plant is set (gestellt) into the current of the Rhine.
It sets (stellt) the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then
sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion
whose thrust sets going the electric current (herstellt) for which the longdistance power station and its network of cables are set up (bestellt) to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining
to the orderly disposition (Bestellung) of electrical energy, even the Rhine
itself appears to be something at our command.3 In challenging nature
to deliver all its extractable energy to transform, accumulate, distribute,
and consume it, modern technology discloses each thing as a creation of
provisions [mise disposition] and storage for possible exploitation, as part
of a permanent standing reserve for exploitation governed by the economic principle according to which the greatest profit must be provided
at the least cost.4 Technology proves to be like such a standing reserve. It
is thus indeed a figure and an epoch of being, a mode of beings truth,
and of its disclosure that has the character of a setting upon, in the sense
of a challenging forth, a provocation.5 Through this mode of disclosure,
what is no longer unfolds its presence as an object (Gegenstand)in light
of the destiny of being there is no technical object and the epoch of technology is no longer that of objectsbut as a standing reserve (Bestand),
a word that signifies more than stock, reserve, or balance, because
it here takes on the dignity of ontological right or title.
Whatever its perspicuity, is this interpretation of technology and of
its essence not somewhat arbitrary? In no way, because it ties up afresh
with the Greek sense of . In describing the latter as a mode of
[ale theuein] and not as an instrumental apparatus or a means
toward an end, Aristotle already made techne a modality of setting into
the open, a mode of disclosure.6 All is concerned with coming
into being (), he specified, with contriving and considering how
something may come into being which is capable of either being or not
being, and whose origin () is in the maker () and not in
the thing made (umenw).7 Technology is thus relative to produc-
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5
I NT RODUCT I ON
tion, to . What should we understand by this term? is first

neither an artisanal nor an artistic or poetic work but rather, as Plato
already said, the movement that carries something out of non-presence
into presence. Production presents something out of its withdrawal into
non-withdrawal (Das Her-vor-bringen bringt aus der Verborgenheit her in die
Unverborgenheit vor). Producing comes to pass only to the degree to which
what is withdrawn comes into non-withdrawal. This coming rests on,
and draws its impetus from what we call disclosure (das Entbergen). The
Greeks have the word [aletheia].8 , or nature, thus belongs
as much to , thus understood, as to . What then is the difference between these two modes of production that are and ? It
cannot reside anywhere else than in the manner of coming-into-presence
itself. Whereas the flower appears and comes into presence by itself, a
house could not do so without the collaboration of an architect. The
latter sets and installs the house in non-withdrawal. Relative to the specificity of the technical mode of production, Heidegger continues:
is what concerns, fundamentally, all producing in the sense of a human
placing [Herstellen, which also means to produce and fabricate]. If producing () is the setting (das Hin-stellen) in non-withdrawal [Unverborgene] (of the world) then designates the being-known-there in
non-withdrawal [Unverborgene] and the ways of obtaining, holding, and
fulfilling the non-withdrawal [Unverborgene].9 is thus indeed production that, as a mode of disclosure, is maintained in the domain of
non-withdrawal, that is, in that of [ale theia]. This determination of clarifies the essence of modern technology, insofar as the
latter could not be a challenging creation of provisions10 if
from which the creation comes, since it preserves its namehad not
already been understood as a placing or a setting (Stellen)a word
that, assuming that we are thinking in a Greek way, corresponds to the
Greek, .11
In commanding nature to set itself [se mettre] or to set its resources
at our disposal (which comes to the same), modern technology not only
allows everything that surrounds us to appear as standing reserve, but
it further requires that we complete this unconcealment. How is that
possible? What must be our being, in order to do this? If we derive our
being from being itself, then we can only disclose what is, as standing
reserve, on condition that we ourselves belong to the standing reserve
that is disclosed. Do we not speak of human resources in terms of energy
resources? Does genetic engineering not make life into an industrial
product? So we cannot disclose what is as standing reserve unless we
ourselves belong to the standing reserve disclosedand this, in a manner still more original than nature,12 since we are the executors of this
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6
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<Q: Au, in the Are we

, the However fundamentally sentence, I
accepted your changes,
but the sentence still
has grammatical problems. Is it the creation
that challenges? OK to
add as after such?
Considerating isnt a
word. OK to change to
considering? OK to
delete it before the
last dash?>
unconcealment. In other words, we could not disclose what is, in the

technological mode, unless we were called to do so by [aletheia]
from which, on the one hand, we derive our being, since it is the truth
of being itselfand, on the other hand, since it is the domain whence
all technology comes, or may come to pass, whenever it calls man forth
in the modes of revealing allotted to him.13 Because man cannot contribute to the challenging creation of provisions without himself being
assigned to them in advance, the essence of technology could not be but
an epoch of being, a destiny of unconcealment.
Are we, henceforth, ready to determine the essence of the danger
from which alone a god could save us? Not entirely. On the one hand,
the mode of unconcealment that governs the essence of technology and
characterizes it as an epoch has yet been named and, on the other hand,
the connection between the mode of unconcealment and the domain
from which it comes still remains obscure. To name the challenge that
inclines man to let what is appear as standing reserve set as his disposal,
Heidegger ventures using the word Gestell.14 The choice is risky because
it implies that this word might be used in an unusual sense. If Gestell, in
its current reception, means: chassis, support, frame, carcass, it here denotes that starting from which, and in which, all that is or implies a position and a provisioning (which the verbs stellen, herstellen, bestellen, and the
noun Bestand all signify) is assembled and can deploy its reign. The word
stellen [to set] in the name Ge-stell [enframing]15 does not only mean challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another
Stellen from which it stems, namely that producing and presenting [Herund Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of , lets what presences come
forth into unconcealment or non-withdrawal. However fundamentally
different producing and presenting may appeare.g., erecting a statue
in the temple precinct, and the creation of provisions that challenges,
such we are now considerating itthey remain nonetheless essentially
related to each other. . Both are modes of revealing or disclosure, of
[ale theia].16
But what is the domain common to these two modes of unconcealment that are and Ge-stell, production and apparatus,17 and
above all how do they arise from this domain? Since [aletheia] is
the sole domain of all possible modes of disclosure, man could not disclose what is without having previously been summoned to it in one way
or another. For no disclosure could take place if we did not first belong
to the site of disclosure, of non-withdrawal, which alone could, consequently, lead us toward it in such a way that we can disclose what it is. And
if the unconcealment [non-withdrawal] of that which is always takes a
path of unconcealing,18 how could we take it without ourselves being set
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7
I NT RODUCT I ON
thereon, that is, sent and destined to it? We shall call the sending that
gathers [versammelnde Schicken], that first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining (Geschick). It is from this destining that the essence of all
history (Geschichte) is determined.19 Each mode of unconcealment, production as much as apparatus, is thus a sending of the destiny through
which man is governed, since this sending arises from the truth of being
from which man derives his own being. Yet this destiny is neither a fate
that compels,20 nor consciousness of self as of a foreign power. This is
because, on the one hand, it does not concern self-consciousness and, on
the other hand, by sending us on the path of disclosure it opens us and
frees us for the truth of being, which is that of our own being. To the
occurrence of unconcealing, that is, of truth, freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring
and a concealing. That which freesthe secretis concealed and always
concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the free, goes into the free,
and brings unto the free.21
Having thus arrived at the essence of technology as a destiny of
unconcealment, which, qua destining, opens us to the freedom of what
frees, it is hereafter possible to determine the danger to which we are
exposed. As destined to unconcealment, man is by the same token essentially endangered. Indeed, because it turns us toward what is unconcealed and away from the non-withdrawal to which we are indebted for
our essence and our freedom, every mode of unconcealment is dangerous in itself. If man cannot reveal what-is, save at the risk of the truth of
his being (which is that of being itself), then the destiny of unconcealing is, as such and in each of its modes, necessarily, danger.22 Receiving
its vocation from the non-withdrawal, responding to a destiny of unconcealment, thinking is in essence dangerous and simply abdicates when it
becomes soothing and pacific, inoffensive or moral.
What becomes of this danger in the age of technology in which
being is destined in the mode of Ge-stell, of the apparatus? As long as
he is called to disclose what-is as object, man discloses himself as subject
and still remains (in this status and in his being) different from what he
discloses. The subjective determination of man thus neither obliterates
nor wholly obnubilates the truth, nor the highest dignity of his being . . .
which lies in keeping watch over the unconcealmentand with it, from
the first, the concealmentof all essential unfolding on this earth.23
In other words, in the age of subjectivityor objectivity, it is the same
thingthe danger is not yet at its apogee, and it could not be unless
we were ourselves completely absorbed in and by that which is unconcealed, in such a way that the lost glimmer of the truth of being might be
completely absorbed at the same time. It is therefore only when being is
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8
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destined on the mode of the apparatus that the time of the supreme danger comes about. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as
what is un-concealed no longer concerns man even as object but exclusively as standing reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer or commissioner of the standing reserve, then man
comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point
where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. Meanwhile,
man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as
lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything
man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives
rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and
always encounters only himself.24
The supreme danger thus appears under two points of view. According to the first one, man, called to disclosure in the mode of the
apparatus, himself becomes a part of it and consequently, on principle,
finds himself incapable of hearing the call as call, and of considering
himself as the one to whom the call of being is addressed. Turned away
from his own essence, that is, from the truth of being, he no longer encounters anything other than himself andthis is the second perspectivehe assumes the form of master and lord of the earth. In what sense
are these two perspectives distinct, or, better, why does the errant man
(and the essence of errancy resides in the essence of being as danger)25
come to imagine himself as master and lord of the earth? We could not
respond to this question without determining the source of this form.
It is not Greek, but biblical. In the Lutheran translation of the Bible,
the expression der Herr der Erde [the Lord of the Earth] denotes God
himself such as he is revealed to Israel and in Christ. Not only does Luther always translate the name Yahweh by der Herr, the Lord, but the
latter again receives the title of Lord of the Earth in a psalm where it
is written: mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the master
of all the earth.26 It is with the same epithet that God is invoked in the
Gospel of Matthew by Jesus who, concerning the Gospel, will say, I bless
you, father, Lord of the heavens and the earth for having hidden this
from the wise and the prudent and for having revealed it to the small.
It is again used by Saint Paul, citing the psalmist, when he declares, of
all that is sold on the market, you shall eat without asking questions or
burdening your conscience, for the earth is the Lords as is that which
fills it.27 What does this divine lordship over the earth and the heavens
imply? Nothing other than faith in a creator God. God is the master and
lord of the earth because he is its creator, because it is his creation, and
because he can change its landscapes by making the mountains disappear. However, as creator of the earth, God is equally so with man. What
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9
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then is the relation between man and God? According to the priestly
narrative of creation that opens Genesis: God created man in his image,
in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
How to understand the character of the image here? The following verse
provides the answer: and God blessed them and said to them: be fertile
and increase, fill the earth and master it, and rule over the fishes in the
sea and the birds in the sky, over cattle and all the animals that creep on
the earth.28 How does this verse permit us to clarify the determination
of man as image of God? If the term image is not taken in a formal,
but rather a functional sense, assimilating acts rather than states, then
man can be qualified as the image of God because he masters the earth
and the animals in the fashion of God who reigns over the whole of creation. Man is in the image of God as ruler and because he is Gods trustee.
We must, moreover, underscore the violence of the expressions that describe this rule of man over the earth, since the Hebrew verbs translated
by master and rule first signified to trample down, to crush, and
designated the pressing of grapes.
However, in recalling here and in this way the biblical origin of the
expression master of the earth, are we not granting finally a second
foundation to the essence of technologywhich does not mean a secondary foundation? Without any doubt, and Heidegger does not fail to
point this out. After having asserted that Nietzsche recognized the danger to which man is exposed in the instant of exerting dominion over
the earth and of using powers that free the unfolding of the essence of
technology, Heidegger explains in effect: Nietzsche was the first man to
raise the question: Is man, as he has been and still is, prepared to assume
that dominion? If not, then what must happen to man as he is, so that
he can make the earth subject to himself and thus fulfill the words of
an old testament?29 In thus citing what he calls an old testamentthe
substitution of the indefinite article for the definite one is pregnant with
meaning, since it implies, against the witness he himself is bearing, that
the God of Israel would only be one god among othersdoes Heidegger
not recognize, by the same token, that the unfolding of the essence of
technology concurs with the biblical characterization of man as will? And
how could he do so unless the essence of technology had a second origin,
other than the Greek, a Judeo-Christian origin?
But the mere citation of a verse from the Old Testament nevertheless does not allow us yet to assign a second foundation to the essence of
technology. In order to do so, two conditions are required. It is first necessary that the meditation on the essence of technology would itself be
able to recognize that other foundation. It is then and especially necessary that the mode of disclosure that is the essence of technology always
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10
I NT RODUCT I ON
bear the mark of that foundation, always and everywhere. Let us return
a moment to our point of departure. As we said, electricity can be consumed everywhere, at will, with the simple flick of a switch. Everywhere
at willwhat does this mean if not that the will is everywhere assured
of what it wants, only to have ultimately to do with itself and with none
other than itself? Technology seems to make of man the master of the
earth, because the will, finding itself everywhere anew, has become its
own object. This will, which, in every intention and every perception, in
all that is willed and attained, wills only itself and, more precisely, itself
doted with the continually increased possibility of this able-to-will-itself
[ce pouvoir-se-vouloir]this will, as Heidegger once said, is the foundation and the essential domain of modern technology. Technology is the
organization and the organon of the will to will.30 In this way fulfilling
the biblical word, the will to will proper to technology so violently masters
the earth that it tears it out of its circle of possibilities to forcibly carry it
into a measureless devastation. The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. It is first the will that
arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology
drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such
things which are no longer a possibility and are thus the impossible.31
To trample the earth under foot amounts, thereby and finally, to exhausting its being, to tearing it out of being and its truth. Moreover, analyzing
the concept of reflection within the framework of a clarification of logic
as thinking about thinking and reflection on reflectionanalyzing
this concept through which logic, deprived of a connection to things
themselves, is carried into the voidHeidegger emphasizes that thanks
to the care of the self implied in the quest for ones own salvation on
the one hand, and thanks, on the other hand, to the technicist thought
of creation (-haften) which from the point of view of metaphysics is
also one of the most essential foundations of the modern technology,
Christianity has played a role so decisive in the constitution of subjectivity qua the dominion of self-reflection, that the same Christianity is in
principle powerless to surmount the rule of technology. And, that there
be no doubt about the connection between Christianity thus understood
and the very essence of technology, Heidegger continues by asking in
the summer semester of 1944: Besides, whence comes then the historial
bankruptcy of Christianity and of its church in the history of the modern
world? Would it take a third world war to show this to it?32
The biblical thought of creationwhich implies mans dominion
of the earth and all that is found in itis not an object of knowledge
but rather a confession of faith in the creator and redeemer God. Con-
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11
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sequently, we could not truly recognize the stamp by which this thought
marked the essence of technology without first determining the essential
character of the creator god, from which this stamp could hardly fail to
come. Different from a Greek god who shows, indicates, and unfolds
its essence solely in the realm of [aletheia], the God of the Old
Testament, Heidegger reminds us, is a commanding God; His word is:
Thou shalt not, Thou shalt. This shalt is written down on the tables of
the law.33 Before examining the context in which Heidegger was brought
to make this remark and to which the adverbial formation indeed also
refers, it is appropriate to make a few brief comments concerning the
signification of the Decalogue. Proclaimed to Israel, the commandments
assume election and alliance. The proclamation assumes election as,
opening with the words I am the Lord, your God, who led you out of
the land of Egypt, out of slavery,34 it is addressed to those whom Yahweh
has ransomed, and it merges with the alliance since the tables of the
law are said to be the tables of the alliance.35 In other words, to comprehend the God of Israel on the basis of the Sinaitic revelation of the
commandments is to comprehend him in the fullness of his salvific work
and his justice. But the Ten Commandments reveal God and man as wills
conjoined the one to the other. In fact, a commandment is only possible
where a will can act upon another will, where a will lets itself act through
another will. If God speaks and commandsthe commandments are
called the ten words36man responds to God through obedience or
disobedience. It follows that the Decalogue could not fail to define the
very humanity of man facing God, as a creature called to salvation in and
through this very creation, as will. And it does this in an essentially negative way, since the commandment on the Sabbath and the honor due to
parentsthe only ones presented in positive formmust be considered
as the transformation of old negative forms.37 Given over to that of God,
the human will is originally determined by interdictions, that is, by negations. For man is this will that must originally will not to will what God
does not want. Now this in no way amounts to willing originally what God
wants, for in that case, we would have to admit that the divine will and
being were directly accessible to human will and being. In a word, the
human will is related to what it wills through the binding intermediary
of a primary negation, precisely by virtue of divine transcendence. The
human will is inhabited by negation just as it is by God; or, rather, it is
inhabited by God in the form of negations. Is it not then this will that,
with the death of God and in the vacancy of his lordship, allows man to
posture in the form of master of the earth? Is it not this will that, having
become the will to will with the death of God, fulfillsever and again,
in its thrust and as if dazed by mourninghis word? Of man (and to
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12
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praise the Lord) one psalm says: That you have made him little less than
divine, and adorned him with glory and majesty; you made him master
over your handiwork, laying the world at his feet.38 Yet if, as long as God
is alive, man though he be scarcely less than a god, remains subject to
the Lord as to a higher, superior power and will, things shall be otherwise
with the death of God, which cannot fail to confer on man the possibility
of unfolding absolutely a power that could not be absolutely his own. If
the master of the earth is a terrifying figure, or even the very form of
the terrifying, then this is because the human, all too human principle,
according to which it unfolds its power, does not measure up to the divine power from which it derives and of which it is the inheritor ab intestat. Because it is not before Zeus but before Yahweh that the mountains
melt like wax, does not the essence of technology also unfold like the
unfurling of a will to domination, which, as such and as the determination of being, of man or of God, never had anything Greek to it? And
does not the unfurling of this will have as its drive a negation henceforth
deprived of the meaning that transcendence could have bestowed on
it? Does technology not thus substitute itself for faith; as a displacer of
mountains is it not its prolongation?39
II
Let us provisionally suspend these questions to which in a host of ways we
will be returning throughout and which form the horizon of this work.
It is over the course of his clarification of the change that comes to the
essence and to the counter-essence of truthat the time of the translation of the words [ale theia] and by veritas and falsum
that Heidegger recalls the essential trait of the Old Testament god. The
privative - that constitutes the first letter of the word [aletheia] in
fact indicates that the essence of truth, as non-withdrawal, unfolds in an
oppositional dimension relative to a counter-essence: . Falsum,
the participle of fallere, is related to the verb : to take down in
wrestling, to wreck, or bring to a fall, a verb for which no nominal form
corresponds to the way would do. No doubt, can
be correctly translated as deceiving. But how can the to bring to a
fall (das Zu-Fall-bringen) take on the sense of deceit or deceiving, or
better: what is the Greek sense of this deception and how is it possible?
In the midst of the beings that appear to him, man wavers when something comes to block his path and this, in such a way that he no longer
knows what to believe nor what he is up against. Moreover, that man
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could thus fall into this trap, something must first appear and be taken
for something else, by which precisely he is able to be mistaken. The
deceiving in question is possible only on the foundation and within
the field of the essence of dissembling and concealing (which constitute
the essence of ).40 In other words, if man can only come to be
led astray within the realm denoted by the word , the bringing
to a fall in the sense of to deceive is but a consequence of the essence
of the , and nothing that relates to this fall could originally be
opposed to .
But then, why did the Romans translate by falsum; why did
they make fallere into the very essence of the and name what is
primary starting from what is secondary? What realm of experience is
normative here, if the bringing to a fall attains such a priority that on
the basis of its essence, there is determined the counter-essence to what
the Greeks experience as , the unconcealing and the unconcealed? To which Heidegger responds on the spot: the realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is the one of imperium and the imperial. 41 What should we understand by this? The
imperium is the sovereign power, der Befehl, commandment. Imperare is to
take, prescribe, or recommend measures such that something be done.
Imperare thus signifies praecipere, to take possession and to dispose of what
is possessed, as of a territory over which command is exerted. Imperium
is the territory (Gebiet) founded on commandments (Gebot), in which the
others are obedient (Botmssig). Imperium is the command (Befehl) in the
sense of commandment (Gebot). Command, thus understood, is the basis
of the essence of domination (Herrschaft), not the consequence of it and
certainly not just a way of exercising domination.42
These considerations, whichneed we emphasizeare philosophical before being philological, prepare and introduce the reference
to the Old Testament god. For the latter is indeed also, as Heidegger
says in the sentence immediately following the one we just cited, a god
that commands (ein befehlender Gott). What justifies these considerations
or, more precisely, what is the legitimacy of the adverb also, whose use
implies the assimilation of the biblical command to the Latin imperium?
We must first point out that the words Befehl and imperium never translated what Israel called the ten words, and that the Greek of the Septuagint, the only one held to be inspired and which Heidegger does not
mention, translated these by . Luther uses the verb
befehlen in its original German acceptation. According to that sense, befehlen does not signify to command but to recommend to . . . When a
psalm says recommend your fate to Yahweh, Luther translates: befiehl
dem Herr deine Wege,43 and to refer to the commandments he resorts to
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the word Gebot. In the Vulgate, Saint Jerome uses the term praeceptum
formed on the verb praecipere. Now, as we have seen, Heidegger (who
subjects praeceptum and Gebot to imperium and Befehl) understands the
last two terms in an exclusively Latin sense.44 But furthermore, and this
is the essential point, the commandments revealed to Moseswhich are
the words whose very hearing calls for response but in no sense orders
to be carry out, and which are assigned to a promise of life or salvation
but not to disciplinecould not be understood on the basis of imperial
domination.
Is Heideggers translation, that is, his interpretation, unacceptable
for all that? Nothing as yet permits us to assert this, as Heidegger is not
speaking of the god of Israel as such, but of the Old Testament god. It is
thus with regard to Christianity as the actualization and fulfillment of the
revelation made to Israel that the question must be posed. It is a matter
of knowing, then, whether and how Christianity can be thought within
the sphere of the Latin imperium.
Let us return to the way in which the Latin imperium determined the
essence of the falsum. As the essence of domination, command implies
a difference of rank, a hierarchy that could not be maintained without
constant supervision. This superintendence watches over that which is
under supervision in such a way that any uprisings of the dominated
against the dominant could be put down. In this sense, the bringing to
a fall necessarily belongs to the realm of the imperial. But this putting
down can result from a frontal attack or from one coming from behind
(Hinter-gehen). But to attack from behind is to take something cunningly
and therefore to deceive (Hintergehen). In this case, the fallen are not
destroyed but rather, in a certain way, raised up againwithin the limits
fixed by the dominating ones. Such is the sense of the pax romana, which
was never but the enduring form of imperial domination. Heidegger can
thereby conclude that to compass someones downfall in the sense of
subterfuge and roundabout action is not the mediate and derived, but
the really genuine, imperial actio and that the properly great feature
of the imperial resides not in war but in the fallere of subterfuge as roundabout action and in the pressing-into-service for domination.45
How does this allow us to understand translating by falsum
or rather, what happens when the first is thought according to the sense
of the second? In light of imperium, which defines the realm in whose
midst and starting from which the Roman world unfoldsand which in
a certain way is to that world what [aletheia] is to the Greek one
ceases to be understood as a mode of closure that dissimulates
by allowing to appear, and allows to appear by dissimulating. In light of
imperium, , no longer arising from non-withdrawal, is henceforth
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interpreted as what causes to fall, as what brings down, as fallace. The falsum is always the fallacious.
The translation of by falsum is not only what we might call
a metaphysical militarization of [ale theia], but again the most
dangerous and most enduring form of domination.46 In fact, the translation of by falsum does not only consist in a transference of the
realm of [ale theia] toward that of imperium, it implies at the same
time the covering over of the truth of being by imperium itself, and consequently the endangering of the truth of being by the latter. As such,
this translation, which by transforming the essence of the truth of being
makes being foreign to its own truth, is essentially dangerous. Moreover,
if the essence of technology is indeed the supreme danger, then it too
must draw its source here in the covering over of the truth of being. But
how? It is impossible to respond without first asking these two questions.
From where does imperium derive the durable character of its domination, which only a thinking that turns back toward and accedes to
[ale theia] is ultimately apt to put into question? And what must this same
[ale theia] have become; that is, how has it been translated such
that falsum could be opposed to it?
If imperial domination was able to be enduringly exerted, then
this was because the imperium Romanum gave way to the ecclesiastical imperium, to the sacerdotium, to priestly domination. The imperial here
emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His
domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of command here resides in the essence of ecclesiastical dogma. Therefore this
dogma takes into account equally the true of the orthodox believers,
as well as the false of the heretics and the unfaithful. The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperium.47 The Roman Catholic
Church thus appears as the most enduring, that is, the most dangerous
figure of imperium, since it is the domination of domination itself, and
since the latter makes being foreign to its own truth. Conversely, questioning this Church and its dogma, which always presupposes the revelation
of God in Jesus Christ, is indissociable from the thinking of being and its
truth. According to the way it understands itself, the thinking of being
and its truth is as hostile to Catholicism and Christianity (we can never
emphasize this enough), insofar as Christianity merges with Catholicism,
as the thinking of being is hostile to that which is Roman. Nevertheless,
is it enough to lead the courtly to the imperial, to characterize the Roman Church qua church? Nothing is less certain, and this for a number
of reasons. First, the court or curia, which brings together the organs of
ecclesiastical government (congregations, tribunals, offices), is relative
to the authority of the pope as vicar of Jesus Christ on earth. If the pope
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is the visible head of a body whose invisible head is Christ, the church
must be theologically understood as the body of Christ. Consequently
and ifas Luther indefatigably reminds uswhat is essential is not the
pope but the cross, then any attempt to lead the Roman Catholic Church
back to imperium remains insufficient if it does not proceed from this
fundamental theological determination. It is the Christian revelation as a
whole that must be led back to imperium, in order that the church might
be one form of it. Now, that is impossible since the divine commandment
that Christ comes to fulfill absolutely does not unfold in the same realm
of experience as that of imperium.
Let us take a few steps back, to understand the implications of these
remarks. As he discloses himself and takes himself as ground, man gloats
in his figure of master and lord of the earth. This mode of unconcealment and this figure, the conjunction of which describes and characterizes our being in the age of technology, do not have the same origin.
Once it is shown that the commandments of the god of Israel, on the
one hand, and the Christian Church, on the other, cannot be essentially
assimilated to the forms of Roman imperiumthat imperium on whose basis the essence of was transformedonce it is shown that divine
lordship is not imperial domination or that Jerusalem is not Rome, and
Rome is not a holy city, then it is at the same time established that the figure of the master and the lord of the earth could not be led back to this
change in the essence of truth brought about by its Romanization. This is
because the Romanization through imperium of what is Judeo-Christian,
like the thought of creation, does not reach this divine lordship that
man cannot but assume with the death of God. The figure of master of
the earth, consequently, could not be grounded in the Romanization of
[ale theia], that is, ultimately in as the original realm of all
modes of disclosure. In other words, if the unfurling of the will, which
marks the essence of technology, is not essentially and exclusively of an
imperial nature, a Roman nature, then it becomes impossible to attribute
to [ale theia] alone, and to its Romanization, the unfolding of the
essence of technology. Before examining the problems that this raises
(but to bring out their breadth), let us return to the truth, that is to say,
now, to the translation of [aletheia] by verum.
The Latin verum derives from an Indo-European root, ver, present
in the German words wehren, to resist; die Wehr, the defense; das Wehr, the
dam. Resistance to . . . is nevertheless not the only meaning of the root
ver. In old High German, wer also signifies: to resist for . . . , that is, to
defend oneself, to assert oneself, to hold position and to hold ones position, to remain upright and to be in ones right; in short, to command
and not to fall. Thus it is from the essential domain of the imperial
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that verum, as antonym of falsum, received its rightful, well established

signification.48 But this acceptation covers another, more original one,
which again das Wehr manifests, the dam. Effectively, the Italic word veru
or verofe, which designates a door, rests on an ancient neutral *werom,
closure, derived from the root *wer- (Skr. vr nti, it closes, it encloses,
German Wehr).49 Consequently, the most original, significant moment
attached to the root ver is that of the enclosure. The original element
in ver and verum is that of closing off, covering, concealing, and sheltering, but it is not die Wehr [defense] as resistance. The corresponding
Greek word of this Indo-Germanic stem is the defensive weapon,
the covering, the enclosure.50 This wordrelated to the Latin verum
thus has in Greek a meaning opposed to that of [aletheia], which
verum precisely translates. Nevertheless, this opposition would be impossible if the opposed terms did not unfold in the midst of one and the
same dimension. In other words, the Latin verum comes out of the same
semantic field as the Greek . However, verum there signifies the
contrary and corresponds to the Greek .
From the moment that verum is opposed to falsum within the domain of imperium, the root ver cannot fail to signify covering, in the double
sense of what protects (the covering force) and of what guarantees (the
covering of a risk). The verum is thus what assures imperium against a fall
and holds it upright. Verum is rectum (regere, the rgime), the right, iustum.51 And if verum may be assimilated to iustum, it is because ius, right,
is inscribed in the sphere of command, since the word ius signifies conformity to a rule, and the condition necessary to the fulfillment of an
office.52 Under the influence of the imperial, Heidegger says by way
of recapitulation, verum becomes forthwith being-above, directive for
what is right; veritas is then rectitudo, correctness [Richtigkeit], we would
say. This originally Roman stamp given to the essence of truth, which solidly establishes the all-pervading basic character of the essence of truth
in the Occident, rejoins an unfolding of the essence of truth that began
already with the Greeks and that at the same time marks the inception of
Western metaphysics.53
Heidegger is alluding here to the transformation of
[ale theia] into . Initially, designates that which is not
withdrawn. But man could not disclose the non-withdrawn without conforming to it. The unconcealment to which man is calledand this call
constitutes his beingmust therefore conform to that which calls to
unconcealment; it must correspond to truth itself. And how could this
conformity (or ), which presupposes non-withdrawal and takes
what is not withdrawn for what it is, and is simply the mode in which
unconcealment is fulfilledhow could this conformity not require the
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? How could this conformity to what calls to unconcealment (and

which draws its very possibility from [ale theia]) not have, as its
obligatory site, that by which man responds to the call addressed to him,
that by which man discloses: the utterance, the ?54 The conformity
of the word to what it lets appear thus becomes the definitive representation of [aletheia]55 and what is essentially secondary passes
by the same token into the foreground. Now, and it is here that
[ale theia] comes to encounter veritas, the Greek as disclosive
correspondence and the Latin rectitudo as adjustment to . . . both have
the character of an assimilation of assertions and thinking to the state
of affairs present at hand and firmly established. Assimilation is called
adaequatio. In the early Middle Ages, following the path set by the Romans, [ale theia], presented as , became adaequatio. Veritas
est adaequatio intellectus ad rem. The entire thinking of the Occident from
Plato to Nietzsche thinks in terms of this delimitation of the essence of
truth as correctness [Richtigkeit].56
This determination of the essence of truth as correctness is, according to Heidegger, at the foundation of modern technology, whose
domination we are attempting to clarify as the unfurling of the will to
will. What then is the connection between the Roman determination of
truth and technology? As we said, if unconcealment must conform to
what it discloses, this is because it must take what is not in withdrawal for
and as what it is. Latin calls taking something for something, reor. From
this is derived ratio which translates . Consequently, the essence of
truth as veritas and rectitudo passes over into the ratio of man. The Greek
, to disclose the unconcealed, which in Aristotle still permeates
the essence of , is transformed into the calculating self-adjustment
of ratio. This determines for the future, as a consequence of a new transformation of the essence of truth, the technological character of modern, i.e., machine, technology. And that has its origin in the originating
realm out of which the imperial emerges. The imperial springs forth
from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive selfadjusting guarantee of the security of domination.57
It is thus indeed from imperium and ultimately from [aletheia]
that the form of domination proper to modern technology proceeds, according to Heidegger. However, in that case, if the biblical command
cannot be brought back to imperium, and if revelation is inaccessible from
the Roman path [romanit], it then becomes impossible to understand
how and why, in the moment of supreme danger, man gloats in the figure
of the master of the earth, fulfilling the word of an old testament. Now,
we could not be saved from this danger without beginning by recognizing all its origins. And we could not recognize them without starting from
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what we are in the very moment of mans supremacy: the trustee of standing reserve and the lord of earth. In other words, the clarification of the
essence of technology, that danger from which only a god could save us
now, must be at least as inseparable from a confrontation with revelation
as it is from a meditation on the truth of being and its destiny.
III
The confrontation with revelation is all the more necessary in that, according to Heidegger, the modern determination of truth bears its mark,
since the ecclesiastical dogmatics of the Christian faith has contributed
essentially to the consolidation of the essence of truth in the sense of
rectitudo.58 In effect, it is starting from the domain of the Christian faith
that the new transformation of the essence of truth was fulfilleda transformation that will determine the very character of modern technology:
the transformation of verum into certum. In what way did this take place
and what are its major moments? When Descartes takes the clear and
distinct perception of self as characterizing the certainty of the cogito,
and establishes as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and
distinctly is true,59 he thereby raises clear and distinct perception to the
rank of a criterion of truth qua certainty. Whence, however, does clear
and distinct perception derive its authority as criterion? If the general
rule, which all knowledge must obey, is given to me with and through
the ego cogito, then only the analysis of the second term is liable to lead
to what grounds the first. As finite and imperfect, I am a being that does
not have in itself the foundation of its being. Is there, then, in me an idea
that could reveal this foundation to me? The idea of God, which God
himself placed in me, is the truest and most clear and distinct.60 This is
because the idea of Godlike the mark of the craftsman stamped on
his work, since he has created me in his image and likeness61has an
objective reality that necessarily implies formal or actual reality. Otherwise put, the idea of an infinite God, containing all that is true in things,
is the ultimate ground of the general rule according to which clear and
distinct perception guarantees truth. Yet if my being stems from a truthful God, whence then come error and what is false? As long as these have
not been explained, and attested as exclusively human, the criterion of
knowledge and of truth will remain insufficiently grounded.
How does Descartes interpret error? When I look more closely at
myself and inquire into the nature of my errors (for these are the only
evidence of some imperfection in me), I notice that they depend on two
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concurrent causes, namely on the faculty of knowledge which is in me,

and on the faculty of choice or liberum arbitrium; that is, they depend on
both the intellect and the will simultaneously.62 In what way does error
have understanding and will for its cause, if the one and the other are
perfect in their genres? On the one hand, in fact, considered in itself as
pure power to conceive, the understanding could not err and its limits
are not a privation, for nothing proves that God should have given me
a different faculty of knowing. On the other hand, and by contrast with
the faculty of knowing, imagination, or memory, it is only the will [or
liberum arbitrium] which I experience within me to be so great that the
idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp; so much so that it is above
all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the
image and likeness of God.63 No doubt the divine will surpasses our
own in the knowledge and power to be found there, or again by virtue
of the objects to which it extends; yet, considered as will in the essential and strict sense, the human will is the equal of Gods, because [it]
simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm
or deny, to pursue or avoid); or rather, it consists simply in the fact that
when the intellect puts something forward for affirmation or denial or
for pursuit or avoidance, our inclinations are such that we do not feel we
are determined by any external force.64 In short, and considered purely
in itself, the will is none other than freedom.
This is not, however, the freedom of indifference, characteristic of
Gods omnipotence, since indifference does not belong to the essence
of human freedom.65 What then is the essence of human freedom? The
human will is free when it is determined by the knowledge of what is
good and true. For in order to be free, there is no need for me to be inclined both ways; on the contrary, the more I incline in one direction
either because I clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness
point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughtsthe freer is my choice. Neither divine grace nor natural
knowledge ever diminishes freedom; on the contrary, they increase and
strengthen it. But the indifference I feel when there is no reason pushing
me in one direction rather than another is the lowest grade of freedom;
it is evidence not of any perfection of freedom, but rather a defect in
knowledge or a kind of negation. For if I always saw clearly what was true
and good, I should never have to deliberate about the right judgment or
choice; in that case, although I should be wholly free, it would be impossible for me ever to be in a state of indifference.66 Revisiting in his way
Saint Augustines concept of freedom as propensity and determination
to the good, Descarteswho, in the fourth Meditation, always associates
error and sin67makes clear and distinct knowledge of the good and the
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true (inasmuch as this knowledge determines the will) the very condition
of the correct use of human freedom. He does this independently of the
natural or grace-related origin of this clarity. Indeed, divine grace acts on
the will the way clear and distinct knowledge can do, since the clarity or
evidence which can induce our will to give its assent is of two kinds: the
first comes from the natural light, while the second comes from divine
grace.68 And if there really is a difference between the content of a revealed truth and that of a natural one, then this difference only concerns
their respective substance and not the formal reason why we give them
credence. [For,] on the contrary, this formal reason consists in a certain
inner light which comes from God, and when we are supernaturally illumined by it we are confident that what is put forward for us to believe has
been revealed by God himself. And it is quite impossible for him to lie;
this is more certain than any natural light, and is often even more evident
because of the light of grace.69 However, as we know God through the
idea he has placed in us, it is ultimately clear and distinct perception that
characterizes all certainty in general, because the latter is for us, in some
way, the pure form of all light, whether natural or supernatural.
If divine grace and natural knowledge confirm my freedom, this is
indeed by virtue of the certainty that accompanies the one and the other.
Consequently, Heidegger can venture that Descartes transfers what was
characterized theologically, as the effect of Gods grace, to the effect of
the action of the intellect on the will. And he can add that the clara et
distincta percepta takes on the role of grace, since it presents to judgment
its characteristic bonum.70 What is the meaning of this functional identity of grace with clear and distinct perception, whichwe might add
assumes the convertibility of transcendentals? It means first that, if every
will tends toward a good, then it is the intellect that gives, in advance,
to the will the perceptum to be pursued or eschewed. As a result, error receives an explanation: So what then is the source of my mistakes? It must
be simply this: the scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect; but
instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters
which I do not understand. Since the will is indifferent in such cases, it
easily turns aside from what is true and good, and this is the source of
my error and sin.71 Therefore I only ever deceive myself by using my
freedom beyond that which I conceive clearly and distinctly, and in this
incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes
the essence of error.72 If error is a usus libertatis non rectus, then this is
because truth itself has already been understood previously as rectitude,
correctness.73
The functional identity of grace and clear and distinct perception has, furthermore and above all, the sense of a detheologization or a
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secularization.74 What should that mean? By detheologization, Heidegger

is pointing to the movement according to which propositions originating in the realm of the experience of Christian faith are translated or
transferred into that of philosophical knowledge. This detheologization
does not proceed without raising serious difficulties, whose full sense we
must try to evaluate. Heidegger never ceased interpreting the Cartesian
turn that inaugurates and commands all of modern philosophy as a detheologization, emphasizing for example that the Cartesian demand for
an absolute, unshakeable foundation springs from the liberation of humanity from the bonds of the truth of Christian revelation and the doctrines of the Church, a liberation which frees itself for a self-legislation
that is grounded in itself.75 The Cartesian determination of the essence
of freedom, from which error originates, thus implies the passage from
the certainty of faith to that of knowledge that knows itselfand this
in such a way that the certainty of faith is no more than the other contrary source, from and on which this knowledge breaks free. Yet what is
true for Descartes and for all of modern philosophy is likewise true for
the existential analytic. In fact, if the Christian definition of man, as ens
finitum, was indeed detheologized over the course of the modern age,
it nevertheless remains that the idea of transcendencethat man is
somethimg that reaches beyond himselfis rooted in Christian dogmatics, which can hardly be said to have made an ontological problem of
mans Being.76 Because transcendence belongs to the being of Dasein,
should we not understand fundamental ontology, and the initial posing
of the question of being, as the fulfillment of that detheologization, tantamount to modern philosophy?
What does this detheologization mean and, above all, under what
conditions is it possible? If detheologization denotes the passage from
the realm of experience of faith to that of philosophya passage that assumes or institutes a certain continuityit cannot fail ultimately to hold
philosophy in thrall to theology. Why and how so? When a concept originates in Christian dogmatics, it preserves in itself the stamp of its site of
origin; that is, ultimately, the stamp of God himselfif only as Creator of
that finite understanding to which certainty can be introduced. Now, this
stamp of origin could not be erased like some arbitrary stamp, because
its origin looms over all the others. In carrying a concept from Christian
dogmatics into philosophy, by exporting it outside its birthplace, one
may perhaps erase some of its theological traits. But this is also to proceed to a surreptitious and radical theologization of philosophy as such,
since one is thereby introducing into reason itself a trace of God, which
is to say, God himself. From Descartes to Hegelfor whom philosophy
ultimately comes to coincide, in the form of absolute knowledge, with re-
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vealed religionthe path is secure. The Cartesian detheologization has

for its ultimate consequence the assimilation of speculative philosophy
to a speculative theology. In short, it is God himself who may, alone and
through his death, make us forget him. And only the death of God can
give rise to a radicalbut above all definitivedetheologization of
meaning and word [du sens et de la parole]. As long as the death of the God
revealed in Christ has not become the object of a frontal confrontation,
as long as the whole of revelation is more skirted than faced, the movement of detheologization, which moves from God toward being and proceeds from theology toward a general or fundamental ontology, remains
insufficient. For, blind to the Christian nature of its point of departure,
fundamental ontology invariably risks turning against its own intentions.
Like every movement, detheologization never ceases transporting its origin. In other words, the renewal or return of onto-theo-logy to a mode
of disclosure of being is not enough to make us forget that the god of
Aristotle was subject to the God of revelation. It is therefore not only the
essence of technology, but also the metaphysical realm of its unfolding,
that requires that the biblical tradition be put into question anew.
How to undertake such a task? The history of truth ought, by itself,
to be able to point the way. If the transformation of verum into certum,
which the essence of modern technology requires, was effectuated starting from the realm of Christian faith and corroborated the determination of the essence of truth as correctness, then this domain must have
been previously concerned. No doubt, Descartes transferred to the cogito
what Saint Thomas, who placed the certainty of faith above that of knowledge, attributed to divine science alone.77 However, the certainty of faith
or of knowledge is not yet that of the believing and knowing ego as such.
Whence comes that certainty, and how can Christian faith assure the ego
about itself? By assuring it of its being-in-Christ, that is, of its salvation.
After having asserted that the transformation of verum into certum originates with Christian dogmatics, Heidegger immediately adds the following remark: Luther raises the question of whether and how man can
be certain and assured of eternal salvation, that is, certain of the truth;
Luther asks how man could be a true Christian, i.e., a just man, a man
fit for what is just, a justified man. The question of the Christian veritas
becomes, in the sense just articulated, the question of iustitia and iustificatio. What should we understand here by justice and justification?
Must we understand them according to Scholastic theology, as Heidegger
does when, citing Saint Thomas, by justice he understands correctness
of reason and will?78 Or should we return more directly to Saint Paul,
whose doctrine of justification constitutes, according to Luther, the core
of all Scripture, that is, ultimately, of all theology, since the latter consists
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in interpreting Scripture? In other words, does Heidegger have the right

to determine justice, such as Luther understands it, on the basis of the
Scholastic theology and philosophy that Luther unceasingly criticized
for their incomprehension of justification? Clearly not, for this would
amount to confusing what Luther strove indefatigably to distinguish: the
philosophical sense of justice as formal or active, and its properly scriptural and theological sense as passive justice. Recall the magnificent page
on which, shortly before his death, Luther summed up all of Evangelical
theology in a narrative and biographical mode:
I had been seized by an astonishing ardor to know Paul in the Epistle
of the Romans; yet what hindered me at the time was not so much the
chill of the blood in my entrails as a single word, found in chapter I:
the justice of God is revealed in it [the Gospel]. Indeed, I hated that
term justice of God that I was accustomed to understand philosophically, following all the Schoolmen, as the formal or active justice
through which God is just and punishes sinners and the unjust. Yet I,
who lived as an irreproachable monk, felt myself a sinner before God,
with the most uneasy conscience, and could not find appeasement
through my satisfaction; I did not love and even hated this just God who
punished the sinners, and I revolted against this God, secretly fostering
if not blasphemy, at least a violent murmur, saying: as though it were
not enough that wretched sinners, lost through original sin, be burdened by all sorts of ills through the law of the Decalogue, why should
God add pain to their pain and send his justice and his wrath against us,
even through the Gospel? I was thus beside myself, my conscience infuriated, overwhelmed, and yet, intractable, I called upon Paul, ardently
desirous to know what he meant to say in this. This, up until the moment when, God taking pity as I meditated day and night, I would finish
by attending to the order of the words: the justice of God is revealed in
him, as it is written: the just man lives from faith. I then began to understand that the justice of God is that through which the just man lives
through the gift of God, which means from faith, and that it is through
the Gospel that the justice of God is revealed, which means the passive
justice by which the God of mercy justifies us by faith, as it is written:
the just man lives by faith. Whereupon I felt myself being utterly
reborn and entering into paradise itself, all its doors being opened.
There and then, all of Scripture appeared to me under another countenance. I then read through the Scriptures such as I had them in my
memory and observed the analogy with other terms: the work of God
is what God effects in us; the force of God is that by which he makes
us capable; the wisdom of God, that by which he makes us wise; the
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fortitude of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. As great as was
the hatred through which I had previously hated those words, justice
of God, the more did I now exalt this sweet word in love. In this way,
the passage of Paul was truly for me the door to paradise. I then read
the De spiritu et littera of Augustine wherein, against all hope, I saw that
he interpreted the justice of God in the same way: that with which God
cloaks us in justifying us.79
If the question of the Christian truth is indeed that of justice and

justification, then, qua Christian, it is not originally one of rectitude.
By interpreting, in the wake of Saint Anselm80 and Saint Thomas, the
justice of God as rectitude of reason and will, Heidegger surreptitiously
abandons the Lutheran doctrine of justification through the faith alone,
in favor of the Thomist and Catholic doctrine of justification by a faith
informed by charity or love.81 In fact, understood as correctness of reason
and of will, justice, though it would not go without faith, cannot fail to
come out of rational and voluntary acts, that is, out of worksthough
they were works of charity itself. Now, against the philosophers, which
is above all to say against Aristotle, does Luther not assert that we are
not made just by working justly, but rather made just, we work justly?82
Against the Lutheran doctrine of justification, and consequently, against
all of Evangelical theology, Heidegger thus subjects the justice of God
revealed in Christ to that history of truth out of which Aristotle arises
along with all of philosophy and, by the same token, subordinates the
divine word to that of being. He does this more radically than had Scholastic theology, whose constant adversary was Luther. Now, to reiterate:
the confrontation with revelation could not take place principally on the
sole ground of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics and that
of [ale theia]. For, it is im-possible to accede to revelation on the
basis of these, from the moment that divine commandment proves irreducible to imperium, and the justice of God revealed in Christ, irreducible
to a justice that rewards merit. Nevertheless, this does not yet allow us to
answer the question of how and from whence to engage the debate with
revelation.
IV
By bringing Luther into the history of truth, of [ale theia]
which is not at all self-evidentHeidegger intended to elucidate its
modern determination as certainty, correctness [justesse], and justice; a
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determination presupposed by the essence of technology. After Descartes who, as we have seen, understands truth as certainty and correctness of judgment; after Kant who, in the Critique of Pure Reason, strives
to justify the use of the pure concepts of the understanding, Nietzsche
closed the metaphysical history of truth by interpreting it as justice. If
we experience and come to know these historial connections as our history, that is, as modern European world-historyHeidegger writes to
grasp and recapitulate the destiny of the essential transformations of
[ale theia] since Platowill it then surprise us that in Nietzsches
thought, where the metaphysics of the Occident reaches its peak, the essence of truth is founded on certitude and justice? Even for Nietzsche
the true is the right (das Richtige), that which is directed (richtet) by what
is real in order to adjust itself to it and make itself secure in it. The basic
feature of reality is will to power. What is right must conform itself to the
real, hence must express what the real says, namely the will to power.
All correctness must be adjusted in terms of the will to power. Correspondence to what the will to power utters is the just, that is, justice (das Rechte
d. h. die Gerechtigkeit). It receives its essence, at the end of Western metaphysics, from the decree of the will to power. Nietzsche very often uses
the word life as a title for the will to power, and he uses it in accord
with the usual biological way of thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche can therefore say: Justice is the highest representative of life itself. This is a Christian thought, though in the mode of
the antichrist. Everything anti thinks in the spirit of that against which it
is anti. Justice, in Nietzsches sense, presents the will to power.83
In light of a meditation directed toward [ale theia], Nietzsches thought thus marks the apogee of Western metaphysics, since, as
the ultimate consequence of the translation of by veritas, that
thought consecrates the triumph of the Roman way [romanit]. What can
this mean other than that is henceforth completely covered over
by veritas as source, that is, by what derives from it? Nevertheless, if the
field of the essence of is covered over, it will not be enough for
us to sweep around the ruins to be able to come back to it. On the contrary, the essential field of is obstructed by the enormous bastion
of the essence of truth determined in a manifold sense as Roman. 84
Of this gigantic bastion that constitutes metaphysics, Nietzsches thought
is the last stone, the last word that could not be fully last without also
being first, in a certain sense. But how does Nietzsche fulfill this end of
metaphysics? How does he lead the end back to the beginning?
In an essay contemporary with his course on Parmenides, and which
concerns the ontologico-historial determination of nihilism, before establishing
the fundamental metaphysical position of Nietzsche, Heidegger reminds
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us that if metaphysics indeed recognizes that beings are not without

being, this is only to immediately displace being onto beings, or onto a
being, taken in an eminent sense. In other words, in withdrawing before
the foundation of all beings by way of a supreme being that Plato and
Aristotle called , being gives rise to metaphysics as onto-theo-logy.
To ask the question of what beings are as such, beings in their essence, is
also immediately to ask the question of knowing what the being most appropriate to that essence is, and thereby, to seek its existence. Otherwise
put, if metaphysics, in the guise of ontology questioning beings as such,
inquires into their essentia ( ); in its guise as theology and focusing
on the supreme being, metaphysics enquires into its existentia ( ).
What then, according to Heidegger, is Nietzsches fundamental metaphysical position or, more precisely, how does Nietzsche understand the
being of beings in light of the dual relation of its essence and of its existence? As an ontology, even Nietzsches metaphysics is at the same time theology, although it seems far removed from the School metaphysics. The
ontology of beings as such thinks essentia as will to power. Such ontology
thinks the existentia of beings as such and as a whole theologically as the
eternal recurrence of the same. Such metaphysical theology is of course
a negative theology of a peculiar kind. Its negativity is revealed in the expression God is dead. That is an expression not of atheism but of ontotheo-logy, in that metaphysics in which nihilism proper is fulfilled.85
In understanding the being of beings as will to power and eternal
return, Nietzsche specifies being according to the double relation of its
essentia and its existentia. In so doing, he brings together and combines
the initial metaphysical positions of Parmenides and of Heraclitus. In
fact, if, in response to the question: What is a being? Parmenides says:
a being is; and Heraclitus answers: a being becomes, then to think will to
power as eternal recurrence means to secure for becoming the constancy
of being. Does Nietzsche not sum up his own thinking with these two
propositions: To imprint on becoming the character of beingthis is
the supreme will to power, and again: That everything returns is the most
extreme rapprochement of a world of becoming with that of being?86 Such is
the way in which Nietzsche closes, according to Heidegger, the circle described by the history of truth. By leading the end of metaphysics back to
its Greek beginning, a beginning whose originality he never questioned,
Nietzsche did not replace the guiding question of metaphysics, What is
a being? with the fundamental and prior question concerning the essence, or the truth, of being. In other words, Nietzsches thought is an
onto-theo-logy because it over and again starts out from the withdrawal
of being that gives rise to the distinction between the ontological and
the theological.
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However, would Nietzsches thought (which Heidegger takes to be

the apogee of metaphysics originating in Greece) not also be the place
for a confrontation with Christianity [explication avec le christianisme]? If
this were the case, then the question of knowing where and how the debate with revelation should be engaged, would find ipso facto its response.
Can we take the doctrine of the eternal return of the same, then, as a
properly philosophical theology, deriving its negativity from the death
of a god that Nietzsche, for his part, always qualified as Christian? That
said, for Nietzsche, the death of God never had an originally negative
sense. From the summer of 1881, when Nietzsche warns, in light of the
thought of recurrence, that if we do not make of the death of God a grandiose renunciation and a perpetual victory over ourselves, we shall have
to endure its loss,87 he is emphasizing its affirmative sense since it denotes
victory. It is always for man, never for the overman, that the death of
God has and can have a negative sense. Consequently, if the doctrine of
eternal recurrence is not the ultimate philosophical theologyor ontotheo-logy par excellencethen not only is Nietzsche perhaps not the
last metaphysician of the West,88 as Heidegger argues indefatigably, but
more importantly, this doctrine risks modifying the entire task of thinking risks. It is toward running this risk that the present work is, in a certain sense, dedicated.
What then is the connection between, on the one hand, the clarification of revelation, whose necessity we progressively drew out of the
essence of technology, and the metaphysical destiny of truthand, on
the other hand, the questioning of the onto-theo-logical character of the
thought of eternal recurrence, which has to serve as counterweight to
the death of the Christian God? Only the determination of the connection between the essence of technology and the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics (of which Nietzsches thought marks, or should
mark, the completion) can allow us to answer definitively the question
of how the debate with the word of God must be engaged. Why? The
first reason has to do the historial position of Nietzsche who, according
Heidegger, fulfills the Romanization of [ale theia]. Through this
Romanization, however, was not only immured in the gigantic
bastion of metaphysics, it was reinterpreted in advance to serve as one
of the building stones, hewn expressly for it.89 Thus, as the ultimate Roman metaphysics, Nietzsches thought is the farthest removedof all
metaphysical thoughtfrom the truth of being. From the moment the
essence of technology, whose unfolding requires the transformation of
verum into certum, is the mode of disclosure of the being that is farthest
removed, strangest and most hostile to its truth, Nietzsches thought
(and singularly that of eternal recurrence understood as onto-theo-logy)
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can only be relatedand this is the second reasonto the supreme danger, albeit in its way and for the truth of being. Two brief remarks by
Heidegger, which confirm this, are also clarified thereby. The first is a
manuscript note in the margins of a lecture of 1949, entitled The Danger.
There, Heidegger wonders, assuming that God were, not being itself to
be sure, but the supreme being, who would venture to say today that this
god thus represented is the danger for being?90 This strange question
signifies first that the understanding of God as the supreme being has
the same origin as the origin of technology, because it assumes the withdrawal of being and its truth. But thereupon, by not placing any article
before the word God, is Heidegger not suggesting that the Christian
God who invested metaphysics also has (by reason of his very nature) an
intimate complicity with the essence of technology? And does this suggestion not distantly echo a note by Nietzsche, according to which the
Christian god, the god of love and cruelty, is a person conceived quite
cleverly and without moral prejudices: really, a god for Europeans who
want to subjugate the earth?91
If this were not the case, then the Note on the eternal recurrence
of the same that follows the lecture of 1953 devoted the figure of Zarathustra, would have no meaning. Indeed, after having cautioned against
any mystical misinterpretation of the doctrine of recurrence, about
which, in presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring
to light the essence of modern technology, the present age could certainly
set us straight, Heidegger goes on to argue that the essence of the modern power-driven machine is one version of the eternal return of the
same.92 This second remark does not exhaust the doctrine of return, as
it concerns but one form of it. It signifies fundamentally the same thing
as the first remark. That is, that the thought of eternal recurrence
whether as the ultimate onto-theo-logy, or because it arises from the essence of technology out of which comes the essence of the machine
is the thought in which the entire history of the withdrawal of truth is
concentrated and recapitulated. The name technology is understood
here in such an essential way that its meaning coincides with the term
completed metaphysics, 93 as Heidegger once said. Let us emphasize
this once and for all: the confrontation with revelationwhose necessity
we established on the sole basis of the description of the technological
essence of man as master of the earth (thus, on the basis of philosophy
alone)can then take its point of departure from Nietzsches thought,
whereby metaphysics is completed as the destiny of being.
But that this confrontation might start out from Nietzsches thought
does not yet mean that it must do so. In order to do so, it would have to be
the case that Nietzsches thought were as much, if not more, the site of a
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clash with revelation, than it was the fulfillment of Romanization, i.e., the
withdrawal of [aletheia]. Is Holy Scripture present in Nietzsche as
something with which he contends? Let us return to justice. By making
justice the supreme representation of life, Heidegger asserts that Nietzsche continues to think in a Christian fashion, all the while thinking in
an anti-Christian one. But what is Christian in Nietzsches determination
of justice? Heidegger observes, in regard to the transformation of truth
into certainty, that this truth-certainty, as self-assurance (to-will-oneself)
is iustitia, understood as the justification of the relation between a being
and its primary cause, and thus as the justification of its belonging to
the being [God as primary cause]. Immediately thereafter Heidegger
adds: iustificatio, in the Reformations sense and Nietzsches concept of
justice as truth, are one and the same.94 Relative to the history of being,
this claim would have precious little scope if the Christian truth (that is,
ultimately, revelation in its entirety) belonged to the history of truth and
to the destiny of the way the grounded belongs to its ground. Yet
that is not the case, and it is necessary to complete the demonstration,
here, at the apogee of metaphysics. First, to say that iustificatio, in the
sense of the Reformation, that is, in the Pauline sense, and Nietzsches
justice are but one and the same thing, is to make Nietzsche no longer a
philosopher but a Christian theologian, since iustificatio constitutes the
head and the sum of Christian doctrine [doctrinae christianae caput et summam]95 in Luthers own words. This objection would be without impact
on the destiny of being if it were possible to take Christian theology qua
Christianand it is from Christ himself that this theology receives its
character as theology, since he is the incarnate as a structural moment of all metaphysics. But it is not such a momentmoreover, and if it
is true that justification (iustificatio) is the achievement of iustitia,96 the
latter for Luther has nothing to do, either with willing-oneself or with the
ultimate authentication of subjectivity as the being of beings. Heidegger
emphasizes that, at the beginning of modernity, the question is revived
concerning howout of the sum of beings, that is, facing that foundation which is more entity than any entity (God)how man can become,
and be sure of his own consistency (Bestndigkeit), which is to say, of his
own salvation. Yet when Heidegger continues, asserting that this question about the certainty of salvation is that of justification, which is to
say, of justice (iustitia),97 is he not reducing, among other things, man
before God (coram Deo) to man before the world (coram mundo)? Is the
certainty of salvation in Christ, and not that before the supreme being,
not the very essence of faith for Luther? The true faith says: I believe
in the son of God, dead and resurrected, for me, for my sins, and of this
I am certain. Indeed, he has died for the sins of the entire world. Yet it
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is quite certain that I am part of the world; therefore it is quite certain

that he also died for my sins.98 Is there anything that is Cartesian, and
more generally, philosophical, in Luthers determination of doubt and
certainty? Luther writes, doubt is the work of the law. Indeed, whereas
the law produces doubt in the soul, the Gospel, on the contrary, consoles
and makes the soul certain. Doubt and certainty lay siege to each other
in bitter combat.99 Has the foundation of beings or, if you prefer, the
god of Aristotle ever saved or redeemed whomsoever, and does Luthers
justification not imply faith in Christ, to the point of merging with that
faith? Does Luther not assert, in 1536, that from the point of view of theology, Aristotle knew nothing of man?100 Did he not criticize the philosophical definition of man as rational animal in order to substitute his
theological definition for man? In thereby erasing the opposition, coram
mundocoram Deo, which crosses all of Lutheran theology, in identifying
at the same time man, apt to justification as the image of God, in the
place of man as rational animal or as the entity that understands being,
Heidegger leads Evangelical theology back to philosophyneglecting
Luthers lesson, which he nonetheless happened to recall.101 In this way,
Heidegger leads the word of Christ back to that of being and this, at the
cost of an essential misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of justification and of the certainty of salvation,102 which is supposed to allow
the transformation of verum into certum. By the same token, Heidegger
sets off on a surreptitious de-Christianization of philosophy; that is, an
unfounded and ultimately inoffensive de-Christianization. Once again in
regard to justice and to the apogee of metaphysics, it appears that revelation could not arise from or be related to the destiny of , even
in the guise of its Romanization. Finally, it is not certain that the rule,
according to which everything anti thinks in the spirit of that against
which it is anti, can be applied to revelation in the same way that it is
applied to philosophy.103 If the reversal of a metaphysical thesis is still a
metaphysical thesis, if all anti-Platonism always comes back to Plato as to
its source, it remains that to proclaim the death of God does not amount
to announcing his resurrection. The death of God is not that of the Son
who rose again to sit on the right hand of the Father.
What has just been said means that there could not be, at the same
time and in light of the history of being, a Lutheran philosopher and
theologian. In other words, Nietzsche could not simultaneously carry
out the Romanization of and think justice in the wake of Saint
Paul or Luther. This is because the second of these two tasks comes out
of a field of experience irreducible to that to which the first task belongs. That does not imply, yet, that Nietzsches thought would indeed
be, above all, the site for a confrontation with revelation, a confrontation
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of which divine justice would either be the red thread, or at least that to
which it should lead us.
Nevertheless, it is not without right that Heidegger could say that
the metaphysics of will to power conforms only to Roman culture and
with Machiavellis The Prince.104 In the section of the Twilight of the Idols
entitled What I Owe to the Ancients, and which Heidegger cites to
confirm his interpretation, does Nietzsche not indeed declare: To the
Greeks I do not by any means owe similarly strong impressions; andto
come right out with itthey can not be for us what the Romans are. One
does not learn from the Greeks[their manner is too strange, it is also
too fluid to produce an imperative, a classical effect. Who would ever
have learned to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans! . . . Let no one offer me Plato as an objection.].105 Yet
the whole question is one of knowing whether the distinction between
Greeks and Romans really has the same meaning and function for Nietzsche as for Heidegger. Whereas for Heidegger, Romanism denotes the
covering over of [aletheia] as that essential dimension in which
the Greek world initially unfolded, things are wholly otherwise for Nietzsche. What are those strong impressions of which the Greeks offer no
equivalent? They are those for which Nietzsche is indebted to what he
calls the Roman style, exploited in his Zarathustra. And in order to make
himself fully understood, he specifies: From that day to this no poet has
given me the same artistic delight as I derived from the very first from
a Horatian ode. In certain languages what is achieved here is not even
desirable. This mosaic of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as
concept, pours forth its power to left and right and over the whole, this
minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum
of energy of these signsall this is Roman and, if one will believe me,
noble par excellence.106 Roman for Nietzsche is thus eponymous for noble.
And Romanism must be understood relative to the revaluation of values.
It is therefore not Romanism that gives its meaning to this revaluation,
but the reverse. It is for this reason important to grasp Nietzsches sense
of Romanism, to specify what is eponymous for those servile values subject to revaluation.
Why does Nietzsche refuse to consider Plato as an objection? To
pose this question is ultimately to ask what Plato signifies on the horizon
of the project of revaluation.
In respect to Plato I am a thorough sceptic and have always been unable
to join in the admiration of Plato the artist which is traditional among
scholars. After all, I have here the most refined judges of taste of antiquity themselves on my side. It seems to me that Plato mixes together
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all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first decadent

[erster dcadent des Stils].107
But this response, which characterizes decadence according to its form

or, better, to the mixture of forms (that is, in the absence of a sovereign
form), does not yet allow us to understand what dcadence is and consequently to name that over which Romanism is called to triumph. This
is whyand still in the same paragraph of Twilight of the Idols from which
Heidegger borrowsNietzsche sets the figure that Plato takes on within
the perspective of revaluation, writing:
Ultimately my mistrust of Plato extends to the very bottom of him: I
find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christianhe already has the concept of good as the supreme conceptthat I should
prefer to describe the entire phenomenon Plato by the harsh term
higher swindle or, if you prefer, idealism, than by any other. It has cost
us dear that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (or with
the Jews in Egypt? . . .). In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that
ambiguity and fascination called the ideal108 which made it possible
for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to
step on to the bridge which led to the Cross . . . And how much there
still is of Plato in the concept Church, in the structure, system, practice of the Church!109
If Nietzsche prefers the Roman style to the Greek one, for which Plato
is here the paradigm, this is because Plato prepared the way for Christianity. What is more, in the years 188788, Nietzsche will not cease
repeating that Plato is a Jew: Plato . . . who had already devalued the
Greek gods with his concept of the good, which was already itself marked
by Jewish bigotry (in Egypt?) or again, Plato, that anti-Hellene and
Semite by instinct.110 In short, the values to which Rome is opposed are
Judeo-Christian values, or rather, those of which Judeo-Christian values
are highly exemplary. And if Rome is not opposed to Athens but rather
to Jerusalem, if the combat between noble values and servile ones can
have as its symbol, Rome against Judea and Judea against Rome,111
this is because, far from being some ultimate metaphysics, Nietzsches
thought is the site of a confrontation with revelation and metaphysics.
More precisely, it is the site of a confrontation with a system of values
that permits the conjunction of Athens and Jerusalem. The distinction
between Greeks and Romans could therefore not have for Nietzsche the
sense it has for Heidegger. The latter meaning includes the Christian
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Church in the Roman world, at a time when, paradoxically, that world

excluded it, and it is impossible to say that the will to power agrees with
Romanism alone, so long as the latterunderstood as the covering over
of is not taken in its properly Nietzschean acceptation.
In light of revaluation, symbolized and defined by the combat of
Rome against Judea, it becomes impossible to describe the directing
movement of Nietzsches thought as a reversal of the Platonism that persists in thinking in the spirit and sense of its adversary; impossible likewise
to consider Nietzsche as the most unrestrained Platonist in the history
of Western metaphysics;112 impossible, finally, to assert that Nietzsches
thinking was and is everywhere a single and often very discordant dialogue
with Plato.113 No doubt Nietzsche himself understood his thought this
way. Did he not qualify his philosophy as an inverted Platonism, explaining that the farthest one stands from the true being [vom wahrhaft
Seienden], the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Life in appearance [im
Schein] as goal.114 Nevertheless, this note dates from 187071 and not
from the years 188788, in which Nietzsches thought reached its apex
according to Heidegger115and in which Plato is regularly characterized
as a Jew. In other words, the reversal of Platonism, by which Nietzsche was
able to grasp one moment of his thought, is inscribed in the revaluation
of Judeo-Christian values, in regard to which Plato figures as a Jew. No
more given to confusing Plato with Platonism than Heidegger was, Nietzsche took care to note in autumn 1887: Plato becomes, with me, a caricature;116 which is to say, the example of a type. What is more, did Heidegger not himself lead Plato back, at least once and in a strange fashion,
to the Jewish world? Asserting that the theological, ecclesiastical, and
Christian interpretation of the world arises from the Judeo-Hellenistic
world and whose fundamental structure was established through Plato at
the outset of Western metaphysics,117 does Heidegger himself not make
Plato a Jew indirectly? For how could Plato have founded the JudeoHellenistic world without himself beingif not as Jewish as Greekat
least somewhat Jewish?
From the moment the reversal of Platonism no longer suffices to
characterize Nietzsches thought, it doubtless becomes impossible to see
that, in and through which the circle of metaphysics comes to a close as
the destiny of being. However, it does become possible, notwithstanding, to close by responding to the question of knowing where and how
the debate with revelation should be engaged. Why is Plato Jewish, according to Nietzsche? When Socrates and Plato took the side of virtue
and justice, they were Jewish or I dont know what.118 Plato is thus
Jewishor something else of which Judaism would be but an exemplary
caseon account of justice. What justice is at stake? Given that Plato be-
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comes Jewish by taking the side of justice, the justice whose side he takes
must ultimately be as Jewish as the decision about sides that it requires.
Nevertheless, in order that Plato be qualified as Jewish and, as such, be
recognized as an adversary, it is essential that the revaluationof which
Nietzsches entire philosophy is but the unfolding and enactment [mise
en oeuvre]finally concern divine justice itself. If one assumes that Nietzsches thought is everywhere and continuously in dialogue with that of
Plato, then this is because the latter, having prepared the way for Christianity, is still Europes greatest misfortune!119 Consequently, Nietzsches
debate with revelation essentially concerns justice in the biblical sense of
the term, that is, Gods justice. And how could things be otherwise if God
is dead? Nietzsche himself emphasized that the death of God signified
the preemption of divine justice. It is with great difficulty, he writes,
that the greatest events reach man at the level of his sentiments [zum
Gefhl]: for example, the fact that the Christian god is dead, that in our
experiences there is no longer expressed a heavenly goodness and education [Erziehung], no longer a divine justice [gttliche Gerechtigkeit], above
all no immanent morality. This is a frightful novelty, which still requires
a couple of centuries to come to Europeans sentiment: and then it will
seem for a long time as though all gravity were gone out of things.120
The confrontation with revelation would simply not take place if
Nietzsche found that the action or effect of divine justice were extinguished, without looking for a new justice, which is to say, a new gravity.
That this is the case is easily attested, if not already understandable. In a
magnificent text from book 4 of The Gay Science, which ends on the first
formulation of the thinking of eternal recurrence (entitled The Greatest Weight, 341), Nietzsche exclaims: Rather a new justice is needed!
And a new watchword [Losung]! And new philosophers!121 A little later
on, in a projected preface to the reissue of Human, All Too Human, he
reconceived his entire itinerary as the search for a new justice. It happened lateI was already well over twenty years oldthat I discovered
what was actually lacking me altogether: namely, justice. What is justice?
And is it possible? And if it should not be possible, how then would life
be sustainable [auszuhalten]?in such a way I questioned myself unrelentingly.122 At the same time, in another project for a preface, Nietzsche
again wrote, I was already over twenty years old when I discovered that
I lacked the knowledge of men.123 Was this not tantamount to saying
that the new justice does not go without a redefinition of the essence of
human beings, that the justice to come requires the overman as one of
its conditions of possibility?
How would this other justice be new if it were not victorious over
the old divine justice that hitherto had made life possible? How would
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this other justice be new, if it were not also the condition of a higher, requalified and considered life; the function, as it were, of a power superior
to that of God revealed in Christ? Need we recall that the justice of God
was always one, if not the, manifestation of his power? Yet, where was the
justice of God proclaimed as foundation for the entire economy of salvation if not in what Luther held to be the Gospel itself, that is to say, the
Pauline doctrine of justification?124 It is thus relative to the latter that the
confrontation with revelation must begin. However, if, as Luther always
saidthat same Luther to whom we appeal for the additional reason that
he is according to Nietzsche the grandfather of German philosophy
who restores the fundamental logic of Christianity125if our justification is not yet complete, if our justification is in act and in becoming, a
work site, then is it possible to attain revelation on the basis of a partial
and incomplete phenomenon? Evidently not. What, then, should the
fundamental motif in the confrontation with revelation be; that is, what
is, in the final analysis, the point of departure for elucidating the positive
sense of the death of God? The resurrection of the dead, for justification
shall finally be complete in the resurrection of the dead.126
We can presently make two remarks that shall engage the rest of
this work. On the one hand, it is indeed revelation, and philosophy, insofar as it is inscribed in revelation, that Nietzsche endeavors to surmount
in seeking a new justice. Just as Nietzsches reproach to Plato for mixing all styles had nothing formal to it, so too it is no philologists remark when, after noting that our ultimate event is still Luther and our
sole book still the Bible, Nietzsche declares: Luthers language and the
poetic form of the Bible as the foundation for a new German poetry:
that is my invention!127 Consequently, the thought of eternal recurrence,
which is heralded in this new form and lies at the base of that Bible of
the future128 that is Thus Spoke Zarathustrasuch a thought should tend
to invalidate the resurrection of the dead that Saint Paul, conjoining old
and new testaments in a single Bible, placed at the foundation of any
economy of salvation.
On the other hand, the death of God being the event before which
Nietzsches own thought would be the counterweight, it is important to
understand straightaway which God this was, that alone could save or
justify us, and why he can no longer do so. Failing that, we shall never
understand why and how, in the age where technology is the supreme
danger, man comes to take on the vacant and fatal figure of lord of the
earth. It is for this reason that, from the moment Christian theology asserts that resurrection and God are so connected that an atheistic comprehension of resurrection would be eo ipso meaningless, and when it
then concludes that the relation between God and resurrection must
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be grasped in a fashion so rigorous that the purity of the understanding of God would depend on the purity of the understanding of resurrection,129 we must begin our confrontation with [explication avec] God
revealed in Christ by an explanation of [explication avec] the resurrection
of the dead, which is always a resurrection of bodies.
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Part 1
From the Resurrection of Body to

Eternal Recurrence
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The Body Under the Law
If there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is also not resurrected; but if Christ is not resurrected, then our preaching is vain, and
so is our faith.1 These two verses from the first Letter to the Corinthians
point, as clearly and firmly as possible, to the foundation of the Pauline
predication. Developing the meaning of the revelation of Christ on the
road to Damascus, Saint Pauls theology and beyond it, the whole of
Christian theology which he inaugurated is centered on the death and
resurrection of Christ. This is not the first case of a resurrection whose
possibility would be given in advance. On the contrary, it constitutes the
origin in grace of that possibility. The resurrection of Christ, the resurrection in Christ, is the belief proper to Christians, and God himself is
invoked as the one whose power raises the dead.
The resurrection, which marks the passage from death to life following that from life to death, is a resurrection of the body. Thus, in
order to elucidate the concepts of life and death insofar as they relate
to resurrection, that is, to justification, and hence to reach the foundations of Pauls theology, we must take the body as our starting point and
principal theme. How does Saint Paul conceive the body? In another
passage from the first Letter to the Corinthians, he compares the unity
of the church to that of the body: For as the body is one while having
many members, and all the members of that body, being many, are one
body: so also is Christ.2 Let us leave for the time being the ecclesial and
Christic side of the comparison and keep only what concerns the human
body. The body is the unity of manifold members whose functions differ. How is this unity possible and from whence does it come? It does
not originate in the members themselves, as is attested by the following
imaginary variation, which takes up an ancient apologue: For the body
is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not
the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if
the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it
therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would
the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the smelling
be?3 This fable, which engages all the senses except taste, shows clearly,
on the one hand, that every member is a member of the body and, on
the other hand, that the unity that reigns among the members does not
41
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derive from them, since none is liable to represent the body as a whole.
If they were all one member, where would the body be?4 As the unity
of body is neither in one of its members nor in an immortal soul (of
which Saint Paul knows nothing), it can only originate in God who set
the members every one of them in the body, as it had pleased him.5 If
the unity of body and the disposition of its members is the work of the
divine will, then the belonging of the bodys members merges with the
belonging of our body to God. Saint Paul thus conceives the body in the
very site of our relation to God. As a divine unity of manifold members,
the body is man himself in his openness to God and, by the same token,
to his fellows in the world.
Does this mean that the body is precisely that openness; or does it
mean that man, considered exclusively from the perspective of God, is
essentially a body? Saint Paul writes, We carry in our body, at all times
and everywhere, the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might also
be manifest in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death
for Jesus sake, so that the life of Jesus might be manifest in our mortal
flesh.6 It is clear in this passage that life and death are not solely natural
phenomena in the Greek sense of the term, but above all that in our
body means in us, and the word body has the value of a personal
pronoun. This is not a hapax legomenon. Exhorting the Romans to turn
away from sin and to dedicate themselves to God, Saint Paul entreats,
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, exacting obedience
to its desires. Neither yield your members as instruments of injustice
to sin, but give yourselves over to God, as those that are alive from the
dead, and your members as instruments of justice to God.7 Again, your
body and your members mean the same thing here, just as do yield
yourselves and yield your members. If it is thus possible to substitute a personal pronoun for the words body and members without
modifying their sense, this shows clearly that man is first and foremost
corporeal, a body.8
But why is it that Saint Paul understood man as a body? How does
the body show us the man? What is the structure of the body that makes
it apt to denote the being of him who says I? Let us return to where we
left off in Pauls description. If they were all one member, where would
the body be? But in fact there are many members, yet only one body. The
eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you; nor the head to the feet, I
do not need you.9 By insisting at once on the unity of the body and the
multiplicity of its members, Saint Paul brings out the unity of the body
as something relational. Every member is necessary to the others, each
one, correlated with them. The body is a relational order, in which each
relation stands in reciprocal and total dependence on the others. The
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relationship of one member to another is a relationship of one to all

the others; that is, ultimately, the relationship of the body to itself. The
unity of the body is thus that of the relationship to self of its multiple
members. Yet the relation to self constitutes the I. Therefore, for want of
a soul, it is starting with the body that we should understand that being
who, because he is a self, can say I.
The description is not complete and the next verse begins with a
comparative adverbial phrase, which points out that the essential has perhaps not yet been reached. Rather, those members of the body which
seem to be the feeblest are necessary; those which we regard as less honorable are treated with special honor, and to our indecent parts is given
a more than ordinary decency; for our decent parts need no adorning.
But God has combined the various members, giving special honor to the
humbler parts, so that there be no division in the body, but that all its
members feel the same concern for each other.10 What idea is most significant here, if we overlook the progressive transition from the human
to the Christic body? If Saint Paul opposes a body hierarchically ordered
according to force, honor, and decency, to a body whose members are
equal despite their difference; if he opposes a divided body to an undivided one, this is because the unity of the members, and of the body
itself, is subject to variation depending on whether the axiology that orders it belongs to us or is divine. The unity of the body is the self, and if
this unity can be broken, it is because the self can be divided. What does
this division mean? The unity of the created body is likewise an ordering of the divine will. Consequently, the division of the self could have
no other sense than that of a rupture between man and God. It could
only mean an antagonism between the human and the divine modes of
valuing the members, a conflict between the possibilities of self, as signified by the various relations of value liable to be incorporated. Fidelity
and infidelity to God, obedience or disobedience of His word are thus
possibilities of the body. And when Saint Paul asserts that the body is
for the Lord, and the Lord for the body, it is immediately upon having
warned that the body is not for fornication,11 which obviously implies
that it could well be.
Man is a body, and by body we should understand an openness to
self, which as such is an openness to God. To put it more rigorously, it is
the openness to God which, as such, is the openness of self to self. The
unity of body therefore could not be naturalas the body itself is not
it is a matter of creation, of the bond between man and God, which is to
say, of holy history alone. As it trusts in or distrusts Godand distrusting
God means defying himthe body is united or divided, possessing itself
in itself or turned, in itself, against itself. What then are the scope and
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meaning of the disruption of self that is a rupture with God? As we noted

earlier, Saint Paul opposes two purposes, two ways of being for the body:
to be for God or for fornication. What does fornication cover? It is a
work of the flesh, a sin against ones own body.12 Thus, the analysis of
the concepts of flesh and sin should allow us to grasp why and how the
body comes to dismember itself.
According to Old Testament usage, the flesh designates fragile
man before the Eternal. When Saint Paul announces that no flesh will
be justified by the deeds of the law, or that God has chosen things
which are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh should
glory before Him,13 the expression no flesh means whosoever, and
the word flesh has a personal sense. On what grounds can the flesh
be substituted for the body to express the self? What is the difference
between flesh and body? If no flesh can be justified through practicing
the law, nor vaunt in the presence of God, that is because flesh is foreign and hostile to him. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of
God.14 How then should we understand the flesh if, as opposed to the
body, it cannot resurrect? Not even once attributed to God in the entire
Old Testament, the flesh is first the skin and muscles of animals or men;
then it is man himself such as he sees and appears to himself. The true
circumcision is not the external mark in the flesh.15 The flesh is thus
coextensive with natural visibilitynaturally with prepuce amounts to
being uncircumcised according to the fleshand, supposing it were legitimate to speak in this way, Pauls phenomenology makes the flesh into
the very being of the visible.
However, the flesh not only characterizes the body such as it sees
itself, but also as in the midst of what it sees. The wisdom of the logos,
the wisdom of the world sought by the Greeks, is a wisdom according to
the flesh, opposed to the grace of God.16 The flesh is thus the body inasmuch as it refers to itself and to the world; in short, to the extent that it
turns away from God. Does Saint Paul not say, in the space of a few lines,
that those who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh? And will he
not add that, through Christs cross, the world is crucified to me and I
to the world?17
That flesh is aversion to God is brought to light in a passage from
the Letter to the Romans: Those who are according to the flesh mind
the things of the flesh; but those who are after the Spirit mind the things
of the Spirit. But to be fleshly minded is death; and to be spiritually
minded is life and peace. For the fleshly mind is enmity against God.18
In distinguishing between the carnal and the spiritual, Saint Paul distinguishes two kinds of relationship of man to God, and two modes of being
for the body. The antagonism between flesh of death and spirit of life
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has the body for its site. Who are those according to the flesh? They are
firstly the Greeks, who exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for
an image [Bild] shaped like corruptible men, birds, four-footed beasts,
and creeping things,19 and who do not observe the commandments of
the law, which, for want of explicit revelation, is inscribed in their hearts,
as is attested by the universal phenomenon of the moral conscience, qua
knowledge of self vis--vis God. They are then, and above all, the Jews
who, possessing the lawguide to knowledge and truth20never respect it. The Greeks are thus Jews unaware of themselves, and the Jews
ignore the law they have received. To be according to the flesh is to be
under the law whether one is Greek or Jewish. Thus it is in relation to
the law that flesh, sin, and death should be understood in Saint Pauls
sense of the words.
By the law, Saint Paul understands the letter of the covenant, which
he will be the first to call the Old Testament21 and, more narrowly, the
statutes revealed by God to lead man to justification, without which there
is neither salvation nor eternal life. If he occasionally speaks of the law
in its ritual or religious acceptation, he nonetheless gives it an essentially
moral meaning, since the whole law is fulfilled in this single word: Love
your neighbor as yourself. 22 The morality in question here is not the
regional science which, in addition to logic and physics, constitutes philosophy for the Stoicsthat vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after
the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.23 Instead, morality is
that from which the economy of salvation arises, i.e., the biblical story; in
short, the totality of relations between humans (which is to say, the body)
and God. This being said, why are all bodies, whether Greek or Jewish
(here, the difference is unimportant), those of death and sin? Why is
the law never respected or fulfilled? Pauls answer is radical: justification
through the law is impossible because it misunderstands divine justice.
Where does this misunderstanding lie? If Moses writes of the justice of
the law: The man who does this gains life through it, 24 then the laws
justice is, for the Jews, the condition they are called to satisfy in order to
receive life. This is to say that, on the one hand, justice is that from which
we live in the same sense as sin is that from which we die. On the other
hand, justification before God depends on our works. But to want to obtain justice through the works of the law is to want to obtain it by oneself,
from oneself, and to substitute ones own justice for Gods. Such a substitution is the essence of sin, which is pride, unconditional assertion, and
self-glorification, confidence in the flesh.25 Far from delivering us from
sin, the law effectively closes us up in it, irremediably. And what ought to
enliven us condemns us to a life of death. Under the law, bodies remain
bodies of flesh, whose God is their bellies;26 in other words, the flesh
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itself. To live under the law, after the flesh, is thus, ultimately to live
under the wrath of God.
Does this actually mean that the law is sin? Of course not. But I
had not known sin except through the law.27 What does it mean to know
sin through the law? Should we understand that the law reveals sin qua
sin or, more profoundly, that the law incites us to sin, elicits sin? The law
could not be sins ratio cognoscendi, because knowledge does not have a
theoretical sense here. Moreover, the rest of the text shows clearly that
the law, like a ratio essendi, is at work in sin itself: I should never have
known lust, if the law had not said: Thou shall not covet. But sin took
advantage of the commandment to produce in me lust of all kinds. For
without the law, sin is dead.28 The law is thus sins mainstay, and there
is a cunning of sin just as there is a cunning of reason. Relative to its origin the law is holy; relative to its carnal recipient, it is that by which sin
takes shape and is known to us. Sin buttresses itself against the law, only
to break it. Sin draws from the law the strength to transgress it, thus turning it against itself, making a commandment of life into an instrument
of death. I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment
came, sin revived, and I died. And so the commandment, which was ordained to life, led me to death.29 If, having formerly lived in innocence, I
am now dead, this present death now characterizes my life, and sin turns
life against itself. To live under the law, or under sin, is to live a life that
bears death with it and keeps itself in death. It is to live against life, resting on it so far as it is mine but opposed to it so far as it is Gods. I am
dead means: I am a divided body, separated from God, a body of flesh.
This argument directly calls for a few comments. First, life and
death should not be understood in a biological or Greek sense, but relative to Gods word, which places everyone before the choice of the one
or the other.30 That does not imply that life and death have no natural
meaning, but rather that nature should always be understood against
the horizon of salvation. Such is, moreover, one of the meanings of creation. Second, Pauls description of life under the law assumes it is possible to recapitulate the entire history of Israel, before as after Exile,
according to a law whose observation should lead to salvation. But the
recapitulation of this history under the law is late. And, what is more,
far from representing servitude, the law is, for the faithful and pious
Jew, an object of love and a source of joy.31 Finally, and third, there is
in Saint Pauls diatribe an illegitimate leap, a surreptitious modification
of meaning, if not a veritable sophism. To obtain justice through ones
own works in no way amounts to substituting ones own justice for that
of God. I may want to be justified through my own works, without the
court before which I appear belonging to me. I may desire justice for
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myself without myself rendering justice to me alone. In short, Saint Paul

does not demonstrate that justification by the law misunderstands divine
justice, or that it is perverse and sinful in essence. Nevertheless, this assertion is the cornerstone of his interpretation of the Jews role in the
economy of salvation. To be sure, rejection of the law ultimately comes
from faith in Jesus Christ, so far as he fulfills the law; it thus springs from
a new theophany. But to agree that only one theophany can abolish another here leads to ruling out a solution of continuity between the God
of Israel and the one who resurrects His Son. It consequently forbids our
seeing in Christ the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, and
ultimately breaks the unity of holy history.
Let us return to the division of the body under the law, which was
never as powerfully described as at the end of chapter 7 of the Letter
to the Romans. Recall, too, that this epistle constituted for Luther the
masterpiece of the New Testament and purest of all the Gospels.32 When
Saint Paul opens his analysis of the carnal ego with the claim that the
law is spiritual, he no longer considers it as arising from the letter that
kills, but rather as belonging to the vivifying spirit of Christ.33 The law is
spiritual when, gathered solely around the commandment to love, it has
become charity. It is thus according to a new principle of justification, a
new justice, that the division of the carnal body under the law is shown
a division perceivable only at the end of the law, starting from Christ. Let
us examine this description. We know that the law is spiritual, but I am
carnal, sold under sin. For I do not even acknowledge my own acts, for
what I want, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.34 Speaking, here, is
the ego of the flesh; it is divided between what it wants and what it does.
It is because it does not do what it wills but rather what it wills not to do,
that it no longer understands what it reaps. Pauls analysis, which should
be understood in a purely eidetic sense, implies that the body, whether
living according to the flesh or according to the Spirit, is will. Saint Paul
defines man as a body, and the body as a will. But what precisely does
the body will? As openness to God, it could only properly want what God
wanted from and for it by revealing the law, that is, life to it. The will
wants life. Thus, if I do not acknowledge my acts and feel lost in them,
it is that, wanting justification and life, I obtain sin. And the paradox is
that I stop understanding myself the moment my will asserts itself against
Gods, instead of giving itself up for that of God. Yet in both cases it is
toward, or away from the divine will, that my will turns. The body that I
am is thus constituted by the relationship of my will to Gods will. The
body is a relationship between wills. Under the law, the body of flesh wills
the contrary of what it wants, since it does not will what God wills, and the
will is turned back against itself. This presupposes first that I know, in any
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event, that the law is good, that Gods will is by nature good, acceptable,
and perfect.35 The disjunction between the willing and the willed, the
autonomy of my will relative to what it essentially wantsnamely Gods
willimplies that the law is understood as holy. If then I do that which
I would not, I consent to the law that it is good.36 This further presupposes that it is not enough to know the lawas form of knowledge and
truthin order to be justified, and that knowledge according to the
flesh is powerless to govern the will.
Divided between what it wants and what it does, between the goodness of the law and the malignity of its acts, the carnal ego is divested of
itself. Now then it is no more I who perform the act, but the sin that
dwells in me. For I know that the good dwells not in methat is, in my
fleshfor though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. Thus, the
good that I want I fail to do, but the evil I want not, that I do. Now if I do
that I want not, it is no more I that do it, but the sin that dwells in me.37
Under the law, the I cleaves, strays from itself, and falters, while conscious
of itself as of another, and it is not so much the subject that is a sinner as
the sin that is a subject. In the proposition, the good I want and the evil
I do, which characterizes the body under the law, the first I is not identical to the second. One belongs to God, the other to the flesh. The I that
wills the good is the one whose will belongs to God, the I that does evil is
the one whose will disobeys God for the benefit of the flesh. To will the
good is to will life, and evil is the death that I do not will. Good and evil,
life and death are aligned with my will to stand for each of the possibilities of my relationship to God. And, as Saint Paulwho assimilates evil to
sinnever conceives God outside any relationship to man, this relation,
whichever it be, is inscribed in the antagonism of good and evil. Holy history is a moral history, the God who judges good and evil, is a moral God;
in short, everything can be understood under the opposition of good
and evil; the knowledge of good and evil is the ultimate knowledge of
life and death, of what revives and what mortifies by turning life against
itself. Need we recall that the works of the flesh are opposed to the fruits
of the Spirit, as vices to virtues?38
Flesh and Spirit vie for the I, that is to say, for the body. It is enough
to continue our reading of Romans 7 to be convinced of this: I then
find a law, which has it that when I would to do good, only evil is within
my reach. For, following the inward man, I delight in the law of God, but
I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,
and chaining me to the law of sin that is in my members.39 What is the
human being within, and what is Saint Pauls intent when he borrows this
Platonic expression?40 The human being within is opposed, first, to the
outward human being, as the spirit to the flesh. In his second Epistle to
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the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes: though our outward man perishes,
yet the inward man is renewed day by day.41 But beyond this, the inward
human being is equivalent to reason, and reason to mind; this is the case
in the Letter to the Romans. What should we understand by reason here?
Reason is the will insofar as it knows the alternative before which it is
placed: good or evil, life or death. In this respect, reason is neither good
nor evil, but neutral. Why then does Saint Paul identify it with the law
of God, with the spirit? Does that mean that the will always chooses the
good? No, it means only that it always opts for the good when, in accordance with its essence, it is what it should be and what it is commanded
to be; namely, a will of life, the will of God. Saint Paul can merge reason
and spirit because the will always implies knowledge and because no one
fails to realizeas moral conscience atteststhat the law is good, holy.
If the inward man that I am basks in Gods law while being riveted
to sin, the division of self and the bodys turning against itself both arise
from the clash between flesh and spirit for the mastery of my members.
My body can submit to the flesh or to the spirit; it can live from and by
itself, or from and by God. It can be ruled by good or by evil. But in order
that these two possibilities be offered to it, and proper to it, the body, qua
relationship of wills, should itself be a moral phenomenon whose constitution as such belongs to sin or to justice. It must be a phenomenon
whose being, and whose way of being are always a function of good and
evil. In other words: the body under the law leads to death, it is the body
of someone dead. The body freed from the law leads to life; it is invested
by the spirit, sanctified. The end of the reign of the law thus opens the
possibility of a change in the condition of bodies, of a new qualification
or determination of the body. Centered on the salvific work of Christ,
holy history, biblical history is always also the history of bodies.
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Justice and Faith
Yet how should we understand Pauls word, according to which Christ is

the end of the law?1 Let us start from justice, which is the condition of
salvation and life. Just as sin leads to death, justice leads to life, and the
connection between them is so close that justice may be regarded as the
essence of life: The spirit is life for the sake of justice.2 What then is
justice for the Jews under the law? Nothing in the Old Testament is more
important than justice since it designates that which relations between
man and world, man and others, and above all man and God must satisfy. Virtually a divine name, justice is thus essentially what is necessary to
maintaining the covenant between God and Israel. Just is the one who
satisfies the requirements of the covenant; who, consequently, obeys the
law. But God too is just, if not equally so, as his beneficial acts attest both
fidelity to his promises and his quality as a judge. If justice is the demand
to which this dissymmetrical relationthat is the covenantmust respond, then only a divine judgment can declare a man just. Because man
finds himself before God as before a judge in a court, justice has primarily a forensic meaning. This is the sense, too, that comes out of the expression, it was counted unto him for justice, which Saint Paul borrows
from Genesis on many occasions.3 However, as Israel gradually allowed
itself to be shaped by the eschatology of prophets, justice took on an eschatological sense. This second sense appears for example in the Letter
to the Galatians, when we read, We . . . wait for the hope of justice.4
Thus, justice has for the Jews an eschatological-forensic sense, in relation
to which we should grasp both Saint Pauls rupture with Judaism, and the
novelty of the Gospel of justification through faith alone.
When the Apostle argues, now the justice of God without the law is
manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; justice of God
by the faith in Jesus Christ to all that believe, for there is no difference.
For all alike have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and all are
justified freely by Gods grace through the redemption that is in Christ
Jesus,5 he is upholding four claims against Judaism as he interprets it.
First, that justification no longer proceeds from the law but from faith,
and the one excludes the other. Second, that justice is no longer awaited
but rendered, and eschatological judgment pronounced. Third, that sinners are henceforth justified by divine grace. Fourth and finally, that that
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grace and justice are present forevermore, having been revealed in Jesus
Christor better, that the Christ Jesus, himself, is that grace and justice.
Everything rests here (Luther, as we have seen, took this for the foundation of Scripture) on the sense of the words justice of God.
Gods justice is not a justice wielded, nor is it the law by virtue of
which the sinner is punished. It is a received justice, a passive justice
through which God acquits us of sin and thanks to which he makes us
just. This is a justice that we allow to act on us through faith. The Gospel
Saint Paul preaches is the power of God to save whosoever has faith; the
Jew first and also the Greek. For therein is revealed the justice of God
through faith and for faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith.6 It
is henceforth around the Cross that the entire history of salvation turns,
for Saint Paul first, and after him, for all Christians. The renewal of the
covenant through the sacrifice of Christ is thus correlative to a change
in the essence of both justification and justice. That is, it is related, ultimately, to a change in the essence of life. Whoever is in Christ is a new
creature: old things have passed away, all things becoming new.7 Now, to
be in Christ means to die to sin to live in God. The death and resurrection of Christ separate the old from the new, divide history into two ages;
they form the eschatological event that frees us from our past as sinners
by opening a believers future to us. If Christ were not this, then Saint
Paul could not make of him the antitype or counter-figure of Adam. Indeed, to Adams sin, which brought death into the world, is opposed the
grace and the gift of justice, by which Christ imparts life. As the offense
of one led to the condemnation of all, so the justice of one leads to the
justification of life for all. For as by one mans disobedience many were
made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made just.8
We can now understand how, through Christ, God has emancipated us from the law of sin and from death, and wherein lies his grace.
The analysis of the division of the body under the law ended in the following way. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death? Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!9 This
cry of the flesh is a call, and that call has already found its answer in divine grace or, better, it is itself an answer to the call of divine grace, as is
shown in the verses that follow immediately afterward, opening chapter
8: Therefore there is now no condemnation for them who are in Christ
Jesus . . . for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you free
from the law of sin and death. For what the law could never do, because
it was weak through the flesh, God has done, by sending his own Son in
a flesh like that of sin and for the sake of sin, thus condemning sin in
the flesh, so that the justice of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk
not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.10 Through the crucifixion of his
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son, God crucified the flesh itself and redeemed Adams sin. Thanks to
Christ, sin is no longer attributed to usas it was since the revelation of
the law11and the reign of the law and the flesh over bodies is ended.
However, the crucifixion is nothing without the resurrection, outside of
which we could never know that the son of man is also the son of God.
Moreover, the death of the flesh would be meaningless were it not ipso
facto a birth unto spirit. Consequently, only kenosis and the salutary exaltation of Christ make the resurrection of the dead possible, and this is
none other than the power of God itself.
But how can we appropriate the eschatological event and the coming of salvation? If Christ is dead and resurrected for us, how can we
make the salvation realized in Him our own and become new creatures?
Through faith. In a passage from the Letter to the Philippians, where
Saint Paul explains the meaning of his conversion, after claiming to have
lived beyond reproach in the eyes of the lawbut who can claim this
without glorifying himself, and is it not up to God alone to judge?he
continues: What things were gain to me, those I counted as loss for
the sake of Christ. Furthermore, I count everything as loss, for all this is
outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake
everything was lost to me and I counted it but dung, to gain Christ and
be found in Him, not having my own justice, which comes from the law,
but the justice of faith in Christ, which comes from God by faith. That
I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship
of his sufferings, in conformity with his death; may I finally reach the
resurrection of the dead.12 These verses determine the content of faith:
to believe is to know Jesus as Lord by virtue of his resurrection, and this
knowledge is simultaneously trust and hope. However, while faith possesses a content, it is also an act. What is then the particular nature of
the act of faith? Faith is obedience: to believe is to obey the Gospel.13
Faith lies in obedience to the proclamation: to believe is to preaching as
hearing is to sayingand the saying, here, is Gods. This obedience is a
movement of the will. In obeying Gods word, in believing, the will abandons itself. Yet it is not a matter of willing no longer to will, but of willing
the submission of ones own will to that of God. As a movement of the
will, faith is inseparable from a revaluation: what was considered profit
turns into loss. To gain Christ, to believe, thus supposes a real axiological
reversal, relative to the world, of weakness into force and force into weakness, since God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound
those that are mighty.14 This reversal of value implies a new justice: for
the justice of the law is substituted that of faith, filled with grace, and a
new ego. In faith and obedience to Christ, the ego is no longer divided
as it was under the flesh, but brought together outside itself, reconciled
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in God and with God, since its ipseity is Christ himself. I am crucified
with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.15 From
the moment faith is in itself crucifixion and resurrection, the act of faith
is identified with the object of faith. This identity of act and object confers on faith the character of knowledge based on a decision and not
on a pure eidetic gaze. Faithful knowledge could not have a theoretical
sense but rather, assuming such a concept is relevant here, an existential
one. As a decision to obey, which opens into knowledge and hope, faith
only ever responds to the word of God. It is thus preceded by a gift of
grace. That is why Saint Paul can sayand this amounts to a definition of
faiththat to know God is to have been known by him.16 In this regard,
faith is as passive as justice.
If faith consists in glorifying and magnifying Christ in ones body,17
this is because the Lord is lord of the body, which always means: of my
body. Perhaps even more than the God of the law, the God of faith is essentially mine. As appropriation of salvation, faith encompasses the relation of man to God, since the latter is more my own than my own body.
God belongs to me more intimately than my body, as Leibniz once
said.18 My body is my own because it is the property of my God. What then
does the body wholly in faith become? How does Saint Paul describe this?
The only text liable to give us such a description is found in the penultimate chapter of the first Letter to the Corinthians. These are its initial
verses: But some will say, how are the dead raised up? With what body do
they come? Fool! That which you sow does not come to life lest it has first
died; and that which you sow is not the body that shall be, but bare grain,
perhaps of wheat, perhaps some other; and God clothes it with the body
of his choice, each seed with its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh,
but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of birds,
and another of fish. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies;
the glory of the celestial bodies is one thing, the glory of the terrestrial,
another. The sun has a glory of its own, the moon another glory, the stars
another, for one star differs from another in glory.19 Is this really a description of the resurrected body? In no way. Addressing the Corinthians
who, in spurning resurrection, ultimately reject his gospel, Saint Paul
takes pains here to set down the possibility of resurrection. He does so using two arguments. The first one is a comparison. Just as what is sown lives
again only when it has died, so too our past body dies only to live again
in a body to come. The second argument proceeds directly from the
body. Living earthly bodies differ among each other through the flesh,
since all flesh is not the same, while heavenly bodies differ among each
other according to brilliance [clat], since all brilliance is not the same.
Finally, earthly bodies differ from heavenly ones, since flesh differs from
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brilliance, that is to say, from glory. Flesh and glory are thus bodily qualities, whose variation does not destroy the body. A body can therefore
cease to be a body of flesh to become a body of glory, without losing its
being as a body, and my body can resurrect as other than what it was.
None of these two arguments is conclusive. The first is not, because it
presupposes resurrection, asserting that the passage from the grain to
the plant is one of death. The second is inconclusive, because any qualitative modification of a body requires its permanence as a substrate,
thereby excluding death, and becausewhat is a stronger reason still
it is no longer a question of the body that resurrects, and that I am, but
of the body with which I resurrect and which I have, in the manner of a
vase liable to receive indifferently flesh or glory, flesh or spirit. Saint Paul
is no longer describing a salutary event, but a physical process for which
death is but a phase. And, at the foundation of his sermon, he gives a
metaphysical interpretation of the resurrection whose consequences will
prove considerable. Indeed, if resurrection is a variation affecting an invariable form, and if neither the flesh nor the blood can inherit from
the kingdom of God, then spirit should be conceived as the matter of the
resurrected body. Now, spirit here is the spirit of God, and to understand
the Holy Spirit, or glory, as celestial matter amounts to modifying the
sense of divine transcendence and grace. These become supernatural,
metaphysical, which is to say, relative to nature itself. In short, attempting
to ensure for the Greeks of Corinth the possibility of the resurrection on
the basis of a natural concept of body, Saint Paul, who perhaps learned
his Greek too well, surrenders Gods power of resurrection to metaphysics, and metaphysics to God. To think resurrection from the perspective
of the earthly or heavenly bodyi.e., from a physical perspectiveis
to think God metaphysically and surreptitiously to invert the priority of
the logos of the Cross over the wisdom of the world. But this inversion is
Gods own deed, insofar as he translated himself (as we will see later on)
into Greek; and consequently, insofar as the Greek learned by Saint Paul
was taught to him by God himself. It remains that this ambiguity in the
concept of the body will profoundly mark the conjoined history of Christian theology and Greek philosophy.
Upon considering the possibility of the resurrection of the dead,
Saint Paul continues: So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is
sown as perishable is raised imperishable. Sown in dishonor, it is raised
in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as a natural body,
it is raised as a spiritual body.20 Once more, is this a description of the
body resurrected? It is, to the degree that it can be suitable to its object. Indeed, with the exception of chapter 15 of the first Letter to the
Corinthianswhich will subsequently serve as the framework for all the
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theologies of the glorious bodySaint Paul refrains from representing

the resurrected body. There are two reasons for his abstention. On the
one hand, every image of the resurrected body contradicts its being to
comethe glorious body is to-comeand its miraculous character
God gives every seed the body he wanted. On the other hand and above
all, the knowledge that I can have in the present of the resurrected body
is partial. Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face
to face.21 Should we conclude that it is vain to present what is hoped for,
that representation of the glorious body is illegitimate, even insignificant, with regard to the essence of eternal life? There is no doubt that the
resurrection and the resurrected body are hopes rooted in faith, but faith
is a hope that knows, and partial knowledge is still knowledge. Besides
which, if it is true that the partial vanishes when wholeness comes,22 it
is the same confused, reflected, and darkened knowledge that shall become clear, intuitive, and beatific; it is the same body that dies and resurrects. The glorious body, such as Saint Paul sees and depicts it, could not
then be essentially different from the glorious body such as it will be in
itself. This is all the more so, that the glorification of body has already
begun with the baptism that immerses it in the death and resurrection
of Christ, to make it a member of the church.23 Consequently, what Saint
Paul says about the resurrected body is enough to determine its essence.
Now, by attributing to the glorious body predicates contrary to those
of carnal body, rather than proceeding the other way around (which is
attested by his series of privative prefixes: im-perishable, dis-honor, asthenia),24 Saint Paul sees the former as the negation of the latter. The
glorious body is the negation of the carnal body; the future eternal life,
the negation of the present carnal life. But, as we have seen previously,
the life of and according to the flesh, sinful life, is turned against itself in
itself; it negates itself. What then does the negation of the flesh by glory
mean, when it is carried out on something that already negates itself?
There is an abyss separating to negate that which negates, and to negate
that which negates itself. To negate what negates is, if not to affirm, at
least to put an end to the negation; but to negate what negates itself is to
redouble and intensify the negation. To destroy that which destroys is to
put an end to destruction, but to destroy that which destroys itself is to
pursue that destruction. Insofar as it is the negation of the carnal body
that negates itself, the glorious body will thus be more strongly and more
certainly turned against itself than the carnal body ever was. And, as the
fruit of the spirit, eternal lifefar from opposing the destruction that is
the fruit of the flesh25will radicalize its work. Resurrection eternalizes
a life that negates itself, and the negation of life is always, and only ever,
a mode of resurrection.
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There remains another determination of the resurrected body that

we have not yet emphasized. The glorious body is spiritual, and this adjective is opposed to psychic or psychological, which here means natural,
carnal. What is a spiritual body? Is it a body invested by spirit after having
been invested by the flesh? If this acceptation is presentand how could
it not be, once the body is taken for a form?it is neither the only, nor the
most important one. This comes out clearly from what follows in the text:
If there is a natural [psychic] body, there is also a spiritual body. As it is
written: the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam is a lifegiving spirit. The spiritual does not come first; the soul [natural] comes
first, and after that the spiritual.26 The first man is of the earth, earthy:
the second man is from heaven.27 The opposition between natural or
psychic bodies, and spiritual ones is thus related to that between Adam
and Christ, which is fundamental for the whole economy of salvation,
and the meaning of the spiritual body rests on the designation of Christ
as an ultimate Adam, a last Adamic man. If Adam was a living soul, then
initial humanity is that of terrestrial psychic bodies, but if Christ, the new
Adam, is the spirit that gives life, then the second humanity will be that of
celestial spiritual bodies. Without Christ, around whom all of biblical history revolves and gravitates, there would never have been but bodies of
flesh, and the body of Christ is that utterly unique body, which makes the
transformation of all the others possible. Christ is he who shall transfigure our vile body, that it may be fashioned like his own resplendent body,
by the very power whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.28
The power of Christ is the power of his body; it is exerted on our own
bodies by shaping them according to his. But how does a body conform
() to the body of Christ? In being with () Christ, which
is to say, in Christ, since, for one thing, these two expressions of Paul
are mostly synonymous and since, for another, if all die in Adam, so all
will be brought back to life in Christ.29 Thus, the spiritual body is not so
much a body in which there is spirit, but a body that is in the spirit, and
the body resurrects when it is in Christ.
To be in Christ is to be a member of the body of Christ. In order to
understand this statement, let us return to the initial comparison between
body and Church. We have, writes Saint Paul, many members in one
body, and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are
one body in Christ, and every one a member of the others.30 While by
body we should understand the unity of a multiplicity of members, this
formal definition does not apply univocally to the body of flesh and to
that of Christ. The unity of the body of flesh is that of different members
among each another, since every member has its proper activity: the eye
sees, the hand touches, etc. On the contrary, the unity of the body of
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Christ is one of equal members, since they are all equally different from
Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.31
The equality of the members of the church, whatever the diversity of
their gifts, is thus ensured through their common obedience to Christ;
and the unity of the ecclesial body, far from reigning over different members, reigns on members reduced to equality through their complete
submission to Christ.
Conceiving the body as the unity of a multiplicity of members, it
thus becomes difficult, even impossible, to subsume the carnal body and
the church under one concept. Although Saint Paul borrows from Gnostic thought in speaking of the body of Christ, we must still establish the
meaning and condition of possibility of his usagethat is, the right of
the Church to be called a body. It is time, then, to analyze further the
concept of body. When we defined the body as the unity of a multiplicity
of members, we did not specify what a member was. Yet, if this definition
concerns the body and not an aggregate of some kind, this is because it
refers back to the members. What then is a member here? It is not an
organ qua instrument or function. A member appears in an action, and
Saint Paul encompasses both in the same gaze. When, citing Isaiah, he
cries: How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel!32 he is
not praising the formal beauty of an organ, but that of the propagation
of faith. The member signifies the act and, having an energy of its own,33
it is a potential will. So long as the members are not understood as possibilities of the will, there is no sense in making them the arms of justice
or injustice, no sense in describing them as obedient to the law of sin, or
that of God, both of which are laws only for a will, and the fable relating
their union thus remains unintelligible. Indeed, the allegory designed
to show that one member could not live exclusively for itself but had to
be concerned with the others, implies that the body unites wills before
uniting members. The body is thus the unity of a multiplicity of wills, and
this second definition applies equally to the community of believers. The
church is the body of Christ because a multiplicity of wills live in it, all
of them for Christ to whom they are subject, and relate the ones to the
others only through him.
There is thus a concept of body in regard to which it is legitimate
to speak not only of the body that I am, but again of the church as the
body of Christ. Nevertheless, if this concept is really effective in Saint
Pauls theology, it should allow us to understand how the body that
I am can appear as a form liable to be diversely filled. It should also
allow us to recognize a right relative to the determination of the body,
in terms of the members. If the body is a multiplicity of wills whose
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interplay is not necessarily subject to the divine order, then each of them,
in this case, wills something different and cannot fail to be opposed to
all the others. Hence the body is divided. What does this division mean?
It means there is in me, not someone who is more myself than I (as is
Christ), but something that is not me all the while belonging to me. Divided among many wills, the one [myself] wanting what the others do
not, unable consequently to orient itself [myself]and being unable to
find myself therein, I am other than I am, and this alterity is my own. The
body is then no longer exclusively what I am, but also what I have and
that to which I am bound. The multiplicity of wills gives way then to the
multiplicity of members whose unity can only be formal or external since
those members, henceforth abstracted from their actions, are themselves
forms. Inversely, the unity of the glorious bodyonce its different wills
are reconciled through their common submission to Christ and to the
energy of his powerresides in a force more peculiar to it than those
of its own. In other words, through the mediation of Christ, God brings
divergent wills together in a body that sin literally dismembers.
One remark before going further: if this analysis does not enable
us to grasp how and why the glorious life is more deeply turned against
itself than life according to the flesh, it nevertheless suggests that only an
interpretation of the will and of the relationship between the wills that
constitutes the body will allow us to understand the meaning of the resurrection, and beyond that, of Christian faith. We will come back to this
question, which merges to a large extent with that of the death of God.
The spiritual body is a body whose life is renewed through incorporation into Christ; a body become a member of Christ. How then should
we characterize the relationship between the members? The comparison
between the body and the church ends with these words: If one member
suffers, they all suffer with it. If one is glorified, they all rejoice with it.34
The members of the body of Christ, together in joy or pain, live in the
fulfillment of the commandment of love whose essence is compassion.
But this compassion, or charity, is possible only with regard to men reduced to equality before God. Let us note in passing that Nietzsche often
refers to this equality of men before God. He writes for example, The
Christian love of men, which does not differentiate, is only possible through
the continuous contemplation of God, for whom the hierarchy between
men diminishes to the point of disappearing, and man himself above all
becomes so insignificant that relations of magnitude no longer elicit any
interest: just as from a high mountain, the great and the small become
like ants and similar.35 Moreover, this compassion of love could not unify
the wills composing the ecclesial body without previously unifying those
of my own body, which, likewise leveled down, becomes dependent in its
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being (whether obedient or not) on the only will that surpasses it, that of
God. Compassionate love is thus the synthetic principle that ensures the
conjunction of wills in a body, which relates them the ones to the others.
The love of God, in both senses of the genitive, is the bond of the body,
while the death of God is its dissolution. This is the essential reason why
the problem of the body must henceforth be posed according to these
new stakes.
But if the passion of Christ is the salutary event that makes the renewal of the body possible, how can we experience it? How can the death
and resurrection of Christwhich, as it were, occurred at a particular
date and, to that extent, belong to world historystill open this possibility for us hereafter? Addressing the Corinthians, Saint Paul endeavors
to prove the fact of the resurrection in recalling that he was, among
others, a witness of it.36 Nevertheless, if the vision of the glorious body
of Christ on the way to Damascus can represent for him, and for him
alone, the de jure source of what he calls my Gospel, it remains that it is
not transmissible as such, and could not allow another to become a new
creature.37 It is thus a matter of knowing how an event, both unsubstitutable and forever bygone, can forever, and ever anew, be the eschatological instant. In other words, what should the mode of presence of
the salutary event be, that we could at any moment receive divine grace?
Where then can Christ come to us? In the predication itself. Saint Paul
writes in effect, Whoever invokes the name of the Lord will be saved. But
how could they invoke one in whom they had no faith? And how could
they have faith in one they had never heard? And how could they hear
without a preacher? And how could one preach, except one be sent?38
The salutary event does not cease to come to pass in the tradition of the
apostolic word. But if Christ is at work therein, it is because he himself
is the effective word [la parole nergique]39 that justifies and revivifies. It is
then altogether essential that he who is sent to preach be incorporated
into Christ who exhorts us through him,40 and that he who teaches be
incorporated into that teaching, which is to say, here, into the economy
of salvation. That is the reason why Saint Paul can designate the Gospel
of God as his own or speaking more as a Greek than as a Jew, assert that
according to the grace that God has given me I have, as a wise master
builder, laid the foundation.41
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One Vision Out of Another
Holy history as Saint Paul conceives it, from the fulfillment of the promise in Christ, is also the story of man coram Deo, facing God, that is, man
as a body. Hence, the death of God, to which we briefly alluded, cannot
fail to bring about the destruction of that temple of the living God1 that
is our body. But what does the annihilation of the body mean when an
organism is not in question? What do the multiple wills constitutive of
the body become when the love of God no longer unites them? Under
what conditions, then, is another body possible? If God is more proper
to me than my own body, if God is what is ownmost to my body, then it
is impossible that the absence of God not affect that body, and it is necessary that the thought that unfolds announcing the death of God aim
at the creation of a higher body. Therefore, we should now determine
whether Nietzsches thought is related to that of Saint Paul, by opposing
one incorporation to another.
In 1880 Nietzsche dedicated a paragraph of Daybreak to the first
Christian, Saint Paul.2 However vivid ones belief might yet be in the inspired character of the Bible, Nietzsche points out that the latter nevertheless relates the story of one of the most ambitious and importunate
souls, of a mind as superstitious as it was cunning, that of the apostle
Paul, without whom there would never have been Christianity. But have
we really understood him, have we really read the letters of the Jewish
Pascal, [which] expose the origin of Christianity as thoroughly as the
pages of the French Pascal expose its destiny and that by which it will perish?3 From the moment we pose this question, two remarks become necessary: (1) If Nietzsche proceeds from the Bible as a whole to Saint Paul
in particular, then this is because, like Luther whose heritage he here
takes up, he holds the latter, Paul, to be the key to the former, the Bible.
Consequently, and we will have the occasion to verify this, Nietzsches
critique of Saint Paul concerns revelation in its totality. (2) In substituting his reading according to the free spirit for the reading according
to the Holy Spirit, Nietzsche destroys the principle of spiritual hermeneutics and exegesis; he institutes a new philology in regard to which
Christian philology looks like an art of reading badly,4 and which alone
makes possible the disappearance of the principle which gave meaning
to the holy Scriptures.
60
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How does Nietzsche interpret Saint Paul? He interprets him on

the basis of the question to which his Gospel is the solution. Paul, whom
Nietzsche does not distinguish here from Saul, suffered from a fixed
idea, or more clearly from a fixed question which was always present to
him and would never rest: what is the Jewish law really concerned with?
and, in particular, what is the fulfillment of this law? Who was Saint Paul
and what did he want, that he suffered so? A Pharisee, a zealous defender
of the law he desired to satisfy, voracious for this highest distinction
the Jews were able to conceivethis people which had taken the fantasy of moral sublimity higher than any other people and which alone
achieved the creation of a holy God, together with the idea of sin as an
offence against this holinessSaul was not only incapable of fulfilling
the law, he was also continuously tempted to transgress it. Was this due
to the incitements of the flesh or, more profoundly, to those of the law
itself? Must he not have said to himself, and after him Luther, who for
that reason was his first true reader: It is all in vain! The torture of the
unfulfilled law cannot be overcome.5 Torn between the holiness of the
law and his sinful conscience, threatened with vanity, Saint Paul turned
against the law: The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed:
how he hated it! how he resented it! how he sought about for a means of
destroying itand no longer to fulfill it in person!6 Such was the torment
of a soul whose desire for distinction, which is to say, for power, required
the negation of the law.
The vision that blinded Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, where
he was going to condemn the disciples of Christ, fulfilled this requirement. Nietzsche relates it as follows. And at last the liberating idea came
to him, together with a vision, as was bound to happen in the case of this
epileptic: to him, the zealot of the law who was inwardly tired to death of
it, there appeared on a lonely road Christ with the light of God shining
in his countenance, and Paul heard the words: why are you persecuting
me? 7 While he fails to specify that the vision occurred at noon in a light
more splendid than that of the sun, and that Jesus addressed Saul in
Hebrew, Nietzsche, whose narrative follows Lukes account,8 introduces
the qualifier epileptic. What does this diagnosis mean? To grasp it we
need only to turn to the paragraph in [his notes for] Daybreak, where
Nietzsche explains that almost everywhere, it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, madness that bore so visibly the sign
of total unfreedom as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic.9 In
short, the grand mal attributed to Saint Paul is the stigmatum of a renewal of values. What did this consist in, and how did Saint Paul interpret
the event? What essentially happened then is rather this: his mind suddenly became clear: it is unreasonable, he says to himself, to persecute
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precisely this Christ! For here is the way out, here is perfect revenge, here
and nowhere else do I have and hold the destroyer of the law! 10 A sinful
power that devastated Saint Paul, the law, by reason of which he hunted
down the disciples of Jesus, was henceforth abolished. The epiphany of
the glorious Christ makes the law obsolete, moral despair is as if blown
away, destroyed, since morality itself is blown awaynamely, fulfilled,
there on the Cross!11 The resurrection of Christ thus allows Saint Paul
to triumph over the law. Nietzsche therefore writes: The tremendous
consequences of this notion, this solution to the riddle, whirl before his
eyes, all at once he is the happiest of menthe destiny of the Jewsno,
of all mankindseems to him tied to this notion, to this second of his
sudden enlightenment, he possesses the idea of ideas, the key of keys,
the light of lights; henceforth history revolves around him! For from now
on he is the teacher of the destruction of the law!12
Let us pause at this dramatization. Nietzsche, who understands
Saint Paul against the horizon of Judaism, describes his Damascus vision
as an act of vengeance that negates a morality, which is to say the set of
conditions that make life possible and justify it. However, in taking the
appearance of the resurrected Christ as vengeance, it is the resurrection itself that Nietzsche considers to be such. Vengeance does not cease
with the destruction of the law; on the contrary, it proceeds and reaches
completion in the resurrection of bodies. Thus, in order to determine
in what sense the salutary work of God through Christ is vengeance, is
reactiveand that is one of the intentions of the present workit is
important to know what was, for Nietzsche, the body according to Saint
Paul. In July 1880, reading a study on Pauls anthropology and its place in
the doctrine of salvationa masterpiece he will write to Overbeck13
Nietzsche took extensive notes, which constitute so many drafts of paragraph 68 of Daybreak. Without entering into the details of these texts,
where citations and commentaries intertwine, we can say that Nietzsche
identifies sinful flesh with sensibility,14 and the body with a form liable
to receive, following the death of sensuous flesh, a celestial matter.15 Following Saint Paul himself, Nietzsche seems to conceive the body and its
resurrection in a Hellenizing fashion. This interpretation of the foundation of Pauline theology is largely prior to 1880, for, as early as March
April 1865, Nietzsche devoted a few pages to the doctrine of the resurrection and to the Damascus christophany.16 Referring to chapter 15 of
first Corinthians, he there grasped the glorious body as already spiritual
and celestial, the body of flesh as already natural and terrestrial, and the
resurrection on the ground of the physical and metaphysical oppositions
of earth and sky, nature and spirit. If it is a given that Paul understands
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the body primarily as the unity of a multiplicity of wills, and secondarily as a form apt to be variously filled, then it seems that Nietzsche
does not reach the primary meaning of the Pauline body, but only the
derivative one.
Let us leave this for a moment, to come to what is most remarkable in this mise en scne of the origin of Christianity: its premonitory
value. Indeed, Nietzsche there depicts the conversion of Saint Paul using the same terms that will serve him, one year later, to characterize
the upsurge of the thought of eternal recurrence. Is this something fortuitous or the sign of an essential relation? Let us begin by highlighting
that which, in regard to its modality as a datum, relates the doctrine of
the eternal recurrence to that of the resurrection. As Nietzsche notes
from 1865, it is on the route to Damascus, at noontime, in a light more
than solar, that Saint Paul saw and heard the Christ. It is while walking
through a wood, toward the Lake of Silvaplana, at the foot of an enormous rock set upright like a pyramid,17 that there came to Nietzsche
the thought of the return, which marks high noon for humanity every
time.18 Nietzsche is fully aware of the repetition, since he notes that
the sun of knowledge stands, once again, at high noon.19 Should we
conclude from this that the eternal recurrence was the object of a revelation? In August 1881, immediately upon having set down his thought
for the first time, Nietzsche asks himself with an unshakable probity:
Am I speaking as one under the effect of a revelation? Then despise
me and do not listen to mewould you still be among those who need
gods?20 This question, addressed to himself and which immediately
finds its response, would nonetheless have no sense if the thought of
the eternal recurrence were wholly devoid of religious scope. Moreover, would Nietzsche struggle against being considered a founder of
a religion if the mode of appearing of the eternal recurrence, which
is to say, ultimately, its tenor and its content, did not contain the possibility of such a mistake? As the prophet of his own thought, did he
not proclaim what was going to befall him and would never cease happening to him, when, in a paragraph from Daybreak, slightly preceding the one concerning Saint Paul, he explained as follows the birth
of religions: How can someone regard his own opinion about things
as a revelation? This is the problem of the origin of religions: on each
occasion there was a person in whom this phenomenon was possible.
The precondition is that he already believed in the fact of revelation.
Then, one day, he suddenly acquires his new idea, and the happiness
engendered by a great hypothesis encompassing the universe and all
existence enters his consciousness with such a force he does not dare to
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consider himself the creator of such happiness and ascribes the cause
of it, and again the cause of the cause of this new idea to his God: as his
gods revelation.21 Is the eternal recurrence not also a new and sudden
thought, whose ownership Nietzsche claims, a hypothesis embracing
all things and attended by an intense feeling of joy? Further, in making
Christ the negator of the law, Saint Paul had the thought of thoughts,
says Nietzsche. This thought divides and apportions the history that
begins revolving around it. But the eternal recurrence, likewise named
thought of thoughts,22 cuts history in two, since from the moment
that thought is there, every color is modified and there is a new history,
even a new hope.23 After having revolved around the teacher of the
destruction of the law, historybut is it the same one, is it another, and
what do same and other mean here?revolves around the teacher of
the greatest doctrine,24 that of the eternal ring.
The parallel is thus too close to be accidental and Nietzsche himself
attested to a relationship between the thought of return and Christian
theology. On July 21, 1881, he sent from Sils Maria a postcard to Peter
Gast, in which, concerning Daybreak, he wrote the following, whose meaning is not simply biographical: I am aware, dear friend, that in my book,
the constant internal debate with Christianity must be unfamiliar to you,
even painful; it is nonetheless the best part of the life of the mind that
I have effectively known; since my earliest childhood I explored it from
many angles; in my heart I believe I have never been vulgar in respect to
it. Ultimately, I am the descendant of whole lineages of Christian clerics
forgive me this limitation!25 Then, after three weeks silence, and still
from Sils Maria, he proclaims to Gast: I [am] filled with a new vision
far superior to that of other men.26 Thus it is borne out that the vision
of eternal recurrence obtrudes on Nietzsche over the course, if not at
the end of a conflict with Christianity. Dating from his childhood and
continuing up to the last notes of January 1889, it is no doubt on the horizon (which does not mean the exclusive horizon) of his reflective existence. Therefore we must now consider whether the eternal recurrence
is in itself related to Pauline theology and to its ground: the resurrection
of bodies.
If the essential aspect of a great thought, as Heidegger says precisely of the eternal recurrence, is given in the instant of its upsurge,27
then, whatever the multiple perspectives in which Nietzsche will later
persist in unfolding it, what is most specific to the thought of the return
should be able to be found in the notes from the summer of 1881. And
this applies especially to the first among them, that is, to that note to
which Nietzsche himself alludes when, in 1888, in Ecce Homo, he tells the
story of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here is its text:
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The Return of the Same.

Project.
1. The incorporation of fundamental errors.
2. The incorporation of passions.
3. The incorporation of knowledge and of the knowledge that foregoes.
(Passion of knowledge)
4. The innocent. The individual as experience. The lightening of life,
lowering, weakeningtransition.
5. The new weight: the eternal recurrence of the same. Infinite importance
of our knowledge, of our wandering, of our habits, ways of life for
everything to come. What do we do with the rest of our lifewe, who
have passed the principal part of it in the most fundamental ignorance? We teach the doctrineit is the strongest way for us to incorporate it. Our kind of beatitude as teacher of the greatest doctrine.
Beginning August 1881, Sils Maria,
6000 feet above sea level and well above all things human!28
Let us begin the examination of this memorial to which, in one way

or another, explicitly or implicitly, we will unceasingly return. The eternal
recurrence is designated therein as the new gravitas, and this definition
comes about following a passage, a transition. The thought of the eternal recurrence is thus at the source of a distinction drawn between the
old and the new. But what have these two adjectives come to qualify,
and what is it that needs steadying? The answer is provided by this question: What do we do with the rest of our lifewe, who have passed the
principal part of it in the most fundamental ignorance? The thought
of eternal recurrence, as the heaviest of knowledge, exacerbates a life
lightened and weakened. Consequently, we could not understand this
thought without identifying the specific weight of the old life, without
explaining the reasons why it ended by losing all its gravity. In the fall of
1881, Nietzsche conceived the first part of his work to come as a funeral
oration to the deceased God;29 and four years later, a draft entitled The
Eternal Recurrence mentions: First part: Funeral feast of God.30 Does this
mean that God alone gave life its weight? Yes, since the madman who
announced his death addresses his auditors with the following interrogative: Have we lost all weightiness since there is now neither an above nor
a below?31 The eternal recurrence is thus to the dead God what the new
weight is to the old one; the thought of thoughts answers the murder
of murders,32 and this act, comparable to none other, inaugurates a
higher history than all history hitherto.33
Who is this God to whose death the eternal recurrence serves as a
counterweight? God is dead! God remains dead! cries the madman.
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The addition is decisive and signifies that this death, excluding all resurrection, concerns him whose son died for our sins and was resurrected
for our redemption. In paragraph 343 of The Gay Science (the paragraph
that opens the fifth book, which takes up after the fourth ended on the
eternal recurrence), does Nietzsche not observe that the greatest recent
eventthat God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievableis already beginning to cast its first shadows over
Europe? More clearly still, he warns us, from 188788, that the time
is coming, when we will have to pay for having been Christians for two
thousand years: we shall lose the weight that allowed us to livefor a time
we shall no longer know what is out nor in.34 Need we give examples of
this bewilderment that corresponds to our own historical situation, to
our own historical condition? The thought of eternal recurrence is thus
inseparable from the death of the God that is preceded by no article, the
God revealed to the Christians, but first to the Jews, the living God from
whom springs life itself, who constitutes the weight of all life, and thus
likewise of all sin, that is, of all death. Eternal recurrence, the mightiest knowledge,35 is destined to counterbalance the lack of God, the loss
of that which wasever in the words of the madmanthe holiest and
mightiest of all that the world has yet owned.36 According to an economy
without equivalent or precedent, eternal recurrence is the price paid
upon the death of God, the price due, if not to God, at least for God, the
eternal price of God.
That the death of God concerns the one that Nietzsche calls, following the Bible, the holiest and the mightiest37 in no way contradicts
his remark that only the moral God is refuted.38 On the one hand,
Nietzsche speaks of the Christian moral God; on the other, and above
all, the God revealed in Christ is, as we have seen, an essentially moral
God. The death of God is thus not that of one god among others, nor is
it that of the god of Plato or Aristotle, but that of God, whose essence it
is to outstrip and exhaust all possible divinity. Need we recallagainst
Nietzsche, who seems at times not to exclude the possibility of other
kinds of gods39need we recall the words, striking in their ambiguity,
that Yahweh confides to Isaiah: Before me, no god had been formed,
neither shall there be after me.40 The death of God is henceforth the impossibility of a new god; it is the now finished past of any god to come
and to think, as Heidegger did, that only one god could save us now is,
at the very least, as much to misunderstand the meaning of God as it is
that of his death.
The death of the Christian god means the collapse of our world,
which for two millennia never ceased revolving around him. Clearly,
Nietzsche was not unaware of this collapse, characterizing the absolute
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change that comes about with the negation of God in the following
way: We have absolutely no longer any master above us; the old world
of values is theologicalit is overturned.More succinctly: there is no
higher instance above us: insofar as God could be, we are now ourselves
God . . . We have to ascribe to ourselves the attributes we ascribed to
God . . .41 But how could we appropriate the attributes of God, and particularly his power, without triumphing over that power, without surpassing it, without incorporating it? Directly or not, everything that follows
will attempt to answer this question.
The relationship of the doctrine of recurrence to Christianity is
brought out in a host of notes from the summer of 1881, where the former is determined through a confrontation with the latter. Eternal recurrence will find its first partisans among the weakest of beings, but the
first adepts prove nothing against a doctrine. I believe the first Christians,
with their virtues, were the most unbearable of peoples.42 Eternal recurrence will unfold its power only after a long period of time: What do
the two millennia during which Christianity preserved itself represent!
The mightiest thought will require thousands of yearsfor a long time,
a very long time, it shall have to remain small and powerless!43 Eternal
recurrence is the object of a belief: This doctrine is mild toward those
who do not believe in it, it is without hell or threats. Whosoever does not
believe, has in his consciousness a fugitive life.44 The thought of eternal
recurrence is that of a possibility: If circular repetition is but a likelihood or a possibility, then even the thought of a possibility can shake us
profoundly and transform us, and not only our sensations and particular
expectations! What did not fail to result from the possibility of eternal
damnation!45 Or again: eternal recurrence is a hypothesis in the long
run more powerful than any other beliefassuming it remains stable much
longer than a religious dogma.46 While the thought of eternal recurrence
is considered from a different angle in each of these notes, each one enriched by interrelated determinations, it is always with a view to comparing its power and necessary duration with that of Christianity.
Is the doctrine of eternal recurrence essentially religious, then?
When Nietzsche cautions, Let us keep from teaching such a doctrine
as a spontaneous religion,47 his warning concerns only this spontaneous character, and not that of a religion, which is decisively asserted in
another note: I would defend my thought in advance! It must be the religion of the freest, the gayest, the most sublime spiritsa lovable verdant
glen between the ice and the pure sky!48 But this religion could not be
inscribed into the landscape of Engadinto which Nietzsche says he
owes his life49if its contents did not warrant it or differ essentially from
that of the Christian religion, whose landscape is altogether different.50
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This is why Nietzsche took pains to distinguish the eternity of recurrence

from the eternity of the life resurrected: Let us impress upon our lives
the image of eternity! That thought contains more than all the religions
that hold life here below in contempt as something fugitive, and which
have taught us to look toward an other, indeterminate life.51 To think
eternal recurrence, to live according to this thought, which makes a new
way of living, a new life, possible, is not to direct ones gaze toward
distant unknown beatitudes, benedictions and graces, but rather to live in
such a way that we should want to live again, and want to live in this way
throughout eternity!Our task summons us at each instant.52 If the
doctrine of eternal recurrence is religious, and for the moment nothing permits us to assert this, it is not religious in the Christian sense of
the term. In comparison to the religion revealed in Christ, the thought
of eternal return is not religious. Yet do the death and resurrection of
Christ forever exhaust the meaning of all religion? Are there not godless
religions, and is it not, on the contrary, because the thought of thoughts
modifies the essence of religion itself that Nietzsche can qualify eternal
recurrence as a religion of religions?53
Does this designation not also point toward the nature of the relationship between eternal recurrence and Christianity? If the thought
of thoughts is the thought that grounds all thought, then the religion of
religions is the religion that surpasses all religion. How can the religion
of recurrence surpass that of Christ? A brief note from the summer of
1881 states: A wholly other eternalizationglory moves in a false dimension. We must introduce into it eternal depth, eternal repeatability.54
Nietzsche thus opposes the glory and eternity of eternal return to the
eternal glory of the Holy Spirit, as the true opposed to the false. But what
is glory? Glory is the weight and power peculiar to the manifestation of
God,55 and for Saint Paul, who speaks of the eternal weight of glory in
the resurrected life, glory and power are synonyms.56 Consequently, to assert that glory has unfolded in a false dimension is to lighten, to weaken,
and to devalue the power of God revealed in Christ, while subordinating
it to another, higher, truer power. The thought of eternal recurrence exceeds the testamentary revelation, and from the moment this thought is
thought [ds linstant o cette pense est pense], God dies and remains dead
since, by its essence, this moment repeats eternally. The appearing of the
return is the disappearing of God, and if the grandeur of this double
event is incommensurable with the course of history, that is because this
event is, paradoxically and like the word of God himself, datable in time
and iterable throughout eternity.
What does this devaluation of Gods power mean? Divine power is
the resurrection of the dead. Consequently, to say that glory moves for-
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ward in a false dimension is to say that the resurrection of the carnal body
as a spiritual one, or the resurrection of an earthly body as a celestial one,
fails to grant the body its true power, that it is a false resurrection, or a
resurrection unto a false life. But how can we utter such a judgment without having opened beforehand the possibility of a resurrection to the
true life, of a sur-resurrection in the very sense in which Nietzsche speaks
of sur-Christianity? And how should this possibility not be confused with
eternal recurrence itself? Let us go back to the memorial of August 1881,
which established a divide between two ways of living. Even more than of
life, Nietzsche speaks there of incorporation and, following Heidegger,
we must take this term as the key word [Leitwort] of the project.57 The
incorporation of the new doctrine in fact replaces the incorporation of
fundamental errors, of passions, of knowledge, and even of the knowledge that abjures. Ensuring the passage from one incorporation to another, from one body to another, the mightiest thought58 is liable to
change the body, bestowing on it its own power. Eternal recurrence is
thus knowledge that makes possible a modification of the body. Should it,
however, be understood in relation to the Pauline, the Christian dogma
of the resurrection of bodies? Doubtlessly so, even if this reference does
not permit us to characterize the thought of eternal return in a positive
fashion. In 1885, Nietzschewho, we repeat, understood Christianity
on the basis of Pauls Gospeldefined his task in this way: to overcome
everything that is Christian by way of something that is sur-Christian, and
not simply by ridding ourselves of itfor the Christian doctrine was the
counter-doctrine that opposed the Dionysian doctrine.59 The Dionysian
doctrine of eternal recurrence could be anti-Christian and sur-Christian
only by being grounded on a sur-resurrection, since Christianity was itself grounded upon the resurrection. From this it follows that eternal
recurrence is the knowledge which, by opening the possibility of a new
incorporation, invalidates the resurrection in Christ and gives to the expression the eternal weight of glory an entirely other meaning.
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Circulus Vitiosis Deus?
Should we take this to mean that the doctrine of eternal recurrence does
not concern philosophy? Not at all. But if Greek philosophy and revealed
religion restas will become progressively apparenton the same type
of values, then the revaluation, inseparable from eternal recurrence,
cannot concern the one without concerning the other. It is sufficient in
this regard to refer to paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil, the text in
which, according to Heidegger, the thought of thoughts reaches to the
very limits and supreme heights of what can be thought.1 A complete
understanding of this third communication of the doctrine of recurrence, which comes after paragraph 341 of The Gay Science and after
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, requires that we know its context, as Heidegger
again says though he perhaps leaves it behind too hastily himself.2 This
occurs in Beyond Good and Evil in the section entitled What Is Religious?
Of itself this placement indicates that the thought of recurrence cannot
proceed without a new determination of the essence of religion and,
consequently, of its relations with philosophy.
Paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil is approximately at the heart of
the section devoted to the essence of religion. Let us therefore examine
what comes before it. Nietzsche begins in defining the Christian faith in
a crucified God as a revaluation of all the values of antiquity3 or again,
aristocratic ones. This revaluation is not only of Jewish origin, but also
though not equallyof Greek origin. This is because, while it allowed
itself progressively to be invaded by a servile fear, the religiosity of the
first Greeks was characterized by an enormous abundance of gratitude,
which bore witness to their high nobility. In this way, early Greek religion
ultimately prepared the way for Christianity and its ideal of holiness.4
Now, this holiness amounts to an enigma, from which the most recent
philosophySchopenhauers, still draws its source. How is the denial
of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have
been the question over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and
began.5 That is to say that the metaphysics of the will and German Idealism, whose inheritor is Schopenhauer, belong to the horizon of revealed
religion.
In what sense and for whom is the saint an enigma? If the most
powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as
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the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation, this is first

because they recognized in the force of his will their own strength and
delight in dominion. But it is further, and above all, because the saint inspired suspicion in them: Such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will
not have been desired for nothing . . . There may be a reason for it, some
very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters
and visitors, might have inside information. What is this danger wherein
all the grandeur and enigma of the saint reside? In short, the powerful
of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a
strange, as yet unconquered enemyit was the will to power that made
them stop before the saint. They had to ask him6
The enigma of holiness is thus that of turning the will to power
against oneself. Considering the context in which the will to power is introducedjust prior to the third statement of the doctrine of return
we must suppose this doctrine capable of putting an end to the reversal
of the will to power. What could this mean if not that eternal recurrence
opens a new history, since the will to power is the primordial fact of all history?7 It is nevertheless impossible to grasp the novelty and superiority
of the history opened by the thought of recurrence without first determining what the old history was. Nietzsche applies himself to this in the
four paragraphs preceding and preparing the proclamation of eternal
recurrence.
The first paragraph treats of the greatest sin against the spirit,
which weighs on the European conscience: the gathering into one and
the same Bible of the New Testamentthe book of graceand the Old
Testamentthe book of divine justice.8 This gathering, and its principle, presuppose Saint Pauls theology and, consequently, are founded
on the resurrection of bodies. The third paragraph characterizes the
new philosophyskeptical in matters of the theory of knowledgeas
anti-Christian.9 Now, on the one hand, this epistemological skepticism
is in certain respects that of Nietzsche himself. On the other hand, a
philosophy can only be anti-Christian by opposing the Christianization
of philosophy and the values that permitted this. In short, the doctrine
of eternal recurrence is directed against what we will call the great coincidence between revealed religion and metaphysics; a coincidence that
only the latter can bring to light and to which we will return later.
The second and fourth paragraphs concern the death of God. In
the one, Nietzsche claims that today, the Father, in God, has been thoroughly refuted; ditto the Judge, the Rewarder. 10 In the other paragraph, the death of God is interpreted as the highest stage of religious
cruelty: To sacrifice God for the nothingthis paradoxical mystery of
the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up:
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all of us already know something of this.11 Having thus recalled the

content and position of the four paragraphs, it is possible to identify
the history the thought of recurrence aims to overcome. It is holy history, of which the death of God is the dark but true apocalypse. Into this
history comes that of philosophy, in a secondary, which is to say servile
wayand this, from the time of the constitution of the Christian Bible.
Now, in noting that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of
growing powerfullybut the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion12 or again in specifying that anti-Christian in no way amounts to
anti-religious,13 Nietzsche refuses to reduce religion to its reactive and
nihilist type alone. For this reason, we should expect that the thought
of recurrence overturns the hierarchical relations between philosophy
and religion, and confers on philosophy a wholly new sovereignty over
religion.
In acquainting ourselves with the context to which the third statement of the doctrine of return belongs, we have determined its effective
domain; viz., the common history of metaphysics and revealed religion,
and thus laid the ground for its interpretation. Here, then, is paragraph
56 of Beyond Good and Evil: Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and
to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in
the form of Schopenhauers philosophy; whoever has really looked into,
down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking
beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer,
under the spell and delusion of moralitymay just thereby, without
really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the
ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being
who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever
was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo, not only to himself but to the whole play
and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who precisely needs this spectacleand makes it necessary: because again and
again he needs himselfand makes himself necessaryWhat? And
this wouldnt becirculus vitiosus deus?
In one long, single sentence, Nietzsche describes the transition
from one ideal to another, from one mode of life and thought to another. But is this really what is essential, and will it suffice to change
the essence of religion? To answer this, we should follow the movement
that leads from pessimism to eternal recurrence. What should we understand by this pessimism whose final expression is Schopenhauers metaphysics of the will, yet whose quintessential forms are encountered in
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Asia?14 Pessimism is a preliminary form of nihilism,15 which culminates

in Christianity and the Pauline conception of God. The initial version of
paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil bears this out since, after defining
eternal recurrence there as a way of thinking, the most high-spirited,
liveliest and most world-affirming of all possible ways of thinking, Nietzsche adds: I found that God is the most annihilating and hostile to life of
all thoughts; and it is only through the enormous obscurity of the dear
pious ones and the metaphysicians of all time that knowledge of this
truth had so long to be awaited.16 But whence can this knowledge come
if not from eternal recurrence itself? Is it not solely in light of the most affirmative thought that the most negating one can be recognized as such?
In other words, and more profoundly: the moment the Judeo-Christian
God is the apogee of negation, should not eternal recurrence, as the
apogee of affirmation, be called, in a higher and thus entirely different
sense, Deus? The Latin expression circulus vitiosus deus thus answers the
following one: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.17 The thought of
return here reaches the ultimate limit and supreme degree of what is
thinkable in it, because it proves to surpass God himself in power. If
this were not the case, then never could The Anti-Christ have reproached
Europeans for not having repudiated the Christian God; for having
failed since then to create any new God! Never could he exclaim, burning with a brilliant impatience in which all his grandeur and nobility are
concentrated: Almost two millennia and not a single new God! But still,
and as if existing by right, like an ultimate and maximum of the Godcreating force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian
monotono-theism!18
Yet is it not absurd, even quite mad, to consider eternal recurrence
as a thought mightier than the God of revelation? Outside the fact that
madness is a moment of all true thought, this is indeed Nietzsches conception. To be convinced of this, it suffices to read the paragraph immediately following the statement of eternal recurrence, where Nietzsche
characterizes, as discretely as rigorously, the relationship between the
circulus vitiosus deus and the Christian religion.
With the strength of his spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as
it were, the space around man: his world becomes more profound; ever
new stars, ever new riddles and images become visible for him. Perhaps
everything on which the spirits eye has exercised its acuteness and
thoughtfulness was nothing but an occasion for this exercise, a playful
matter, something for children and those who are childish. Perhaps the
day will come when the most solemn concepts which have caused the
most fights and suffering, the concepts God and sin, will seem no
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more important to us than a childs toy and a childs pain seem to an

old manand perhaps the old man will then be in need of another
toy and another painstill child enough, an eternal child!19
In saying that the world ordered according to the eternal return

is to that which gravitated around God, what the old man is to the child
that he once was, is Nietzsche not claiming that the circulus vitiosus deus is
deeper, more enigmatic, richer, and, in a word, more powerful than that
God before whom we have sinned, before whom we have been sinners
from the beginning?
The conception of a thought more powerful than the old God
implies ipso facto a modification of the meaning of religion and of its
relations with philosophy. This is brought out in all the paragraphs following the declaration of eternal recurrence. Before we examine them,
we must forestall a misinterpretation. The circulus vitiosus deus should not
be thought of as an additional metaphysical god or on the horizon of the
Judeo-Christian determination of God, as it refers the one and the other
back to their common axiological ground, to their coincidence, and
their simultaneous decline: to nihilism. What meaning does the doctrine
of eternal recurrence confer, then, on religion? After having explained
that modernity teaches disbelief and destroys the religious instincts,20
after having made of homines religiosi the greatest of all artists because
they embellished man at the cost of truth, whose inversion and negation
they wanted;21 after having understood Christ, who preached the love of
men as the love of God and remained forever venerable and holy
as he who up to now flew highest and erred most magnificently22
in short, after having shown that the problem of religion has never in
truth been posed for want of a commensurate knowledge, Nietzsche
was able, thanks to eternal recurrence, to determine the meaning of
religion and of its relations to the philosophy henceforth irreducible to
metaphysics, and finally relieved of its status as ancilla theologiae [theologys handmaiden].23 The philosopher as we understand him, we free
spiritsas the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has
the conscience for the over-all development of manthis philosopher
will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education,
just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at
hand.24 In light of eternal recurrence, of the most powerful knowledge,
religions, in the eyes of the philosopher, are but means toward ends and
values that vary according to the rank of those who set them down and
establish them. The doctrine of eternal recurrence is therefore not a
new religion in the Christian or Buddhist sense of the term, and while
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Nietzsche calls it the religion of religions,25 the first occurrence of the

word has absolutely not the same meaning as the second. The religion
of religions qua essence of religion has nothing religious to it in the
sense of those moral religions26 of which it is also the essence. It is not
one religion more, but on the contrary one religion less, since being incommensurable to all ancient religions, it is their tutelary and sovereign
power.
What then is religion, when it does not want to be a means of education and cultivation in the philosophers hand, but [reigns on the basis of itself] and [in] its own sovereign way, or again, what were religions
and to what did they contribute, particularly Christianity, before eternal
recurrence? Nietzsches answer is as clear as possible. While underlining
the inestimable benefits that Europe owes to Israel and to Christianity,
he asserts that in the final analysis, the sovereign religions we have had so
far are among the chief causes that have kept the type man on a lower
rung. Indeed, claiming for itself a sovereignty that eternal recurrence
restores and confers, as we shall see, to philosophy alone, the Christian
religion sets all evaluations on their head,27 works through a revaluation
of all aristocratic values, and thereby, makes life diseased since it turns
it against itself. Eternal recurrence is thus indissociable from a new revaluation liable to put an end to the will to powers turn against itself, a
reversal of which one of the highest forms is holiness. Thus is attested on
the basis of the thought of thoughtssuch as the third section of Beyond
Good and Evil states it, and when considered as a whole and according
to its logicthe solidarity among the fundamental concepts of Nietzsches philosophy, which, as a critique of holiness and of the holy lie,28
has as its purpose to raise philosophical knowledge, freed of all theological servitude, above God, whose power and wisdom were revealed in
Jesus Christ.
But how does eternal recurrence develop a power superior to that
of God? As long as we have not answered this question, all that has preceded will remain ungrounded. To say that the power of the circulus vitiosus deus surpasses that of God is, in a certain fashion, to compare them,
supposing that they impact the same thing, even if in different ways. But
how and on what does the power of the God of revelation operate? According to the gospel of him who laid its foundations, this power applies
to bodies such that they walk in a new life.29 The resurrection of the
body is the very enactment of divine power and the expression resurrection of the dead is for Saint Paul but a definition of the word God. 30
We should determine, then, the way in which eternal recurrence makes
possible another new life31 and the creation of a superior body, which
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together invalidate, render powerless, and destroy the life and resurrection in Christ. This is the task to which the present study is devoteda
task whose properly philosophical character remains uncertain as long
as we have not specified the relations between the metaphysics of the will
and revealed theology, the word of God and that of Being.
8/31/11 3:12:30 PM
Part 2
The Shadow of God
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The Double Status of the Body
That Nietzsches thought should refer to the economy of salvation whose

foundation was laid by the Pauline teaching in no way signifies that this
thought is theological or religious in nature. A thought may have theological implications without necessarily being encompassed in the sphere
of the theology at which it aims. Nietzsche did not want merely to maintain the rank of philosophy but above all to raise it, and this is one of
the reasons why he engaged in an unprecedented struggle with the revelation whose power, i.e., grandeur, he knew he must never or almost
never underestimate. In effect, the German philosophy whose polemical
inheritor he was, and which was marked by the names of Leibniz, Kant,
Hegel, and Schopenhauerthis philosophy is a cunning theology. The
Anti-Christ proclaims, it is necessary to say whom we feel to be our antithesisthe theologians and all that has theologian blood in its veinsour
entire philosophy.1 However, since it is above all by way of Schopenhauer that Nietzsche came to the metaphysics of German Idealism, it
is appropriate to begin by reading The World as Will and Representation,
which, weaknesses not notwithstanding, gathers up in one all the basic
directions of the Western interpretation of beings as a whole.2 In this
way we will bring out the theological character of this thought.
Schopenhauers work, whose title recapitulates the entirety of modern philosophy, opens with the following proposition: The world is my
representation. If this thesis is valid, according to Schopenhauer, for
every living and knowing being, then it is exclusively in humans that it
can become the object of reflective consciousness. As the pure correlation of the subject and the object, representation is thus the form of
all possible and imaginable experience, more general than the other
forms, time, space, and causality.3 From the moment that the I think,
understood as an I represent to myself a representation, is set as the principle
of philosophy, no truth is more evident, certain, and absolute than that
which affirms the essential connection between the knowing subject and
the objects known, between the subject as whole and undivided in every
representing being4 and those objects that are necessarily multiple because subordinate to the a priori forms of time, space, and causality.
This thesis from Descartes and Berkeley, and recognized, as Schopenhauer adds, by the philosophy of the Vedanta school, nevertheless
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results from an abstractionas attested by the internal resistance5 that

we feel when taking the world for a pure and simple representation. The
thesis must therefore be completed by another truth, more originary
than the first one: the world is my will. But what does this statement
mean? How does one come to it? At the end of what argument or what
experience? And if it is only representations that constitute the initial
datum, then what is the representation (or the object) apt to lead us to
posit that the intuitive world isbeyond representationwill?
Representations are distributed into classes, an inventory of which
was established by Schopenhauers dissertation On the Four-fold Root of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason. If this principle expresses, in the most general
way, the necessary connection between representations, its form will not
fail to vary according to the nature of the representations subjected to it.
Schopenhauer thus distinguishes (1) intuitive representations, which are
complete and empirical (real objects) and connected by the law of causality or the sufficient reason of becoming. (2) Abstract representations,
representations of representations, concepts, connected by the principle of sufficient reason of knowledge, according to which judgments
should be grounded. (3) Pure, formal representations, i.e., space and
time, whose reciprocal relationship of parts, that is position and succession, is determined by the principle of sufficient reason of being. Finally,
(4) and unique in its genre, the immediate representation of the internal sense, or the subject of willing qua immediate object for the subject
of knowledge, whose acts obey the law of motivation, or the principle of
sufficient reason of action. Understanding, reason, pure sensibility, the
internal sense or self-consciousness, are the subjective correlates of each
one of Schopenhauers four classes or representations.
Intuitive and complete representationsmatter subjected to causalityconstitute the world of experience offered to knowledge. But to
know is to know the cause from the effect. That means first, with sensibility presupposing matter and causality, that empirical intuition consists
in the knowledge of the cause starting from the effect, by means of the
understanding; in a word, that it is intellectual. It further means that no
intuition of the world would be possible without a first effect serving as
the point of departure to the operations of the understanding. What
then is the representation immediately given, to which the understanding is applied, that is to say, the law of causality, and whence proceeds
knowledge qua totality of representations?
It is the body whose sensations are apprehended by the understanding as effects referring necessarily to causes. Subjective sensation thereby
becomes objective intuition, and the world an object of knowledge. The
body, writes Schopenhauer, is for us immediate object, in other words,
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that representation which forms the starting-point of the subjects knowledge, since it itself with its immediately known changes precedes the application of the law of causality, and thus furnishes this with the first data.
The whole essence of matter consists, as we have shown, in its action. But
there is cause and effect only for the understanding, which is nothing but
their subjective correlative of these. The understanding, however, could
never be applied if there were not something else from which it starts.
Such a something is mere sensuous sensation, the immediate consciousness of the changes in the body, by virtue of which this body is [its] immediate object.6 Such a mode of argument, appealing so strangely to a
Kantian vocabulary, immediately raises a problem. Is it possible, in effect,
to make my body an object, even an immediate one, before the intervention of the understanding? In other words, if the body stands at the
origin of objectivity, can it then itself be an object and, in qualifying it as
an immediate object serving as the point of departure for objective and
intellectual intuition, does Schopenhauer not commit from the outset a
petition of principle? To be sure, he will specify, regarding the expression
immediate object, that the conception of object, however, is not to be
taken here in the fullest sense, for through this immediate knowledge
of the body, which precedes the application of the understanding and
is mere sensation, the body [Leib] itself does not exist really as object, but
first the bodies [Krper] acting on it.7 Seeing the difficulty, however, does
not suffice to resolve it, and if my own body is known objectively only
through the application of the law of causality to the relations among its
organs, then the question remains of knowing whence comes the immediate objectivity of the first organ, the affection of which is understood
as the effect of a second organ, which is its cause. The aporia is not without implications, when the body is the point of departure of knowledge
through causality, which connects only objects, and when it is the obligatory mediator of every objective intuition.
The body is thus the immediate representation that opens our access to the ordered set of representations. Yet is the world only representation, or again something else that would no longer be a representation? Before responding, we must justify the question. Representation is
the fundamental form of consciousness and, by distinguishing intuitive
representations from abstract representations, Schopenhauer makes the
first into the content of the second. Consequently, if abstract representation is a form that contains intuitive representation, then should we
not inquire about the content of intuitive representation itself? It goes
without saying that the latter could not be representative or objective,
and hence that it is inac-cessible to the red thread that is the principle
of sufficient reason.
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It would nevertheless be impossible to reach the non-representational

being of the world (and the being of the world is, according to Schopenhauer, the sole theme of philosophy)8 without some representation that
permits us to exceed representation toward that which differs radically
from it. The meaning that I am looking for of the world that stands
before me simply as my representation, or the transition from it as mere
representation of the knowing subject to whatever it may be besides this,
could never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than
the purely knowing subject (a winged cherub without a body).9 It is
therefore because the subject of knowledge, the philosopher, is neither
cherubic and incorporeal but rather incorporated and individuated hic
et nunc, that it is possible to pass beyond representation. The body is not
only a representation that the subject has, but likewise one that the subject is, and if its movements appeared only in a representational form,
then they would be as foreign and external to me as those of any other
body. That this is not the case proves that my body is offered to me in two
ways: it is given in intellectual intuition as representation, as an object
among objects, subject to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in
quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately, and denoted
by the word will.10 My body is representation and will; the subject of
knowledge is identical with that of willing.
The identity of the body and the will is, in Schopenhauers view,
the miracle for which his entire work becomes (or at least would like to
be) the explanation. Stricto sensu, this identity is indemonstrable, since it
is an absolutely immediate knowledge [connaissance], whose truth resides
not in some relationship between representations, but in the intuitive
relation with that which differs totally from them. In light of this, the
assimilation of the body and the will constitutes philosophical truth kath
exokhen.11
The body is thus distinguished from all other objects because it is
an immediate representation at the starting point of knowledge, and because it is known in two ways that are heterogeneous to each other. The
question then arises whether it is the only possible object of this double
grasp or again, whether all objects are not representation and will. But
whether the objects known to the individual only as representations are
yet, like his own body, phenomena of a will, is . . . the proper meaning
of the question.12 In short, does the body manifest the unrepresentable
essence of all representations, the being-in itself of all phenomena?
How to answer this question when it is impossible in principle, save
in the case of my own body, to pass through representational appearances in order to arrive at the thing-in itself beyond the phenomenon?
We resist taking our body as a pure and simple representation because we
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know it internally as will. It is therefore not from representation but from

the will (whose affections are pleasure and pain) that my body draws the
reality I attribute to it. Consequently, should we not impute the reality
we reserve for the representation of the worldas when, for example,
we distinguish it from a dreamto the will, since outside of representation and will we cannot think anything? Such is my body, and such, the
worldand it is by way of analogy that Schopenhauer posits that the essence of every phenomenon, the thing in itself, is will.
But in naming the thing in itself will, do we not understand it from
one of its phenomena? We could entertain this objection if it were possible to do otherwise; if philosophical knowledge could do without a
red thread. This is not the case, and we could not conceive the thing
in itself without representing it. However, since the representation of
the will can be either immediate or not, it is graduated, and it will be
enough to designate the thing in itself according to the most transparent of its manifestations, and to choose as our red thread the phenomenon that is the most distinct, the most developed, the most directly enlightened by knowledge13all of these, conditions filled by the human
will, which the body makes visible. These qualifications are accompanied
consequently by an extension of the concept of the will that goes well
beyond the merely reflective, motivated, and reasonable one: Before all
things, Schopenhauer warns, one must learn to distinguish will [Wille]
from free choice [Willkr], and see that the former can exist without
the latter. This, of course, presupposes my whole philosophy. The will
is called free choice where it is illuminated by knowledge, and when
therefore motives, hence representations, are the causes that move it.14
In other words, Schopenhauers metaphysics is founded on the radical
separation of the will and of knowledge.
The body is therefore not only the starting point of empirical and
etiological science, but likewise the red thread of metaphysical knowledge. If, in a general fashion, we understand the cogito to be the cardinal
and preferential theme of philosophy since Descartes, for Schopenhauer
it will take the following form: body I am, a proposition in which it is
the body that gives its meaning to the I am. Schopenhauer explains and
justifies this methodological privilege of the body in a text worth citing
because Nietzsche will himself take up its argument and terminology.
After having qualified as an error the method that consists in proceeding from simple and general phenomena to elucidate complex and particular ones, Schopenhauer goes on to say, but wewho are here aiming not at etiology but at philosophy, that is to say, not at a relative but at
unconditioned knowledge of the nature of the worldtake the opposite
course, and start from what is immediately and most completely known
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and absolutely familiar to us, from what lies nearest to us, in order to
understand what is known to us only from a distance, one-sidedly, and
indirectly. From the most powerful, most significant, and most distinct
phenomenon, we seek to learn to understand the weaker and less complete. With the exception of my own body, only one side of all things is
known to me; namely, that of representation. Their inner nature remains
sealed to me and is a profound secret, even when I know all the causes on
which their changes ensue. Only from a comparison with what goes on
within me when my body performs an action from a motive that moves
me, with what is the inner nature of my own changes determined by external grounds or reasons, can I obtain an insight into the way in which
those inanimate bodies change under the influence of causes, and thus
understand what is their inner nature. Knowledge of the cause of this
inner natures manifestation tells me only the rule of its appearance in
time and space, and nothing more. I can do this, because my body is the
only object of which I know not merely the one side, that of the representation, but also the other, that is called will.15
As a guiding theme of philosophical research, the body is thus the
object starting from which it is possible to reach the meaning of any objects being [sens dtre], including that of the world, itself. Clearly, the
choice of such a theme is not arbitrary but grounded on the determination of being to which it leads. Schopenhauer substitutes the body for
consciousness, because representation derives from the will, of which it
is simply the objectification. This substitution is legitimate insofar as it
never deviates from the principle according to which every explanation
should go from the most powerful, the richest and clearest phenomenon
to the weakest, the poorest and most obscure one. In this way, the description of the bodycharacterizing as it does the relations between will and
representationought to allow us to secure the status of knowledge.
Before following this description in detail, we must emphasize one
point. Schopenhauer is in agreement with Kant when he maintains that
no representation allows us to know things in themselves, but he opposes
Kant when he asserts that the knowing subject also belongs to the things
to be known and even that, among these things, the subject is the only
such thing whose being in itself is directly given as will, outside all representation. The immediate consequence of this thesis is that the human
essence does not reside in consciousness or in knowledge [la conscience
ou la connaissance], but in the will. In thus subordinating the understanding to the will, whose objectification is the body, Schopenhauerwho
claims he is putting an end to an error whose history is coextensive with
that of philosophy itself 16necessarily attributes knowledge to a particular organ, the brain. Indeed, if the will is originary and metaphysical,
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then knowledge is secondary and can only be physical, better, cerebral.

This identification of the understanding with the brain, which ruins all
transcendental idealism, is founded on the metaphysical priority of the
will and for this reason constitutes a major premise of Schopenhauerian
doctrine.
Following the guiding thread of the body, and in order to determine the relations between representation and will, it is apposite to begin by examining those between the brain and the organism, since that
which in self-consciousness, and hence subjectively, is the intellect, presents itself in the consciousness of other things, and hence objectively, as
the brain; and that which in self-consciousness, and hence subjectively, is
the will, presents itself in the consciousness of other things, and hence
objectively, as the entire organism.17 The brain, including the spinal
cord and the nervous system, is embedded in the organism that feeds
it, yet in whose preservation it does not participate directly. It is thus a
parasite.18 What then is the somatic function19 of this parasite? It controls the relations with the external world; this alone is its task, and in
this way it discharges its debt to the organism that nourishes it, since the
latters existence is conditioned by the external relations.20 The brain
is a necessary parasitea parasite because it lives off of a host that can
live without it, necessary because this host needs it to live in the external
world. Qualifying the brain in this way means that knowledge is always in
service to the will, that knowledge is essentially servile.
Can we describe in a more detailed fashion the function of the
neuro-cerebral apparatus? No doubt we can, but in turning toward the
organism itself. The will, which it objectifies, is not subjectively perceived
as the constant substrate of its movements, for self-consciousness is subject to the sole form of time that, when united with that of space, then
makes possible a substantial permanence. We therefore know the will
only through its successive acts: the contractions of the muscles of the
body. If muscular irritability is the immediate objectification of the will,
there is nevertheless no contraction without excitation. How then can
excitations unleash contractions? Schopenhauer explains the process
in this way: the will is immediately present in the muscles of the body,
as a continuous tendency to activity in general.21 For this tendency to
externalize itself in movement, the latter must receive some direction
that only the nervous system can impose on it. In effect, irritability, in
itself indifferent to any direction, cannot alone give rise to movement,
which, if deprived of direction, would be indistinguishable from rest.
It is thus from the activity of the nervous system [activit nerveuse] that
muscular irritability receives the direction that makes its realization possible as bodily movement. However, the nerves, which unleash muscular
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contractions by way of excitation, themselves belong to the cerebrospinal

system or to the neuro-vegetative one. In the first case, when the nerve
is afferent to the brain, the contraction is a conscious and motivated act
of will; in the second case, when the nerve is afferent to the intercostal
nerve [grand sympathique], the contraction is an unconscious, reflexive
act of the will.
The distinction between these two types of acts immediately raises
a question: why are certain bodies endowed with consciousness? Schopenhauer answers, As I have often explained, the necessity of consciousness is brought about by the fact that, in consequence of an organisms
enhanced complication and thus of its more manifold and varied needs,
the acts of its will must be guided by motives, no longer by mere stimuli.22
Consciousness is therefore proper to complex organisms in which, as essentially one, it ensures the centralization of motives among which the
will chooses and determines itself. In thus making consciousness the foyer
of cerebral activity, Schopenhauer identifies it at the same time with the
synthetic unity of apperception: That point of unity of consciousness, or
the theoretical ego, is exactly Kants synthetic unity of apperception on
which all representations are ranged as pearls on a string, and by virtue
of which I think, as the thread of the string of pearls, must be capable
of accompanying all our representations. 23 Now, the synthetic unity of
apperception is the supreme principle of every usage of the understanding, that is to say, of any possible knowledge, and by assimilating it to the
foyer of cerebral activity, Schopenhauer confirms the subordination of
the I think to the body, and that of knowledge to life and to the will.
Let us return to our description of the organism. The muscles in
which the will is objectified are themselves the product and the work
of the bloods solidification; they are only blood that has become congealed, or as it were clotted or crystallized.24 Schopenhauer defends
this thesis with the help of the following considerations: (1) muscles are
made of blood, since the latter absorbs without modification their fibrin
and the matter that gives them their color. (2) The force that transforms
blood into muscle is none other than that which, later on, moves the
muscles. The contractions of the heart are, effectively, independent of
the cerebrospinal system and the circulation of the blood is a movement
that, precisely like that of the will, is spontaneous and originary. As the
primary fluid of the organism,25 the blood consequently determines the
entire form of the body and is the siteif difficult to imaginein which
the will is most immediately manifested in representation. After having
raised blood to the dignity of the primary phenomenon of the thing in
itself, Schopenhauer resumes in this way his whole interpretation of the
body: From all this it follows that the will objectifies itself most immedi-
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ately in the blood as that which originally creates and forms the organism,
perfects and completes it through growth, and afterwards continues to
maintain it both by the regular renewal of all the parts and by the extraordinary restoration of such as happen to be injured. The first products
of the blood are its own vessels, and then the muscles, in the irritability
of which the will makes itself known to self-consciousness; also with these
the heart, which is at the same time vessel and muscle, and is therefore
the true center and primum mobile of all life. But for individual life and
continued existence in the external world, the will requires two subsidiary systems, one to govern and order its inner and outer activity, and the
other constantly to renew the mass of the blood; it thus requires a controller and a sustainer. Therefore the will creates for itself the nervous and
the intestinal systems. Hence the functiones animales (sensuous or nervous
functions) and the functiones naturales (metabolism) are associated in a
subsidiary way with the functiones vitales (circulation of the blood), which
are the most original and essential, which are the most original and
essential.26
Taken as a whole, this description is not without a serious aporia,
which already came to light under the question of whether the body was
conceivable as an immediate object and this, by way of the application of
the law of causality to the relations among its various organs. Indeed, if
the will is absolutely one and unique, then the body in which it is objectified is constituted, for its part, by a multiplicity of organs whose functions differ. How, consequently, can the single indivisible will divide itself
between the will-to-know, [which] objectively perceived, is the brain, just
as the will-to-walk, [which] objectively perceived, is the foot, and the willto-grasp, the hand . . . etc.?27 Would it not be necessaryand above all
in order to be able to account for the plurality of organsto relinquish
the primordial hypothesis about the uniqueness of the will and attribute
to it an internal principle of differentiation? How, when Schopenhauer
argues at the same time that the will is tied to no particular organ28 and
that the heart is its symbol and synonym,29 could this will be that which
really moves and forms30 without being articulated? Or again: if the will
is the inner nature of the force that manifests itself,31 then must he not
reduce it in order to render it capable of information and organization?
It is not possible at this point to answer these questions. We will return
to them later on, when we discuss the will to power as an organizing
principle.
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The Self-Negation of the Will
Using the body as our guiding thread, we have thus learned that the will
was absolutely one, and knowledge its instrument. The foregoing discussion notwithstanding, is it possible to liberate knowledge from the yoke
of the will? If knowledge is knowledge of the will in the subjective genitive sense, then can it become this in an objective sense as well? Moreover, since the will is the being of the world, and the latter the exclusive
theme of philosophy, to seek to know the former, the will, is to look for
the conditions of possibility of the knowledge of philosophy itself.
As it does not obey the principle of reason, that is, the a priori form
of all empirical knowledge, the will seems to be unknowable. Yet this
argument supposes that all representations result from the principle of
reason. Is this the case, or again are there not representations that are
independent of the principle of reason? The will, as we have seen, objectifies itself in diverse ways; it appears according to gradations, with
increasing clarity, passing from the blind thrust to cerebral activity as it
grows increasingly conscious of itself. There is thus a hierarchy of representations in which the privilege of the body is grounded. What is more,
each degree of objectification is expressed in a plurality of individuals for
which it [the particular degree] constitutes the universal, identical, and
eternal form. If spatiotemporal phenomena are born and die, ceaselessly
becoming without ever being, then these grades of objectification of the will
are nothing but Platos Ideas, states Schopenhauer, specifying that by
Idea I understand every definite and fixed grade of the wills objectification,
in so far as it is the thing-in-itself and is therefore foreign to plurality.
These grades are certainly related to individual things as their eternal
forms, or as their prototypes.1 The Ideas are therefore representations
independent of the principle of reason.
Now, one remark before proceeding: in assimilating the thing in
itself to the will, and the Idea to its adequate objectivity [objectit adquate], Schopenhauer claims he is harmonizing Plato and Kant, like two
paths leading to his own single thought . . . which has been sought for
a very long time under the name of philosophy.2 Reading Kant as having argued that experience knows only phenomena and not the thing in
itselfa restriction extended to our egoand Plato as having asserted
that things given to the senses have no authentic being, cannot be the
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object of a true science, and as having maintained that only the eternal
Ideas are knowable, Schopenhauer can by all rights say that the inner
meaning of both doctrines is wholly the same; that both declare the visible world to be a phenomenon which in itself is void and empty, and
which has meaning and borrowed reality only through the thing that
expresses itself in it (the thing-in-itself in the one case, the Idea in the
other).3 Now, even if, as Nietzsche will say, Schopenhauer as much misunderstood Kant as Plato,4 the imposed tutelage of appearance can be
sanctioned by this twofold authority.
The Idea, whose empirical kind is the species,5 is a representation that has not yet espoused the forms of space, of time, and of
causality. It is only representation, pure being-object-for-a-subject [pur
tre-objet-pour-un-sujet], and this alone distinguishes it from the thing in
itself. The Idea is the thing in itself under the most minimal form of
representation, and to know it is to know the will. But how can a subject,
individuated through its body, acquire knowledge of Ideas foreign to
plurality and individuality? Would the subject of knowledge not have to
cease being simultaneously an individual subject, and its intuition no
longer be mediated by a body,6 whose affections permit the application
of the law of causality, the sufficient reason of becoming? To be sure,
and the subject could not know the Ideas without annulling its corporeal individuality.
A detour is necessary to bright to light the possibility of such a
modification. Because it takes as point of departure the relationships
between the immediate object and other objects, only to extend from
there, under the figure of a system of sciences, to all inter-objective relations, knowledge remains in thrall to the body and the will. Consequently, as it is the principle of sufficient reason that places the objects
in this relation to the body and so to the will, the sole endeavor of knowledge, serving this will, will be to get to know concerning objects just those
relations that are laid down by the principle of sufficient reason, and thus
to follow their many different connections in space, time, and causality.
For only through these is the object interesting to the individual, in other
words, has it a relation to the will. Therefore, knowledge that serves the
will really knows nothing more about objects than their relations, knows
the objects only in so far as they exist at such a time, in such a place, in
such and such circumstances, from such and such causes, and in such
and such effectsin a word, as particular things. If all these relations
were eliminated, the objects also would have disappeared for knowledge,
just because it did not recognize in them anything else.7
Now, although knowledge, under the jurisdiction of the principle
of sufficient reason, is always a function of the interests of the will, it is
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possible through the power of the mind alone to suspend this manner
of considering things according to the where, the when, and the why, and
to contemplate their very being. The subject then loses itself in the object
and, forgetting its individuality and its will, no longer knows the singular
thing as such but only, exclusively, the Idea. As clear mirror of the object,8 freed from its corporeal individuality, the pure subject then knows
the object outside of any interest, without interest.9 Through his tacit
reference to Kants definition of the beautiful, Schopenhauer lays the
ground for his determination of the mode of knowledge that considers
objects in their absolute objectivity: It is art, the work of genius. [Art]
repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the
essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world. . . . Its
only source is knowledge of the Ideas; its sole aim is communication of
this knowledge.10 Thus attesting the possibility of a disinterestedness in
the subject, and that of a diminution of its individuality, art isto borrow
an expression of Schelling in whose regard Schopenhauer is here more
than simply tributarythe true organ of philosophy; art is the organon
of the metaphysical knowledge of the will, as it permits us to comprehend the world in a constant presence that no becoming can alter; in
short, independently of the principle of reason.
We retain the three following theses from the aesthetics developed
by Schopenhauer, and which form the background of Nietzsches own:
(1) Art is the work of the genius, that is, of a man whose force of knowledge
exceeds that of his will, and who uses this excess in the contemplation of
the Idea and of life. Genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure
perception, to lose oneself in the intuition, to remove from the service
of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service.11
As a higher degree of the objectification of knowledge, genius is thus
against-nature, since in it the intellect is emancipated from the will. If
man in general is simultaneously [the] impetuous and dark impulse of
willing (indicated by the pole of the genitals as its focal point), and [the]
eternal, free, serene subject of pure knowing (indicated by the pole of
the brain),12 then the genius is he whose encephalon (as objectification
of the faculty of knowing) dominates his sex (as the objectification of
the will to live), and who, through this domination, destines knowledge
toward pure objectivity. In other words, the sovereignty of knowledge
has for its condition of possibility the annihilation of the body, and the
subject can only be absorbed in the artistic contemplation of the Idea at
the price of his sexual drive. Nietzsche overlooks none of this when he
notes, The World as Will and Representationretranslated in a narrow and personal way, into Schopenhauerian: The world as sexual drive
and contemplative life. 13
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(2) Art manifests the Ideas, that is to say, the different degrees of
objectification of the will, starting from which a system of beaux-arts is
organized, and which moves from architecturewhere charge or loading vies with the support, and weight with rigidityto tragedy, where in
the light of day the will struggles with itself. One art nevertheless remains
outside this system: music, which reproduces no Idea. When then does
music reproduce if reproduction is the essence of art? Schopenhauer
proposes an explanation that, he admits, is indemonstrable. Music is a
representation of what can never be immediately represented. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas,
but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.14 In the
physical world music expresses the metaphysical will that transcends it,
and we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied
will.15 Music is then the true universal language since it is that of the
will and, paraphrasing Leibniz, Schopenhauer (whose aesthetic doctrine is the soil of Wagnerian opera) can define music as an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is
philosophizing.16
(3) Art sedates the will. If but for an instant, contemplation withdraws
us from the will and from those sufferings that necessarily accompany it.
Here is the summit of all art that has followed the will in its adequate
objectivity, namely in the Ideas, through all the grades, from the lowest
where it is affected, and its nature is unfolded, by causes, then where it
is similarly affected by stimuli, and finally by motives. And now art ends
by presenting the free self-abolition of the will through the one great
quieter that dawns on it from the most perfect knowledge of its own
nature.17 As consolation for the pain of being, art lets the will resign
itself to nothingness and thereby holds a high value.18
Yet if art possess such a value, is it not ultimately that the will, from
which it delivers us, is in itself devoid of value? In thus posing the question of the value of existence we are posing what Nietzsche called the
Schopenhauerian question, which will need several centuries simply to be
understood in an exhaustive fashion and in all its depths.19 At the outset
of part 4 of World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer announces
the most important aspectin effect, that he will here discuss ethics
of the value or non-value of an existence, of salvation or damnation
terms that cannot fail to surprise us when a philosopher is bound to be
an unbeliever.20
In being represented with an increasing clarity, of which humans
are the fullest measure, the will comes to know itself and to know that it
wants to manifest itself in the visible world; in a word, that it wants life.
The will is will to life, and life is inseparable from the will, since birth
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and death concern only individual phenomena. Schopenhauer insists

on this point, the present alone is the form of all life, the nunc stans or
everlasting midday21 is the sole form of the manifestation of the will.
But how does the self-knowledge to which the will raises itself react to
this manifestation? Does the knowledge of its proper essence exert a
stimulating function on the will or a sedative function, as in the case of
art? Does this knowledge give rise to an affirmation of the will to live or,
on the contrary, to its negation? Referring to the different ways of acting
found among humans, in whom alone the will becomes conscious of itself, these questions consequently lead metaphysics back to morality.
What is this life liable to be affirmed or negated? Insatiable, the will
is an unending effort: nowhere is there a goal, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a point of rest.22 This indefatigable effort tears it apart,
since every grade of the wills objectification fights for the matter, the
space, and the time of another,23 and the universal war of the phenomena sets the will in opposition to itself. Born of lack, torn asunder by its
representations, the will is essentially suffering. But what belongs to the
essence of the will belongs to that of life and, to take up a word from
Ecclesiastes, cited by Schopenhauer: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.24 It is thus in view of a life known as suffering, opposition to self, and tragedy, that the concepts of affirmation and negation
of the will must be elucidated.
If the body is the red thread of metaphysical knowledge because it
is identical to the will, then to affirm the latter is to affirm the body whose
acts aim to preserve the individual and perpetuate the species. However,
there is a difference between preserving oneself and reproducing oneself. To preserve oneself is to limit the affirmation of life and the will to
a single phenomenon; to reproduce oneself is to affirm life and the will
beyond the single phenomenon. The generative act is the most decided
affirmation of the will-to-live, since the birth of a body reaffirms, beyond
those who engender it, the pain and death essential to every living phenomenon. Consequently, the possibility of salvation, brought about by
the most complete faculty of knowledge, is for this time declared to be
fruitless, and, Schopenhauer adds, here is to be seen the profound reason for the shame connected with the business of procreation.25
To better grasp what this shame signifies before the act, as the most
distinct expression of the will, [which] is the kernel, the compendium,
the quintessence of the world,26 we must specify what is implied by the
affirmation of the body. If the thing in itself is one, and its representations multiple, then the will is entirely and constantly present in each one
of these. Thus is metaphysically egoistical every phenomenon that, in
asserting or affirming its will, affirms the will. However, in so doing, it de-
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nies the will so far as it is likewise affirmed by the others. To affirm ones
body is thus to live in a state of universal war: metaphysical egoism necessarily causes harm to another and this prejudice is most completely, peculiarly, and palpably expressed in cannibalism.27 Each individual lives
at the expense of the others. To be is to be originally guilty and my existence, beyond being shameful, is a priori culpable and unjust.
In regard to what justice, however, and what is justice? It is first the
temporal justice that is confused with law, with rightand whose function it is to recompense or to punish. As a means utilized by this egoism to protect itself from its own consequences, the State is in principle
incapable of reducing harm and suffering [le mal] to nothing. Beyond
this and above alland inaccessible within the horizon of the principle
of reasonit is eternal justice that governs the world and belongs to its
essence. In effect, if the will is one, then there is no essential difference
between that which causes evil [le mal] and that which suffers it and,
modifying one of Hegels expressions, Schopenhauer can write that the
world itself is the tribunal of the world.28 Absolutely free, omnipotent,
the will alone is responsible for existence. Eternal justice, as supreme
representation of life, is then a name for the will itself.
If such is the true justice, is it nonetheless possible to introduce it
into the realm of experience? To put it another way: how can human actions have a moral reach, be good or evil? The concept good (gut), says
Schopenhauer, is essentially relative, and denotes the fitness or suitableness
of an object to any definite effort of the will.29 Conversely, evil (bse) signifies the unsuitableness of an object and any effort of the will. Thus an
action is good that is favorable to our will; an action is evil when it thwarts
it; a man is good who affirms his will without denying that of the other
person, evil when he affirms his will while denying that of the other.
However, if evil is the exacerbation of egoism, it is simultaneously that of
suffering. In effect, the violence of the will brings with it the violence of
want and of pain, from which it is unceasingly born, and every evil act is
accompanied by a remorse that, beyond the appearance of the principle
of individuation, recalls to conscience the ontological identity between
torturer and victim, life and passion.
Does conscience not then point the way to virtue and goodness?
Remorse attests that the being in itself of the other person is likewise my
own, and that the true self is not coextensive with its individual representation. Goodness thus supposes the intuitive knowledge of the unity
of will-to-live [du vouloir-vivre], beneath the antagonistic multiplicity
of its singular representations; it resides in what Schopenhauer shall
call, borrowing an expression of Luther, the works of love.30 To be
good is to lovewhile abolishing the representative difference between
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individualsones neighbor as oneself. If all love (, caritas) is

compassion or sympathy,31 then the latter lies at the origin of acts of
goodness and justice, and to be charitable is to substitute the confident
serenity of good conscience (which accompanies the disinterested gesture) for the anxious care for [ones own] self,32 which is characteristic
of egoism.
The works of love would nevertheless be impossible if the knowledge from which they derive remained without influence on the will itself. What effect can this knowledge have on the will? The reduction of
the principle of individuation overwhelms me with all the suffering of
the world, since I no longer distinguish myself from others. If no grief
or trouble is foreign to me, then I could hardly continue to affirm life.
The knowledge of will-to-live [du vouloir-vivre] exerts a sedative action on
it. The intuitive knowledge of the will is its greatest sedative and in this
regard, art is but a preliminary phase of it.
Let us describe this sedation further. The will of the compassionate, loving individual turns about; it no longer affirms its own inner
nature, mirrored in the phenomenon, but denies it.33 The knowledge
of the thing in itself thereby places the phenomenon in contradiction
with itself, turning the will back against itself, and this turning back is the
sole manifestation of the freedom of the will in the phenomenal world
subjected to necessity through the principle of sufficient reason.34 How
then to set in motion this annulment of the will that merges with love? It
cannot take the form of suicide, which, far from annihilating the will-tolive [le vouloir-vivre], concerns but one of its representations; instead, it
takes the form of chastity and more generally, of asceticism. In fact, once
it is established that the body is the objectification of the will, for which
sexuality is the focus, the knowing, incarnate subject can only negate the
will by refusing sexuality. Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step
in asceticism or the denial of will-to-live. It thereby denies the affirmation
of the will which goes beyond the individual life, and thus announces
that the will, whose phenomenon is the body, ceases with the life of this
body.35 The negation of will-to-live, likewise called complete resignation
or holiness,36 is thus charity itselfand the ascetic renunciation of the
world that is, as Schopenhauer says, the greatest, the most important,
and the most significant phenomenon that the world can show,37 frees
knowledge from its subjection to the will, only to make it the sovereign
ruler of nothingness. In starting from his nihilism, Nietzsche writes,
Schopenhauer was perfectly justified in holding compassion for the sole
virtue: it is compassion, indeed, that requires the strongest negation of
the will to live. In allowing the depressed and the weak to continue to
live and to have a posterity, compassion, caritas, crosses out the natural
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laws of development: it accelerates decline, destroys the speciesit denies life.38

This starvation of the will implies the disappearance of the phenomenal world, whose in itself it is. No will: no representation, no
world.39 The annihilation of the will proves to be a will to annihilation,
and having opened his work with the word world, Schopenhauer closes it
with that of nothingness: We freely acknowledge that what remains after
the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will,
assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has
turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and
galaxies, isnothing.40
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The Great Coincidence
The ethics with which Schopenhauers metaphysics concludes is not subordinated to it but rather equaled by it. Indeed, determining the world as
will is ontologically moral. My philosophy, however, says Schopenhauer,
is the only one that grants to morality its complete and entire rights;
for only if the true nature of man is his own will, consequently only if he
is, in the strictest sense, his own work, are his deeds actually entirely his
and attributable to him.1 The moralization of metaphysics is thus the
necessary consequence of the identification of being and the will, of the
determination of being as will. Yet if Schopenhauers moral metaphysics,
or his metaphysical morals, posits that the annihilation of the will is the
summum bonum, or even the only radical cure,2 then by assimilating
the absolute good to nothingness and life to an illness, it is nihilist. Nihilist is, writes Nietzsche, the man who judges that the world, such as it
is, ought not to be, and who judges that the world such as it ought to be,
does not exist. It follows that existence (acting, enduring, willing, feeling) has no sense.3 No sense, that is to say, no value. An answer is thus
given to the question raised at the threshold of the fourth and final book
of the World as Will and Representation.
The morality of resignation agrees, as Schopenhauer insists here,
with Christianity and Buddhism, since we also see how immaterial it is
whether [holiness] proceeds from a theistic or from an atheistic religion.4 At numerous points, Schopenhauer defines his own thought, in
effect, as the philosophical expression of what the logos of the cross proclaimed in a mythic form. The fundamental opposition between the affirmation and the negation of the will represents, in a conceptual fashion,
that which the opposition of Adam and the Christ figures in a symbolic
fashion. Citing Saint Paul, Schopenhauer points out that the Christian
doctrine regards every individual, on the one hand, as identical with
Adam, with the representative of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. On the other
hand, knowledge of the Idea also shows every individual as identical with
the Savior, with the representative of the denial of the will-to-live, and
to this extent as partaking of his self-sacrifice, redeemed by his merit,
and rescued from the bonds of sin and death, i.e., of the world.5 In
thus invoking the Pauline typology, Schopenhauer appeals to the entire
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economy of salvation. Again, the proof lies in the assimilation of the

human will to works, and intuitive knowledge to faith;6 the qualification
of necessity as a natural domain, and of freedom as that of grace;7 the
comparison of eternal justice of the will to that of God himself,8 and the
proclamation of the annihilation of the will as the complete and certain
gospel.9 The metaphysics of the will thus ends by coinciding with the
religion revealed in Christ.
What is the foundation of this coincidence? It could not be sought
elsewhere than in the will itself. In order to do this, let us begin from an
indication furnished by Nietzsche, who notes, in the margin of the work
of Hermann Ldemann devoted to Saint Pauls anthropology, that the
Schopenhauerian doctrine of the will is easily insinuated here, because
we have already been trained in what is essential to itby way of the Jewish concept of a heart with which we are acquainted through Luthers
Bible.10 It is clear that if Schopenhauers will is ultimately none other
than the heart in the Hebraic sense, then the metaphysics founded on
that will shall be confused with the revelation bound up with that heart.
But is this rapprochement, which is well worth interpreting, legitimate?
Before responding by elucidating the biblical concept of heart, three
remarks must be made. (1) The determination of the essence of humanity and of world as will does not have a Greek, but a Judeo-Christian origin. This implies that the determination of Being as will, and with it the
completion of metaphysics, could not be led purely and simply back to
the Greek beginning. (2) With creation being a salutary event, the world
arises from the divine will with which the human will is always in relation.
(3) Schopenhauer did not merely understand the heart in an organic
manner, but also in a moral one. It is, he explains in effect, because man
is will, and the intellect his instrument, that all religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or of the heart,
but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.11
That said, what is the biblical signification of the heart? The Hebrew word leb, which the Septuagint translates by [cardia] or by
[noos], is no doubt the most important one in Old Testament anthropology. It denotes the seat of affects, knowledge, and will, placing
the strongest accent on the latter. The heart is the human being itself
understood against the horizon of the will in relation to God revealed
through his commandments. The heart is the human will enlightened
by the divine will, the instance to which the word of God is addressed
and which, in one way or another, responds to it. We need give but two
examples. In chapter 11 of Ezekiel, God promises a new covenant to the
exiles and says, I will give them one heart and put a new spirit in them; I
will remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give a heart of flesh,
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that they may follow my laws and faithfully observe my rules. Then they
shall be my people and I will be their God. But as for them whose heart
is set upon their detestable things and their abominations I will repay
them for their conductdeclares Adonai Yahweh.12 Clearly, we should
understand by the words heart of stone and heart of flesh mans two
modes of being in regard to God. If having or being a heart of stone is to
proceed against the law, if to have or to be a heart of flesh is to proceed
according to the law, then the heart is really man himself insofar as he
can make up his mind to be for or against God, to know and to obey him,
or fail to know him and disobey him. This concept of heart was taken up
by Christian preaching. Indeed, when Saint Paul writes that if you shall
confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and shall believe in your heart
that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart
one has faith in justice, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,13 the heart always denotes the human will insofar as it can or cannot be commanded by faith, that is, by the knowledge of God in Christ.
Nevertheless it does not seem possible to maintain that, essentially,
Schopenhauers will is the same as the heart in the biblical sense since,
contrary to the latter, the will is always blind. Should we then give up understanding why the metaphysics of the will comes to coincide with the
religion revealed in Christ? By no means. Let us again follow a hint from
Nietzsche who, in the same context, noted the following: the heart as a
Jewish concept, scarcely reasonable, clouded, blinded, hardened, to be
seduced by flattery or its opposite: its functions are affects: the Old Testament attributes the faculty of to the heart: God alone can see into
the heart. The carnal heart: the innards are active in the affects [in den
Affekten]. This corresponds approximately to Schopenhauers will. 14
We must not understand this note from the verses of Ezekiel cited earlier, but once again starting from Saint Paul, since the adjectives that
Nietzsche attributes to the Jewish heart (scarcely reasonable, clouded,
blinded, hardened) qualify the heart of those who live under the
wrath of God, according to the apostle.15 Schopenhauers will thus does
not correspond to a heart able to make up its mind for or against God,
i.e., neutral, but rather to the heart of the sons of Israel who refuse the
divine justice of grace and live according to the flesh, ignoring Christ
and his resurrectional power. Hence it is entirely legitimate to assimilate
the blinded heart of the Jews, who have zeal for God but zeal without
knowledge,16 to the blind will of an atheist metaphysics.
The metaphysics of the will thus ends by coinciding with the religion revealed in Christ, because it comes out of it. Indeed, the metaphysical concept of willand we thereby designate as much Schopenhauers concept as that of his predecessorsdraws its principal traits
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from what Heidegger, citing only the Greek and Latin translations of the
Genesis verse, according to which man was made in the image of God to
dominate his creation, calls, in a singularly restrictive fashion, the anthropology of Christian theology.17 In other words, the determination
of the being and essence of human beings as will inscribes metaphysics
into revelation by inscribing revelation into metaphysics.
This double movement is not peculiar to Schopenhauer, but characterizes the entirety of German Idealism on which it closely depends.
Having explicitly identified the outcome of the Doctrine of Science with
the Johannine gospel, Fichte states in the Initiation to the Blessed Life: yet
it nevertheless remains certain, that we, with our whole age and with all
our philosophical inquiries, are established on and have proceeded from
Christianity; that this Christianity has entered into our whole culture in
the most varied forms; and that, on the whole, we might have been nothing of all that we are, had not this mighty principle gone before us in
Time.18 After having argued in the Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of
Human Freedom that, in the final and highest instance there is no other
being than will, and that the will is the originary being and it is to it
alone that all the predicates of that being are suited: absence of foundation, eternity, independence in regard to time, self-affirmation, Schelling
states clearly that the philosophy of revelation, with which his work comes to
a close, has as its unique goal to conceive the person of Christ, and that
in the highest sense revelation . . . is a revelation of the divine will.19
Finally and above all, Hegel repeats the fundamental thesis according to
which the true must be grasped and expressed not as substance alone but
every bit as much as subject. In light of that, he writes in the last chapter
of his Phenomenology of Spirit devoted to absolute knowing: that which in
religion was content or a form for presenting an other, that is here the Selfs
own act; it is the Notion that connects the content with the Selfs own act.
Indeed, as we see, this notion is the knowledge of the act of Self in itself
as the knowledge of all essence and all existence; the knowledge of this
subject as of the substance and of substance as this knowledge of its act.20
Whatever the differences, then, between the ways Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel conceive philosophy, Christianity, and their interrelationships,
they all fulfill one and the same movement (on the shared ground of the
determination of being as will), whose program and law Leibnizthat
true German situated, according to Nietzsche, between Christianity,
Platonism, and mechanism21sets forth, when he states: I begin as a
philosopher, but I end as a theologian.22
Now, Nietzsche never ceases to refer to German Idealism, understood in this way. As he notes in 1884: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
Feuerbach Straussthis all stinks of theologians and Church Fathers.
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Schopenhauer is rather free of this, one breaths a better air, one even
scents Plato. Kantoafish-heavy-footed [schnrkelhaft-schwerfllig]: we
note that the Greeks have not yet been discovered. Homer and Plato
did not resound in those ears.23 And, one year later: fundamentally, it
was the held-in and long accumulated piety of the Germans that finally
exploded in their philosophy, in a way obscure and uncertain to be sure,
as is all that is German, namely, in pantheistic vapors as in Hegel and
Schelling, qua gnosis; at other times, mystical and world-denying, as in
Schopenhauer: but principally there is a Christian piety and not a pagan one. . .24 These notes call immediately for two remarks: (1) in 1884,
following his conception of the eternal return and the will to power,
Greece designates only that which is not yet Christian but also, and more
uncannily, that which is no longer Christian. (2) In regard to theological
metaphysics and the metaphysical theology of German Idealism, Schopenhauers situation is ambiguous: without being a theologian or a believer properly speaking, he nevertheless participates in Christian piety,
in a word, in the same life prospects. Indeed, if speculative theology is
quite absent from Schopenhauers doctrine, it remains that it is that doctrine that completes the moralization of metaphysics, whether this be
by preaching asceticism, which Schopenhauer associates much too exclusively with Christianity,25 or by appealing to resignation and charity.
Schopenhauers thought attests that Christianitythat is, the sum of corporeal possibilities opened thanks to the resurrection of Christcan be
maintained sub contraria specie, under the cover of atheism, and outside
of any explicit theology. Schopenhauer is thus more cunningly Christian
than were his predecessors. On the basis of his final positions, Nietzsche
will judge that Schopenhauerian nihilism is always and ever the consequence of
the same IDEAL as that which produced CHRISTIAN THEISM.26
What should we understand here by ideal, and in what sense is
Schopenhauer still Christian? When Nietzsche calls the reinforcement,
the thinning out or the denial of life ideals,27 he is aiming at the possibilities that are always, for Schopenhauer, possibilities of the body, since
the latter is the immediate representation of the will-to-live. The affirmation and negation of the first, the body, are thus identical to the affirmation and the negation of the second, the will-to-live. If the affirmation
of the body is confused with sexual practices, then its negation takes the
form of ascesis and of the holiness that together institute a contradiction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, between life and
its highest representation. But what does this mean if not that resignation and charity turn life back against itself? And what is life turned back
against itself, if not the very essence of sickness? The negation of the
will-to-liveor the negation of the body by itselfultimately consists in
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essentially sickening the body that I am. Schopenhauers philosophy is a

transcendental pathology.
In what sense is this pathology Christian? In the penultimate paragraph of the World as Will and Representation, after having compared at
length his own doctrine to Christianity, Schopenhauer concludes: The
doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial
of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory. Accordingly, we should interpret Jesus Christ always in
the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-tolive, but not in the individual, whether according to his mythical history
in the Gospels . . .28 The metaphysics of the will is thus a demythologization of Christianity that, like all demythologization, finds its source in
the kerygma itself.
How does this metaphysics come from the revealed kerygma; better, how can it be found therein? Let us return to Pauls predication
founded on the resurrection of the body. The latter denotes in Saint Paul
the being of man before God; it is understood in Saint Paul as will and,
as we have shown, far from putting an end to the splitting of the body
subject to the law, the resurrection exacerbates its opposition to itself.
The glorious redeemed body is thus more radically sick than is the body
of flesh, and resurrected life is a life that negates and denies life itself.
Having been laid out in a wrongful dimension, that is, in a dimension
in which life is essentially falsified, glory is a sickness and the life eternal
in Christ an eternal pathology.29 By making Christ the representative of
the negation of the will-to-live, Schopenhauer says nothing particularly
different. Yet, this assimilation of Christ to the negation of the will-to-live
obviously supposes that the will could be opposed to itself. And this possibility in turn presupposes the absolute unity of the will. In other words
and to sum up, the coincidence between Schopenhauers metaphysics
and revealed theology would be impossible, lacking the properly philosophical assertion of the absolute unity of the will. Conversely, no critique of the unity of the will can fail to cast into doubt, whether directly
or not, the subordination of philosophy to theology.
As the ultimate figure of philosophy, the metaphysics of the will
nevertheless could not coincide with revelation unless the one and the
other each contained, hidden from view, its possibility. Consequently,
it is not simply a matter of knowing how the metaphysics of the will,
understood in its highest form as absolute idealism, came to assert the
coincidence between revealed religion and philosophy, and to conceive philosophy as religion and the service of God.30 Rather, it is
also a matter of understanding how revelation itself was able to assimilate
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philosophy; how God called philosophy into his own service. Yet, by posing this double question are we not proceeding in a direction opposite
that of Heidegger who, in a dialogue with Hegel, led the theological
character of metaphysics back to the differentiated unfolding of Being
itself? No doubt, and this is the reason why we must attempt to respond
to this double question by interrogating the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics.
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Speculative Theology
In 1927, at the outset of his inquiry into the ontological meaning of the
copula and the utterance, Heidegger cautioned: The problem will make
no further progress as long as logic itself has not been taken back again
into ontology, as long as Hegelwho, in contrast, dissolved ontology into
logicis not comprehended. And this means always that Hegel must be
overcome by radicalizing the way in which the problem is put; and at the
same time he must be appropriated. This overcoming of Hegel is the
intrinsically necessary step in the development of Western philosophy
which must be made for it to remain at all alive. Whether logic can successfully be made into philosophy again we do not know; philosophy
should not prophesy, but then again it should not remain asleep.1 In
saying this, Heidegger justifies a dialogue he had been having with Hegel
and which he had never stopped pursuing more or less openly, more or
less directly. It is therefore worthwhile indicating its source, and this, for
reasons that have nothing to do with some sort of history of philosophy.
Evoking his own path, Heidegger reports that he came to Hegel from
theology, thanks to Carl Braig who made him see the meaning of Schelling and of Hegel for speculative theology, by opposition to any doctrinal
system of Scholasticism. He adds, moreover, This is how the tension
between ontology and speculative theology came into the horizon of my
research.2 The debate with Hegel thus cannot be dissociated from a
confrontation with the combined history of philosophy and theology;
and if the 1957 course on The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics
comes out of a seminar devoted to Hegels Science of Logic, then we can
proceed along with it in an attempt to break the circle in which absolute
knowledge (whose content is that of revealed religion) becomes interwoven with itself.
Heidegger begins by recalling that in order to dialogue with a
thinker, we should agree to speak about the same thing. What then, according to Hegel, is the matter of thinking? It is thinking as such (der Gedanke), thinking that thinks itself and is finally unfolded as absolute Idea.
At the end of the Science of Logic, Hegel in fact writes that the absolute
Ideawhich alone is Being, imperishable life, truth knowing itself, which
is all truth,is the sole object and content of philosophy. After citing
this passage, Heidegger comments: Thus Hegel himself explicitly gives
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to the matter of his thinking that name which is inscribed over the whole
matter of Western thinking, the name: Being.3 But how does Hegel speak
of it? He always does so in a historic fashion, since the Idea is inseparable
from the dialectical process of its speculative self-generation. Thus, the
dialogue with Hegel will not have to concern Being alone, but again and
by the same token its history, since the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of
the Notiondeterminations in the Idea.4
Nevertheless, there could not be dialogue without disagreement,
and Heidegger stands apart from Hegel in a threefold respect. (1) If,
for Hegel, the affair of thinking is the being-thought [ltre-pens] of
beings in the absolute concept; for Heidegger, it is Being inasmuch as
it differs from beings, inasmuch as it distinguishes itself from beings;
thus, difference as difference. (2) If, for Hegel, dialogue with prior
philosophies consists in integrating them as moments within the genesis of the concept, what is at stake there, for Heidegger, is a search
for that which is unthought [limpens ], and from which these philosophies receive their essence. (3) If, for Hegel, the relationship to the
history of philosophy has the quality of a sublation (Aufhebung)5 of its
forms in the knowledge that knows itself absolutely in itself, this relation has for Heidegger the character of a step back that, far from
being a simple change in direction, impresses on thinking an entirely
different movement, since it leads outside what has been thought so
far in philosophy,6 toward what constitutes its source: the ontological
difference.
We could nevertheless not step back outside of the metaphysics
whose absolute recollection Hegel brought about, without having first
taken foot in it, that is, without having described and delineated its fundamental constitution. But how do we reach this point when starting
from a science that presents itself as a circle of circles? To that end, Heidegger resorts to what he calls an expedient, the explanation of the
pages on which the first book of the Science of Logic opens, which is entitled Where Should the Science Begin?7 Hegel answers this question
by setting forth the speculative nature of the philosophical beginning.
What does that mean? After having shown that this beginning, which
could be neither immediate nor mediate, lies in pure Being, this absolute immediacy [that] has equally the character of something absolutely
mediated,8 Hegel asserts that the sciences movement describes a circle,
by virtue of which the beginning is the result and the result the beginning. Heidegger then draws the following conclusion: The beginning
must really be made with the result, since the beginning results from
that result.9
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What then is the last result of the science? It is pure truth;10

truth under the sign of the self [du soi]. This is the reason why, starting
from the Introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel can write that logic
must be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure
thought, and specify: This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own
absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition
of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite
mind.11 Now, Heidegger does not remind us of this determination of
the logic, without which the unfolding of the seminar on the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics nevertheless remains unintelligible.
In fact, immediately after having concluded that it is with the outcome
that we might appropriately begin, Heidegger follows by asserting, with
neither explanation nor justification, that this speculative proposition
has the same sense as the incidental remark, placed between parentheses by Hegel, according to which God has the absolutely undisputed
right that the beginning be made with him.12 Yet to identify the outcome
of the scienceas its true beginningwith God himself, one would first
have had to assimilate God to the absolute truth; one would have had to
define the content of the logic as the presentation of God, such as he is
eternally in himself.
What are the motives guiding this omission, where the argumentation falls short? The science that begins with God is the science of God:
theology. Heidegger then observes, This name speaks here in its late
signification. Consequently, theology is the expression of representative thought about God. [theologos], [theologia] denote
firstly mytho-poetic speech about the gods, with no relation to dogmatics
or to ecclesiastical doctrine.13 Now this remark calls for two points. (1)
Heidegger distinguishes two acceptations of the word theology. According
to onethe initial onetheology is the fable about the gods; according
to the otherthe late senseit is the science of God. How, then, do we
pass from the first, the Greek, to the second, or Hegelian; or again, how
has God decreased or diminished the gods? (2) Heidegger seems to consider that Hegels theology comes out of representation alone; that it is a
theology of understanding. Such is not the case, however, since the logic
as speculative philosophy is a speculative theology. Yet, to recognize that
logic is speculative theology14 entails knowing that the relation in which
these three leading grades of thought, or of the logical Idea is shown in
the manner in which God, who is truth, is known to us only in his truth,
that is, as absolute spirit, and only to the degree to which we recognize
simultaneously as non-true the world created by God, i.e., nature and the
finite spiritnon-true in their difference with God.15 But conversely, to
hold Hegels trinitarian theology as representative amounts to separating
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what he united absolutely: revealed religion and philosophy. By lowering

speculative theology to the level of a theology of understanding, or by
omitting to specify that the God by which the science should begin is the
creator of nature and finite spirit (which amounts to the same thing),
Heidegger obliterates the Christian identity of Hegels theology.
Why is speculative logicwhich includes traditional logic and
metaphysicsa theology? Because, Heidegger responds, from the time
of the Greeks, metaphysics is an ontology and a theology. If this qualification appeared discreetly in What Is Metaphysics?, it is explicitly referenced
in the text that, twenty years later, forms the new introduction to the
inaugural lecture of 1929. In applying itself to the task of thinking the
being or entity as such, according to its most general characteristics and
in the sense of the supreme divine existent, metaphysics since Aristotle
is ontology and theology. This onto-theo-logical essence of metaphysics
could have no other origin than the way in which the being of the entity unfolds. The onto-theo-logical character of metaphysics thus does
not come from its absorption by Christian theology, but rather from the
truth of Being itself. Heidegger summarizes his claim as follows: It was
this unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit) of beings that first provided the
possibility for Christian theology to take possession of Greek philosophywhether for better or for worse may be decided by theologians on
the basis of their experience of what is Christian, in pondering what is
written in the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians:
[oukh emoranen ten sophan tou kosmou]: Has not God let the wisdom of this world become foolishness?
(I Corinthians 1:20). The [wisdom of this world], however, is that which, according to 1:22, the , the Greeks
seek. Aristotle even calls [prote philosophia], philosophy
proper, quite explicitly [dzetoumne], that which is sought after.
Will Christian theology one day resolve to take seriously the word of the
apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?16
But is philosophy indeed folly for Christian faith? Nothing could be
less certain. On the one hand, it is already folly for itself [mana]
provides access to being; on the other hand and above all, philosophy
is not confused with what Saint Paul calls the wisdom of the world. In
fact, to be able to assimilate philosophy to the wisdom of the world, as
Heidegger does, we would have to assume that the Pauline concept of
[kosmos], world, is ontologically identical to that of Aristotle. Or
again, we would have to suppose that what Saint Paul understands by the
Greeks coincides with what Heidegger grasps under this name, within
the horizon of the question of Being. Neither of these two presuppositions is admissible: (1) for example, when Aristotle points out that all
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men have some conception of the nature of the gods, and all who believe
in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or Greek, agree in allotting the highest place to the deity,17 the Greeks are defined in opposition to the Barbarians. However, when Saint Paul speaks of the Greeks,
in his first Letter to the Corinthians (to which Heidegger is referring), it
is in order to associate Greeks with Jews, before the Christians, since he
also writes at that point: whereas the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks
seek wisdom, we preach a crucified Christ, which is a scandal for the
Jews and a folly for the nations, [we preach] a Christ that is the power of
God and wisdom of God for the summoned, whether Jews or Greeks.18
(2) The Pauline concept of the world is at least as ontologically distinct
from Aristotles concept as an existential can be distinct from a category.
Heidegger had himself insisted on this, noting that it is no accident,
however, that in connection with the new ontic understanding of existence that irrupted in Christianity the relation between ksmos and human
Dasein, and thereby the concept of world in general, became sharper and
clearer. The relation is experienced in such an originary manner that ksmos now comes to be used directly as a term for a particular fundamental
kind of human existence. Ksmos houtos in Saint Paul (I Corinthians and
Galatians) means not only and not primarily the state of the cosmic,
but the state and situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes
toward the cosmos, his esteem for things. Ksmos means being human in
the manner of a sentiment that has turned away from God (he sopha tou
kosmou). Ksmos houtos refers to human Dasein in a particular historical
existence, distinguished from another one that has already dawned (aion
ho mellon).19 Far from being a synonym of philosophy, the expression
wisdom of the world has a theological signification and denotes the
being of man separated from God, opposed to God, as a sinner.
Within the context of a definition of the onto-theo-logical essence
of metaphysics, why does Heidegger so misinterpret the apostolic word,
to which he gave its true sense albeit in a wholly different context? The
assimilation of philosophy to the wisdom of the world has for its consequence to make philosophy into folly. What does this qualification cover?
In 1935, Heidegger already said that a Christian philosophy was but a
sideroxylon, an iron-wood, and folly for the originary Christian faith.
Once again, in 1940, he wrote: a Christian philosophy surpasses in its
absurdity the squaring of the circle. The square and the circle agree at
least as spatial figures, while there is an abyssal difference between Christian faith and philosophy. Even if we were to say that the truth is taught
in the one as in the other, it remains the case that what is called truth
here differs entirely from the one to the other.20 Applied to philosophy,
the epithet folly thus denotes the abyss that, according to Heidegger,
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stretches between metaphysics and the faith on which Christian theology

is founded.
According to Heidegger, we saidalthough not according to Hegel, for whom philosophy is Christian, since it simply conceives the absolute essence, as given and represented in manifest or revealed religion.21
Consequently, the uncrossable distance that Heidegger sets between
metaphysics and Christian faith could not fail to pose serious difficulties
for reading Hegel and, beyond him, for characterizing the metaphysics that came out of his thought. To bring these difficulties to light, we
have only to return to the conference on The Onto-theo-logical Constitution
of Metaphysics, at the very point where we interrupted our reading of it.
Immediately upon having referred to the Introduction to What Is Metaphysics? Heidegger states: But it would be rash to assert that metaphysics is theology because it is ontology. One would say first: Metaphysics is
theo logy, a statement about god, because the god enters into philosophy.
Thus the question about the onto-theological character of metaphysics is
sharpened to the question: How does the God enter into philosophy, not
just modern philosophy, but philosophy as such?22
Let us pause a moment to consider this question, whose repetition
marks the entirety of the conference we are studying. (1) The question
as such is prepared by a consideration according to which metaphysics
is a theology because the god entered into it. Is the onto-theo-logical
constitution of metaphysics then the consequence of some divine initiative? One might think so, since the god is in the grammatical sense
the subject of the interrogative statement. (2) Heidegger does not ask,
How does God enter? but, How does the god enter into metaphysics?
Now, to say that metaphysics is a discourse on God is not the same as
saying that it is a discourse on the god. The definite article changes absolutely everything here, in German or in French.23 When Heidegger
says the god, he is translating literally ho theos in its Homeric, Platonic,
or Aristotelian senses. But when Hegel names God, without any article,
he is speaking of the God revealed in Christ, whose mode of being is
wholly other than that of a Greek god.24 These remarks are not without
implications, because in questioning the entire history of philosophy
with a particular regard to Hegel,25 Heidegger necessarily sets himself
the task of comprehending how and why philosophy comes to an end
and is fulfilled, in coinciding with the manifest Christian religion. In
relation to Hegel and to all that which he takes on and sublates [assure
et assume la relve], it is not the eruption of the god in metaphysics that
must be accounted for, but rather that of God. Indeed, according as
the name god is or is not preceded by the definite article, its identity
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changes and with that, too, the problem of the theological character of
metaphysics.
Yet it is not enough to formulate a question to be able to answer it,
since the same terms can take several meanings. Let us therefore specify
the way in which Heidegger understands it. He writes: we can properly
think through the question, How does the god enter into philosophy?,
only when that to which the god is to come has become sufficiently clear:
that is, philosophy itself. As long as we search through the history of philosophy merely historically, we shall find everywhere that the god has
entered into it. But assuming that philosophy, as thinking, is the free
and spontaneous self-involvement with beings as such, then the god can
come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and
by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the god enters
into it. The question, How does the god enter into philosophy? leads
back to the question, What is the origin of the onto-theological essential
constitution of metaphysics? and, Heidegger adds, to accept this kind
of question means to accomplish the step back.26
Can we really accept this final expression of the question, which
merges with the step back and therefore with Heideggers entire enterprise? Nothing would be less clear; for, in passing from the first question to its second formulation, Heidegger initiates a curious reversal.
No longer is it a matter how the god entered into philosophy, but rather
how philosophy arranged its entry. The grammatical subject of the interrogative statement is no longer the god but philosophy. Its verb is no
longer conjugated in the indicative, but in some sense in the imperative.
Hence, the god is deprived of any initiative and after substituting for
the God revealed in Christ (Hegel will say that he is the axis on which
the History of the World turns)27 an anonymous and religiously indeterminate god, Heidegger will definitively reduce its divinity and its power,
since he sequesters it in a compulsory residence and subjects it to the
metaphysical order.
If the question of knowing how the god entered into philosophy
does not come down to the question of the origin of the onto-theo-logical
constitution of metaphysics, then is it possible to respond to the first
question without being led back to the second, that is, ultimately, to the
truth of Being itself? It is, emphatically; but on two conditions: (1) when
turned toward Hegels thought, our gaze is turned ipso facto toward God
and not toward the god. The subject of the question should therefore
be God revealed in Christ. (2) This God could not, however, take a place
hitherto occupied by a Greek god, as their respective modes of being
differ so greatly. As no metaphysical site is neutral, metaphysically, and as
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philosophy can offer to God only a site that conforms ontologically with
what philosophy israther than with what God isit proves impossible
to comprehend the eruption of God within philosophy starting from
philosophy itself. On the contrary, we should attempt to grasp how God
insinuated himself into metaphysics, and why revelation, which is not a
philosophical event, was nonetheless an event for philosophy.
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The Prophetic Translation
How, and why, did God consent to his philosophical investiture? First,
it was necessaryto take up, in part, an expression of Nietzschethat
he learn Greek. It was on the instigationor so goes the legendof a
king of the Lagide dynasty, Ptolemy II Philadelphus or Ptolemy Soter,
and under the influence of Demetrius of Phaler, that the Greek translation of the Torah was undertaken in Alexandria in the 3rd century
b.c.e. The importance of this resists comparison to any other translation, as it will found Europe as a spiritual form. The Alexandrian version of the Pentateuch Judaized the koine even more than the latter
Hellenized Judaism.1 It was early on taken as an inspired text, as attested by the account provided by Philo. The latter was a contemporary
of Christ and according to Hegel, Philo was the first [thinker] in whom
we see appearing the transformation of universal consciousness into a
philosophical consciousness.2 In his The Life of Moses, Philo recounts that
Ptolemy Philadelphus, seized with passion and fondness for our legislation, decided to have it translated into Greek. He thus demanded of the
high priest and the king of the Jews that they choose translators for him.
Now, the king, having reckoned that it was not outside divine design
that the Alexandrian regent be impassioned by such an undertaking,
drew up the list of those Hebrews who, besides their Jewish education,
had also received a Greek one. Having arrived in Alexandria, and after
having been questioned by Ptolemy, the Septuagint withdrew to the Isle
of Pharos and prophesied as though God had taken possession of their
spirits, not each one with different words, but all in the same words and
the same turns of phrase; each one as though under dictation by an invisible prompter.3 Moreover, Philo points out that each year, a festival
and public eulogy are celebrated on the Ile of Pharos . . . to venerate the
place where this translation cast its first rays of light, and to thank God
for this ancient blessing, which is ever reborn.4 Now, this legend, which
is echoed by the Talmud,5 implies that, by virtue of its inspired character,
the Septuagint translation amounts to an event in holy history, and that
God had therefore spontaneously learned Greek.
What, however, is meant by the inspiration of a translation? Is
it inspired solely by virtue of what it translates, or likewise because it
is translating? Is the Septuagint a prophetic translation, or simply the
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translation of prophecies? Did God himself speak Greek, or was his original speech just humanly translated from Hebrew into Greek? Following
Origen, Saint Augustine studied this question in book 18 of The City of
God. Upon having recalled the history of the translation by the Septuagint, and against Saint Jerome who proclaimed the Hebrew text to be the
only inspired one, Saint Augustine justifies in this way the divine authority of the Greek version: If therefore, as is right, we look for nothing in
the Scriptures but what the Holy Spirit has said by the mouth of men,
we can conclude that whatever is in the Hebrew and not in the Greek,
the Spirit of God wished to say through the prophets and not through
the translators. But whatever is in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew,
the same Spirit preferred to say through the translators, thus showing
that both were prophets. In the same way he said one thing by Isaiah,
another by Jeremiah, another by this prophet and another by that, as his
pleasure was. Whatever is found among both, the one and the selfsame
Spirit wished to say by both. The prophets came first, the prophetic translators followed after. As there was one Spirit of peace in prophets who
spoke the truth in harmony, so one and the selfsame Spirit was evident
in those who without any connivance arrived at a completely identical
translation.6
Saint Augustine thus attributes to the Septuagint translation
which, we note in passing, translated only the Pentateuch and was not
responsible for the Greek version of the other books of the Hebrew
canona divine authority, because the divine spirit is its true author.
As he had already done in other circumstances and invariably did over
the course of Israels history, God endowed his translators with prophetic charisma. He rephrased his word to address the Hellenistic
world and, after having been that of the Jews of the Diaspora, the Bible
of Alexandria became the original and canonical form of the Old Testament for the early church as for all of patristic theology up to the
fourth century. This work, which Saint Paul named the old covenant,
must therefore be considered as the final realization of the Mosaic message to the nations prior to the Pentecost.7 This is the same Pentecost
that, Hegel says, inaugurates the possibility of recounting, that is, of
comprehending, the history of Christ.8 God thus learned Greek before
sending his Son, and the Hellenization of the law is indissociable from
the Christian revelation. It is only with regard to this revelation, then,
that the question of how God entered into philosophy should ultimately be posed.
If God took up a place in metaphysics, then that metaphysics is inscribed in revelation. Yet in that case, where and how does revelation
which must always also be understood relative to the addressees that we
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areopen itself to philosophy? Conjoining the law with the Gospel,

Saint Paul founded the entire economy of salvation on the resurrection of bodies. Now, we should recall that in Pauline theology, the term
body has at least two senses. At times it denotes, in a sense more Jewish than Greek, the very being of man before God, and is conceived as a
plurality of wills, united or disunited according to whether they obey or
disobey the divine will. At other times and in a sense more Greek than
Jewish, body denotes a form holding together the organs at humans
commanda physical form, since it is capable of being filled with earthly
or celestial material. Now the first of these concepts founds the second;
for, if it is legitimate to describe the body in terms of organs, then it is
still more legitimate to refer these to their respective capacities, that is, to
the forces or wills that de jure precede them. Stated differently, the body
I have could only be a modification of the body that I am.
This much said, we are henceforth in a position to grasp how God
entered into philosophy. Hellenized through the translation of the Septuagint, who proclaimed the message of Israel before the nations, revelation opens itself to metaphysics when Saint Paul, the apostle inspired by
the spirit, endeavors to establish for the Greeks of Corinth the possibility
of the resurrection by describing indirectly the body of glory. In fact,
proceeding exclusively on the basis of the physical concept of the body,
Saint Paul could not help but identify the mystery of the resurrection
with a metaphysical event. In a word, God could not exert his resurrective
powerwhich is all his power and his all-powerfulnessupon a body understood pneumatically as a physical form, without its having initially become metaphysical. It was thus quite spontaneously that God consented
to his philosophical investiture, and that which we call the Christianization of philosophy was carried out on the body. There is little here that
should surprise us, moreover, from the moment the incarnation of God
is the absolute novelty of the revealed religion, a wonder that, as Hegel
says, absolutely contradicts both representation and understanding,9
since it belongs, on the one hand, to that mystery of God called the Trinity, a mystery whose content is speculative, and on the other hand, since
the whole range of speculation is for [the understanding] a mystery.10
Let us return now to the point at which we interrupted Heideggers
lecture. Having led the question, How did the god enter into philosophy?
back to the question, What is the essential origin of the onto-theo-logical
constitution of metaphysics?a reformulation that, we repeat, is one with
the stepping outside of metaphysicsHeidegger ventures a response. He
begins by observing that Hegel does not call speculative philosophy, that
is, philosophy proper, onto-theo-logy, but rather Science of Logic. 11 In
fact, already in the Preface to the first edition, Hegel indicates that the
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science of logic . . . constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative

philosophy.12 It goes without saying that this metaphysics differs from
the former metaphysics (metaphysica generalis, or ontologia and metaphysica
specialis), which henceforth comes out of the objective logic alone.13 Now,
that implies first that speculative logic be distinguished from the logic
Kant held to be closed and completedthe logic of understanding
which logic, having undergone no changes since Aristotle, was in need
of a total reconstruction.14 This implies further, and above all, that the
[logos] to which the speculative logic refers should not be understood exclusively as the [hen panta] of Heraclitus. In effect, as
the speculative logic is a speculative theology, and the latter a trinitarian
theology, the [logos] must likewise have a Christian sense therein
and more specifically, a Johannine sense. If such were not the case, then
Hegel could not define the content of logic as the presentation of God
in his eternal essence before the creation. Nor could he say of the logic
what Christ said, according to Saint John, of the spiritnamely, that it
leads . . . into all truth.15
How does Heidegger interpret Hegels designation of metaphysics as logic? Is it simply because the affair of thought is, according to
Hegel, thinking itself, and that thinking itself always passes (or practically always) for the theme of logic itself? Certainly. But it is just as incontestable that Hegel, faithful to tradition, sees the matter of thinking
in beings as such and as a whole, in the movement of Being from its
emptiness to its developed fullness.16 The problem is then one of knowing why Being [ltre] should be manifested as thought. This is only
possible if, on the one hand, Being is previously marked out as ground
(Grund), while, on the other hand, the thinking that is turned toward the
ground is foundation. Given that the ground, the ratio by their essential
origin are the , in the sense of the gathering of beings and letting
<Q>You asked for a
them be (des versammelnden Vorliegenlassens). [Given that they] are the
rough breathing mark
[Hen Panta], Heidegger can conclude that for Hegel metaphysics

on E in the How does
is
a
logic,
because Being remains the matter of thinking; while Being,
. Please make sure its
ever
since
the
early days when it became unconcealed in the character
as it should be.
of , the ground that grounds, claims thinkingthe accounting of
the groundfor itself.17
The determination of the Being of beings as , as the ground
that grounds, sets a double orientation on thinking. Thinking must consider beings as such, according to their universal aspects, and it must
simultaneously consider supreme and ultimate existent. Indeed, understood as the foundation of beings (that is, on the basis of beings), the
Being [ltre] that founds every being [tout tant] as such cannot fail to
appear, to beings, as supreme and ultimate; in short, as the supreme and
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ultimate being [ltant]. If, in thinking the being or entity as such, as well
as the supreme being [ltant comme tel et ltant suprme], metaphysics is an
ontology and a theology, this is above all because metaphysics is a logic.
Metaphysics responds to Being as , and is accordingly in its basic
characteristics everywhere logic, but a logic that thinks of the Being of
beings, and thus the logic which is determined by what differs in the difference: onto-theo-logic.18 The unity of the onto-theo-logical makeup of
metaphysics thus rests in logic, and the three terms that compose the
epithet onto-theo-logy do not have the same weight; far from it indeed.
Having thus restored to the name of logic its essential signification, which includes also the title used by Hegel,19 Heidegger returns
to the guiding question: How did the god enter philosophy? He will now
give it the beginnings of a response. From the moment that Being [ltre]
appears as ground, the affair of thinking must be the first ground, or
[prote arche ]. The original matter of thinking [die ursprngliche Sache] presents itself as the first cause [die Ur-Sache], the causa prima
that corresponds to the reason-giving path back to the ultima ratio, the final accounting. The Being of beings is represented fundamentally, in the
sense of the ground, only as causa sui. This is the metaphysical concept of
God. Metaphysics must think in the direction of the god because the matter of thinking is Being; but Being is in being as ground in diverse ways:
as , as [hupokeimenon], as substance, as subject.20
Before examining in what respect this amounts to a merely initial
response, we should make the following three observations. (1) Heidegger characterizes the metaphysical concept of god on the basis of the
Greek determination of Being as . Given this, why does that conceptwhich holds for all of metaphysics as suchreceive a Latin name?
Is it possible, for example, to think the Aristotelian god as causa sui? The
question is all the more serious that the translation of Greek into Latin
is, as we have seen, the mutation in the essence of truth and Being, which
constitutes the very event (Ereignis) of history, and to think in Latin that
which is Greek comes down to Christianizing it, again according to Heidegger.21 In abstaining from justifying the Latin of the epithet he attributes to the metaphysical concept of god (causa sui), has Heidegger not
neglected the difficulty of understanding how a Greek god (whose being
can only be thought on the basis of [ale theia]) could give way
to the revealed God (who does not emerge from )? We will not
solve the problem by invoking here what the Christ says of himself: ego
eimi he hodos kai he aletheia kai he tzoe , I am the way and the truth and the
lifesince, according to Heidegger, only the tones of this speech are
still Greek.22 (2) If it is appropriate in all things to consider only their
higher degrees, then should we think that the title causa sui denotes
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par excellence the metaphysical concept of god? This would not be without implications, since the determination of god as causa sui comes from
Descartes, who not only counted himself among the Christian philosophers,23 but even attempted to explain Eucharistic transubstantiation in
light of his own principles. In other words, the causa sui is, in Descartes
view, the philosophical concept of the God of the faith. Is it not the case,
then, that taking the concept of causa sui as the metaphysical concept
for god par excellence amounts to holding, as quietly as necessarily, the
Christian God to be the metaphysical god par excellence? (3) We must
pay constant attention here to Hegel, who conceives God as spirit, that
is to say, as the differentiation of self by self, as position and sublation of
its other, as the trinitarian God containing difference in himself, God
become man, God revealing himself.24 The same Hegel reserves the
title of causa sui to what he likewise names the metaphysical concept
of god.25 The adjective metaphysical clearly does not have the same
sense throughout. If, for Hegel, it is opposed to speculative, according
to Heidegger it qualifies what is marked by the forgetting of the difference as such. Consequently, Heidegger could not lead Hegels Christian
God back to a metaphysics forgetful of Being, without having first shown
that the triune God is indeed that of onto-theology as such, orto put it
differentlythat the Greek is retroactively inscribed in the Johannine . This at least was Hegels thought when, he recalls that it was
the work of Jewish sages and of the profound thinkers of Alexandria,
notably Philo, to have united the abstract forms of the concrete, as received from Plato and Aristotle, with their representation of the infinite,
and to have recognized God according to the more concrete concept of
the spirit [united] with the determination of the , Hegel thereupon adds that the provenance of a thing is perfectly indifferent, the
only question is, is it true in itself and for itself? He says all this ultimately
to assert that the profound speculative is intimately entwined with the
appearance of Christ himself. And, that there be no misunderstanding,
Hegel specifies that already in John (at the beginning was the logos and
the logos was with God and God was the logos), we see the beginning of
a deeper apprehension: the most profound thought (Gedanke) is united
with the figure of Christ, with the historical, with the external . . .26
Heidegger obviously did not overlook the essentially Christian
character of Hegels logos. Up to the time of Hegel, he writes in 1940,
modern metaphysics remains the interpretation of beings as such; remains ontology, the logos of which is experienced in a Christian theological way as creative reason, grounded in absolute spirit (onto-theology). And, in 1969, he will again qualify Hegels dialectical thought
as Christian-theological-metaphysics.27 However, it is doubtless in the
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193031 course on the Phenomenology of Spirit that we find the most important text in this regard, insofar as it clearly brings out the problem
that Heideggers concept of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics raisesfrom the moment it would be essentially (which does
not mean exclusively) related to Hegel. Heidegger shows there that the
speculative interpretation of Being is grounded in such a way that the
actual being [Seiendes] is the absolute . It is from the being [Sein] of
the absolute that all beings and the are determined.28 Absolute
knowledge, which is ultimately to say, the science of logic, is thus indeed
an onto-theo-logy. But the essence of the god in question is that which
ultimately presents itself to the specifically Christian consciousness of
God, and more precisely, in the form into which it passed through Christian theology and above all through the doctrine of the Trinitythat
dogma of Christian theology that remains unthinkable without the Ancient metaphysics.29 If the god of Hegels onto-theo-logy is that of revelation, and though the Trinity would nevertheless be unthinkable (yet
what does unthinkable mean here?) without the ancient metaphysics
from which it did not, in fact, originate, then the debate with Hegel and
with the entire history of philosophy inevitably becomes the most central thrust of the problem of being. The logical is theological, and this
theo-logical logos is the of the , whereby the term logical means
at the same time speculative-dialectical, proceeding in the three steps
of mediation.30 This, Heidegger recognizes. Yet, how is it possible to
carry out (and herein lies the whole problem raised by the concept of
an onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics) simultaneously a debate with Greek metaphysics and with Christian theology, without having
previously legitimated this at the same time and this and, whether by
leading the Christian God (what is also to say the God of Israel) back
to [ale theia], or conversely by explaining how the God of Israel
erupted into metaphysics forever to change and to alter its sense. As we
have seen, the first path [leading the Christian God to ] is impracticable. Moreover, Heidegger never pursued the second one. And, if one
were to object that the debate concerns only the , then we would
respond that, for Hegel, the Johannine (which, according to Heidegger, is not Greek and, like the Pentateuch of the Septuagint, is nonGreek in Greek) sublated that of Heraclitus and of Aristotleand, ever
according to HegelChristology arises from the affair of thinking.31
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Zeus or Christ
Even in setting aside the difficulties intrinsic to it, the determination of

the metaphysical concept of god as causa sui is insufficient to explaining
how the god was introduced into philosophy. Since philosophy is not just
a theology but also ontology, and since it is ontology because it is a theology (and vice versa), the unity of its constitution, which should preside
over the metaphysical integration of the god, could not be explained
starting from separate terms, where one of these terms was independent
of the other. The question of knowing how the god entered into philosophy can therefore not be answered until we have thought the unity
from which proceeds the differentiation of ontology and theology. And
how could we think the unity of these two disciplines without returning to what is being questioned there: the Being of beings, according
to what, in it, is universal (ontology), and to what, is supreme (theology). If the essential constitution of metaphysics is based on the unity of
the being as such [the god] in its universality and supremacy,1 then we
must attempt to grasp how this conjunction springs from the difference
between Being and beings.
Being is the being of a being; that is, it is the being that is a being,
an entity.2 In the latter statement the is has a transitive sense that means
that Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings.3 One must not understand this passage as though Being left its site
to go rejoin an entity from which it would have been originally separated.
Being makes its transition to a being or entity by surpassing that entity. It
crops up, arises, and arrives at what it discloses, like disclosure itself and,
in this arriving, covers itself in being-unconcealed: it is a being. Being
shows itself as the unconcealing overwhelming. Beings as such appear
in the manner of the arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness [Unverborgenheit].4 Being (the disclosing occurrence or arrival) and
a being (the arrival covering itself) therefore unfold on the basis of the
passage; that is, from the movement of the difference as difference,
which is a movement comparable to no other, as it is difference itself
and as it is a movement that Heidegger attempted indefatigably to restore,
by making it visible. Hence, these differents (Being and beings, entities)5
differ on the basis of the difference (Unterschied) that is the dimension
itself (Unter-Schied) of their differentiation.6 This dimension, which ac118
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cords to the one as to the other the disclosing occurrence and the arrival
re-covering itself (or again, that regulates the controversy between Being
and the existent), is the perdurance of the two in unconcealing-keeping
in concealment [der entbergend-bergende Austrag].7 And this is Being itself,
so far as it is thought starting from the difference.
If this completion of the stepping-back is necessary to understanding the way in which the god has entered into philosophy, it is nevertheless not sufficient to that end. Indeed, the word Being [tre] has been
taken here in its most universal and most indeterminate sense. Now, in
speaking this way, we represent Being in a way in which It, Being, never
gives itself.8 In order to bring out what it is that makes it impossible to
represent Being as a universal for every being, Heidegger turns back to
Hegel: Someone wants to buy fruit in a store. He asks for fruit. He is
offered apples and pears, he is offered peaches, cherries, grapes. But
he rejects all that is offered. He absolutely wants to have fruit. What was
offered to him in every instance is fruit and yet, it turns out, fruit cannot be bought.9 Heidegger does not tell us the context of this Hegelian
fable. Yet that context is not unrelated to his own remarks. Hegel is there
discussing the relationship between philosophies and philosophy, and
therefore the history of philosophy. To whomever takes each philosophy
for a philosophy, and not for philosophy; whoever consequently takes
the universal in a formal fashion, setting it alongside the particular, and
thereby making it ipso facto something particular, Hegel will object: just
as cherries are fruit, the many philosophies are philosophy. In a word, to
wish to buy fruit and not apples, pears, etc., is to think in a representative
manner but not in a speculative one. The Hegelian fable is thus destined
to illustrate the manner of thinking of those who do not comprehend
that the various philosophies are but different degrees of the development of the Idea, the various moments of a single philosophy whose millenary overseer is the sole living spirit. This is so much the case that the
last philosophy in time is the result of the all preceding philosophies, and
it must therefore contain the principles of them all; this is why once it is
philosophy, it is also the most developed, the richest, and the most concrete.10 In other words, the meaning that Hegel attributes to this fable
assumes that speculative philosophy would be the presence, or parousia,
of the absolute: a speculative theology.
Heidegger draws the following lesson from the impossibility of representing the universal outside the particular, and thus, from the difficulty of thinking the universal itself (i.e., of thinking the speculative concept). He writes, it is still infinitely more impossible to represent Being
as the general characteristic of particular beings. There is Being only in
this or that particular historic character: , , , , ,
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Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the

Will to Will.11 Being thus only shows itself under the stamp or trace
of an age; its moment of being given is essentially epochal. This means
that Being is, in a sense, itself the light under which it offers itself. What,
then, is the unity that crosses the different ages of Being, if the latter
are lined up on the counter of historical representational thinking?12
In other words, how does Heidegger characterize the unity of the history of Being, the moment that it is no longer possible to conceive the
history of philosophy, in Hegels way, as the dialectical process of the
speculative self-engendering of Idea? If only the unconcealing-keeping
concealed perdurance is common to the various ages of Being, since it
is starting from this that Being and beings unfold, it is at the same time
that which bestows its character of unity or destiny upon the history of
Being. Heidegger states this very clearly, without underestimating its difficulty: perhaps this elucidation (Errterung) of the difference between
Being and a being in the regulation (Austrag) qua foregoing site (Vorort)
of its essence, allows something general (etwas Durchgngiges) to appear,
which crosses through the destiny of Being from its beginning up to its
completion. It is nonetheless difficult to say how this generality should be
thought, if it is neither a universal that holds true for all cases, nor a law
guaranteeing the necessity of a process in the sense of the dialectic.13
These considerations about the epochal character of Being should
allow us to grasp how the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics arises from the difference; that is, from the unconcealing-concealing
perdurance. If, on the one hand, the onto-theo-logical constitution of
metaphysics rests on the Being of beings, in function of what it has that
is universal and supremewhile, on the other hand, this Being never
gives itself except under the stamp of an epochthen it is in light of
one of these two that we must necessarily describe the way in which
the onto-theo-logical constitution draws its source from difference qua
unconcealing-concealing perdurance. What then is the epochal stamp
from which it is possible to return to the source of the onto-theo-logical
constitution?
Since it is a matter of determining the constitution of metaphysics
as such, should we not proceed from the initial stamp, from what was
preceded by none other and was first named ? This is not, however,
the path followed by Heidegger. In order to facilitate our gaze upon
the origin of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, he turns
toward Being as it is given beneath the stamp of the . Why? Here,
Heidegger provides only an ancillary justification, but it is quite clear that
his decision is dictated by the particular concern for Hegel that must accompany his stepping-back. To put it otherwise: in turning toward Being
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under the stamp of the , Heidegger is turning back toward The

Science of Logic. But then, should he not explain how God, and not the
god, entered into metaphysics?
If the has the sense of the gathering and letting be of beings (des versammelnden Vorliegenlassens) and of the ground, then under its
stamp Being shows itself as the gathering of beings and the foundation
of that to which it happens, and to which it arrives: a being, and it appears as founded, that is, so grounded and so generated, [that] it in turn
grounds in its own way, that is, it effects, it causes.14 But what is it that the
being founds or causes? Let us return to the unconcealing-concealing
perdurance, which differentiates Being and beings all the while referring the one to the other. Under the stamp of the , the difference
unfolds in such a way that Being founds the being or entity, but in its
own way the being founds Being. In effect, grounding itself appears
within the clearing of perdurance as something that is.15 In a word, the
founding appears as a being and, as such, it must in its turn be founded.
However, how could this founding, which is Being itself, be founded, if
not by the being itself? And how could the being found the Being [ltre]
that appears as a being [ltant], without itself being the superlative being
that founds all other beings? The original affair of thinking thus presents
itself as the first cause, and the founding as a foundation in reason.16
How is it then that this supreme being received the name god? This
could only have come from the itself, in the sense of the gathering
of what unifies, in the sense of the [hen panta; one-all]. In effect, the same , as the gathering of what unifies, is the [One].
This , however, is twofold. For one thing, it is the unifying One in the
sense of what is everywhere primal and thus most universal; and at the
same time it is the unifying One in the sense of the All-Highest (Zeus).17
What does this mention of Zeus mean? Zeus, the only god whose name
is pronounced in the entire lecture on the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics? It echoes Heraclitus, according to whom the One
who alone is wise is not ready, and yet is ready to be named Zeus. What
is the meaning of this speech? If the is the Being of every being,
the setting-into-presence (Anwesenlassen) of all that is present (Anwesenden), then it is not itself a being. Yet Zeus, who is the supreme present
(das hchste Anwesende) . . . remains, in an exceptional manner, assigned
to presence (Anwesen).18 He is not, therefore, himself the unifying-one.
Under what relation, then, could the latter receive the name of Zeus despite this? The response is already contained in what was just said. If the
is not understood, based on itself, as the , if it appears on the
contrary as , then, and only then, will the entirety of present things
show itself, under the government of the highest thing present, as an
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<Q>You asked for a

rough breathing mark
on E in the How is it
. Please make sure its
as it should be. There
are two other capped
instances of this word in
the book that you didnt
mention. I didnt add
the diacritic for those;
please mark them if we
should.
S HADOW
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all under this one [comme un tout sous cet un]. Under the highest among
them, the all of present things is the qua Zeus.19 In other words, when
the difference itself is taken into view or, rather, when Being is thought
starting from difference, then the unifying-one cannot receive the name
of Zeus. But when the difference has withdrawn before that to which
it gives rise, then the unifying-one does indeed take the name of Zeus.
Metaphysics can thus be defined henceforth as a logic that thinks of the
Being of beings, and thus the logic which is determined by what differs
in the difference: an onto-theo-logic.20
This definition would, however, be quite simply impossible if Zeus
could not appear as the supreme present, and if he did not have the
same provenance as presence and Being themselves, namely as
[ale theia].21 Consequently, and with regard to Hegels onto-theo-logic,
whose essential origin Heidegger is attempting to elucidate, the question
is this: Does the Trinity of God derive from the ? Or does the
creator God, whose eternal essence is presented in The Science of Logic,
appear out of [ale theia]? Heidegger seems sometimes to have
thought so. Does he not write in the Letter on Humanism: Only from
the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the
essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the
light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word
God is to signify.22 Still more clearly, he understands the absence of
God and of the divine as the presence of the hidden plenitude of what
has been and what is thus gathered (die Anwesenheit der verborgenen Flle des
Gewesenen und so versammelt Wesenden): the divine for the Greeks, that in
Jewish prophetism, and that in the preaching of Jesus.23 This gathering,
whose order is obviously not indifferent, assumes that the God of Israel,
revealed in Christ, unfolds on the basis of [aletheia], or again that,
in the manner of all the other gods, it receives its being from the essence
of the Deity. Now, on the one hand, Heidegger has never shown this; on
the contrary, he has emphasized the abyss that separates the Greek gods
from God.24 On the other handand above all, when Yahweh reveals his
name saying: I will be what I will be25does he not mean that he is the
exclusive, the jealous origin of his own manifestation?
If the Trinitarian God cannot be led back to the truth of Being, it
then becomes impossible to include all of The Science of Logic under the
concept of the onto-theo-logical constitution. To overlook the Trinitywithout which God would not be spirit, and spirit [would be] an
empty word,26 as Hegel sayswould then come down to misunderstanding the speculative as such. Indeed, as we have already shown, the speculative is inseparable from Christ, but not from Zeus. As if responding in
advance to Heidegger, Hegel takes care to state this. We derive pleasure
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from tales about Jupiter and the other Gods; but then, in the first place,
we do not ask more from them than what Homer has reported to us, and
we do not take them the way we do other historical things. Nevertheless,
there is indeed something historical that is divine history and that must
be history in the proper sense of the term; viz., the story of Jesus. This
story does not simply pass for a myth in the mode of an image; rather,
there are tangible events in it: the birth, the passion, and the death of
Christ pass for fully historical things. This story is, to be sure, for representation and it is written in the mode of representation. But it also has
another side. The story is double: it is divine historynot only that external history that should be considered no different than the ordinary
history of a manbut it also contains something divine, a divine coming
or advent, a divine doing, an absolutely divine action. This absolutely divine action is the interior, the veritable, the substantial dimension of this
history, and that precisely is the object of reason.27 To be sure, Hegels
interpretation of the Greek gods never reaches that of Heidegger. Yet,
under the circumstances, that changes nothing since, in the first place,
the speculative is tied to the passion of Christ from the moment that it
is the doctrine of the Incarnation (Menschwerdung) [of God] and of the
presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, that first gave
to human consciousness a perfectly free relationship to the infinite and
thereby made possible the comprehensive knowledge of mind in its absolute infinitude.28 In the second place, this passion does not take place
starting from . No doubt Hegel never reaches the truth of Being.
But, conversely, the thinking of cannot be allowed to reach the
realm of truth, insofar as it is at one with the eternal essence of God
before creation.29
The Trinitarian God, of which The Science of Logic is the speculative
self-presentation, therefore cannot occupy the site reserved for it from
the outset by the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics.30 This
means that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is inaccessible on the basis
of the difference and the discovering-recovering regulation. Yet it does
not excludeto the contrarythat this metaphysics take place within
Revelation, while preserving an onto-theo-logical constitution in the rigorous sense of the term. In other words, if the beginnings of philosophy
are indeed Greek, then its completion is Christian, and (this is a mark
of our historicity) we can only accede to the beginnings by proceeding
from the completion. Hegels speculative theology, which never lowered
God to the rank of the concept but raised the concept to the height of
God, thus supposes that Heraclituss was taken up in the Johannine , that the word of God would have breathed that of Being.
In a word, that God would have learned Greek. Metaphysics could not
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have opened itself to revelation if God himself had not previously invested it. Do we require a final confirmation of this? At the end of his
lecture, Heidegger points out that we could not pray to the god of metaphysics, nor dance, nor make music before him.31 Perhaps not; but Descartes closes his third Meditation with worship, and Nietzsches Dionysus,
whom Heidegger takes to be metaphysical, is a god that dances,32 and,
with Hegel, philosophy becomes an immense proclamation of faith. I
am a Lutheran and will remain the same,33 he confesses while defining
philosophy as divine service34 and stating (contrary to Heidegger) that
metaphysics has taken place in revelation, and even that it is ultimately
and in the final analysis coextensive with revelation. Can we ever surpass
Hegel, then, without overcoming Christianity, and Israel whose promise
it fulfills? Is it possible to destroy the metaphysics that is recapitulated by
Hegel, without attempting first to destroy the biblical tradition outside of
which and without which the essence of technology (which gets confused
with completed metaphysics) could not have unfolded its reign?
No doubt the destruction of the Judeo-Christian heritage will have
to take paths other than the destruction of metaphysics, such as Heidegger understands it. For the Christianization of philosophy is inaccessible, and thus unintelligible, starting from the truth of Being. Nevertheless, if metaphysics is no longer the darkening of Being, but rather
the shadow of God,35 then any destruction of metaphysics that fails
to pronounce the death of God will be a limited undertaking. We must
therefore proceed to a conjoined critique of the ontological and biblical
traditions, so as progressively to show the ground common to them both.
And where should this critique on two fronts find its point of departure
and its red thread if not precisely at the site where the Christianization
of philosophy was carried out?
God translated himself into Greek to be revealed in Christ, and
the Christianization of philosophy took place on the resurrection of the
body. Hegel hardly says anything else when he takes the incarnation of
God as the possibility of knowledge of the infinity of absolute spirit. The
body is consequently the site and the hinge at which metaphysics and
revealed theology, the word of God and the language of Being, are articulated. Now, if modifying an articulation is the only means by which
to transform its terms, then it is by opening the body to new possibilities,
ordered according to a new justice and a power superior to those of God,
that Christianity will be surmounted, and philosophy triumphantly liberated, thereby, from its status as the servant to theology. Is this possible,
and if so, under what conditions? Only the analysis of body will allow us
to decide.
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Part 3
The Guiding Thread
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The Plurality of the Body
Before we proceed to the interpretation of body it is important to delimit

once again the context in which it is inscribed, and the weight it is destined to bear. To understand the intention governing all our preceding
analyses, we will rely on two sayings of Novalis, who is, according to Nietzsche, one of the authorites in questions of saintliness.1 The first dates
from 1798: The art of becoming omnipotentthe art of realizing our
will totally. We must attain power over the body as we do over the mind.
The body is the tool to shape and modify the worldwe must therefore
seek to cultivate our bodies to become an organ capable of anything. Modification of our tool is modification of the world.2 The second one, somewhat shorter, dates from 1799: Who declared the Bible closed? Should
it not be conceived as still growing?3 How should we understand these
two sayings? Let us start from the second. The closure of the Bible is the
fact of the Christ, who is the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the
beginning and the end.4 It is thus God himself who, through his son,
proclaimed the Bible closed. Consequently, to question in this way the
canonicity of the Scriptures does not amount to arbitrarily opening the
possibility of an event concerning the economy of revelation, but rather
to think that such an event has already begun to happen, or has already
occurred. To question the closure of the Bible, to venture conceiving it
as open, apt to metamorphosing, as a book to come amounts silently to
proclaiming the death of God, and attempting to overcome Christianity: my book shall be a scientific Bible,5 says Novalis, who likewise notes
that the Gospel contains the fundamental features of superior gospels
to come.6
But how is that possible, and what path should we take to accomplish it? If, thanks to the Christ, if in Christ, our body is the temple of the
living Godthere is but one temple in the world; and that is the body
of man. Nothing is holier than this high form,7 says Novaliswe could
only become other than Christian by enhancing the power of the body.
Mutatis mutandis, the creation of a superior body erects a wholly different
sanctuary, tied to an entirely different holiness and not to the reconstruction of the old temple, for if a temple is to be erected a temple must be
destroyed: that is the law.8 The first word of Novalis thereby acquires its
full meaning. If out of One God there will arise a Universal-God,9 then,
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correspondingly, our body must become almighty. But how could it become this without being an organ capable of wholly fulfilling our will, an
instrument capable of anything? This means, on the one hand, that the
omnipotence or total realization of the will could not be attained, unless
power became the wills own, exclusive essence. On the other hand, it
means that the body ceases being conceived as a system of organs. Indeed, an organ capable of anything is an organ at least capable of all that
which the other organs can accomplish. Strictly speaking, it is no longer
an organ per se. In short, in order to raise the power of the body and
the will by opening new possibilities to them, and becoming the poets
of our life,10 it is necessary to think body and will differently. However,
since the conative body [le corps volontaire] is, as we showed, the site at
which Greek metaphysics and Christian religion are articulated, its new
concept ought to answer for the one, as for the other, as well as for their
ultimate coincidence.
Once again, if modifying an articulation is the only way to transform its terms, then philosophy will not revoke God, fulfill his death,
and free itself from theology unless it opens new possibilities to the body.
Nietzsche, who wrote this note in 1884, knew it well: We are richer than
we think, we have in the body wherewith to make many persons, we take
for character what belongs only to the person, to one of our masks.
Most of our acts do not come from the depths but are superficial: as with
most volcanic eruptions: one should not be deceived by the noise. Christianity is right in this: one can put on a new man [einen neuen Menschen
anziehen]: to be sure, and then yet another newer one. We deceive ourselves when we judge a man according to isolated acts: such acts warrant
no generalizations.11 Let us examine in what precise sense Christianity is
right, here. The words Nietzsche emphasizes are a literal quotation from
Luthers translation of a verse from the Letter to the Ephesians. Saint
Paul there urges us to reject the old man and to put on the new man,
who was created after God in true justice and holiness.12 Now, since the
old man was crucified with Christ and the new one resurrected with and
in him, Nietzsche is thus referring, beyond baptism, to the resurrection
of the body. Why should he do so, if the resurrection did not imply a certain plurality of body? Indeed, the change in condition that resurrection
denotes could not occur if the body did not itself contain this possibility
and could not be other than what it is. Proclaiming the glorification of
the body, Christianity implicitly acknowledged its possible plurality. After
having thus picked up the thread of Pauls concept of body as a plurality of wills, and thiswe note in passingbeyond the physical concept
on which he seemed to be dwelling, Nietzsche immediately adds that
the new man of whom Saint Paul spoke is not the only one possible. But
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whence does Nietzsche know that Christianity did not exhaust the plurality of bodies, or their multiple possibilities? Let us go back for a moment
to the Pauline concept of a body. Living according to the spirit, the body
is unified by the love of God; living according to the flesh, it is divided,
turned against itself and God. Yet, a divided unity, turned against itself,
is no longer, or not yet, a true plurality. And with God dead and sin no
longer having meaning, the unity divided and turned against itself that
results from this necessarily loses everything, including its unified character, thus allowing a plurality of wills to appear whose very dispersion
calls for the creation of a higher body.
That this was the task prescribed by the death of Godoutside of
which the elevation of the body to the rank of a guiding thread remains
ultimately unintelligibleis clearly attested by a note from 188283:
The dissolution of morality has for its practical consequence an atomized individual, even the scattering of the individual into multiplicities
absolute Flux. This is why a goal is now more than ever necessary and
from love, a new love. In 1874, Nietzsche had already observed: we live
in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos and, in 1881: We are entering
into the age of anarchy.13 The dispersion of the individual, that is, of
the body, into a flowing plurality requires a new love, because the old
love, that of God, had assured its unitybut can no longer do so. The
dissolution of morality has for its correlate the dissolution of bodies,
and the death of God makes simultaneously possible and necessary an
over- or sur-resurrection [sur-resurrection]in the sense in which Nietzsche speaks of an overman [surhomme]a new love. I never profaned
the holy name of love,14 he declares against Christianity. Our body thus
carries within itself the death of God as the hope for a wholly other glory,
and this statement, in no way nostalgic, expresses the strict experience
of the death of God and of revaluation, since all morality is a habit of
self-glorification.15
It was after having finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose fundamental idea is eternal recurrence, at the moment he started the work first
called The Will to Power, then Revaluation of All Values and which led ultimately to The Antichrist, that Nietzsche assigned to the body the function
of guiding thread. This simple fact implies that the clarification of the
body is inseparable from the combined understanding of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the revaluation of values, that is, the ultimate
figure of Nietzsches thought. The first occurrence of the expression
guiding thread of the body dates from 1884. Nothing good, writes
Nietzsche, has up to now come out of the self-reflection of the mind. It
is only now that we inquire into all spiritual processes, memory for example, following the guiding thread of the body, that we progress.16 This
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note, which points to a functional substitutionthe body henceforth

assuming a role previously assigned to the mind, in the exploration of
mind itselfnevertheless does not provide the motives behind such a
substitution. What are these, and how does Nietzsche justify them?
The establishment of a guiding thread is a methodological choice
relative to an epistemic project, and if methods, one must repeat ten
times, are the essential, as well as being the most difficult,17 it is important to specify the motives and consequences of such a decision. Why
does Nietzsche grant the body this privilege? He writes in 188586: If
our I is for us the sole Being, after which we fashion and understand all
of being: very well! Then doubt is apposite, is there not here an illusion of
perspectivethe ostensible unity in which everything is gathered, like
the line of the horizon. The body as guiding thread reveals a tremendous
multiplicity; it is methodologically permissible to use a richer, more easily
studied phenomenon as guiding thread for understanding a poorer one.
Finally: supposing that everything is becoming, knowledge is possible only
on the basis of a belief in being.18 Thus, to take the body as guiding thread
is then first to destitute the I of this function, and to hold the unity of
consciousness, even were it synthetic consciousness, as a mere semblance
of unity. Directly questioning the subject about itself, inquiring into the
processes of the mind, on the foundation of the image it offers and provides itself (of itself), is thus to exclude straightaway, hastily, and without
justification that it might be useful and important for ones own activity to interpret oneself falsely.19 In 188687, the assertion according to
which the phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible
phenomenon, is preceded by this remark: Everything that enters into
consciousness as unity is already prodigiously complex: we never have
but a semblance of unity.20 This destitution of consciousness, starting from
which we could not conceive our real subjective unitythat of which
the body is exemplaryimplies calling into question all knowledge that
holds, as its supreme principle, the synthetic unity of apperception. To
be sure, Nietzsche was not unaware of this, when he writes: If there is
only one being, the I, and all other beings are made in its imageif,
ultimately, the belief in the I stands or falls with belief in logic, that is to
say, in the metaphysical truth of the categories of reason; if, on the other
hand, the I proves to be something in a state of becoming: then 21
Then? Then to consider the becoming I, the body, as a guiding thread,
amounts to modifying the essence of knowledge by questioning the truth
of the categories, that is, the truth of the transcendental deduction. We
will return to this.
The preceding notes indicate next what a guiding thread is. The
guiding thread is the unique being from which we constitute and com-
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prehend the world, the unique being in whose image other beings are
made orto use a language that is not that of Nietzsche, as we cannot emphasize enoughthe being which opens access to the meaning
of Being. The guiding thread thus supposes, if not ontological difference, then at least a certain difference between Being and beings. But
this difference can only take form amidst the becoming that exceeds
it on all sides. In other words, Being and beings are for Nietzsche but
punctuations, stations, states of becoming, and the latter is the pure
verb, preventing any nominalist use; unceasing event or advent: absolute flux.
What ultimately are the characteristics peculiar to the body, such
that it might be apt to serve as guiding thread for philosophical knowledge? It is impossible to answer this question without previously pointing
to that to which body leads. From the moment the guiding thread is that
from which we understand all that is, the analysis of the body will surely
lead us to what Nietzsche calls the innermost essence of being: the will
to power.22 And if this were not the case, then the foregrounding of the
body would not be contemporaneous with the formulation of the will to
power.
That means first that the essential traits of the guiding thread can
only come into view on the horizon of the will to power. It further means
that the body is the easiest phenomenon to study,23 authorizing the clearest observations;24 it is, consequently, the phenomenon which most manifestly shows the will to power. The body is more astonishing, richer, and
more complex than the soul, the mind, the subject, or consciousness.25
And, since the most complete phenomenon is always the beginning,26
the body must, from the point of view of method, come first.27 This is all
the more so in that the body is the most certain entity, the object of a
stronger and more fundamental belief than that in the subject, the soul,
or the mind.28
This priority of the body immediately raises a problem. Since The
Birth of Tragedy, had Nietzsche not always assigned himself as task to look
at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism
of life?29 Did he therefore not make artunderstood from the perspective of the artistthe thread that leads to life, that is to say, to the will to
power? Was it not for this reason that he wrote, the phenomenon artist is still the most transparent:to see through it to the basic instincts of
power, nature, etc.! Also those of religion and morality!30 If art is the most
transparent of the configurations of the will to power; if it is the easiest
to know, does it not become ipso facto the thread that leads to it? Yet, is it
conceivable that philosophical knowledge detains more than one thread,
or is it the case that the one may be referred to the other?
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The answer to this question presupposes that we clarify further the

essence of the guiding thread as such. If the latter is the being from which
we constitute and comprehend all the others, if philosophical knowledge
is devoted to clarify[ing] the world starting from what is clear for us or
even, if science does what man has always done: use something of himself, which he holds for comprehensible, for true, in order to explain
all the rest, then recourse to a guiding thread implies, directly or not,
the humanization31 of the totality of beings. Thus, the world has always
been interpreted in function of our being, and there has never been but
one sole and unique guiding thread, under different guises. Should we
conclude from this that philosophical knowledge is, by its very structure,
a humanism? Perhaps, but in any event this could not be the case with
regard to that great knowledge, whose spokesman is Zarathustra, and
by virtue of which he teaches the overman; in other words, that man is
something that must be overcome.32
From the moment that there is but one guiding thread, art
considered against the horizon of the will to powermust itself be understood relative to the body. Mutatis mutandis, did Schopenhauer not
already subordinate art to the body, by making art the initial stage of the
negation of the will, which is fulfilled by the ascetic annihilation of the
body? Art, writes Nietzsche in 1887, brings us back to states of animal
vigor; it is, on the one hand, an excess and overflow of flourishing corporeity in the world of images and desires; on the other hand, [it is] an
excitation of animal functions through images and desires of intensified
life;an elevation of the feeling of life, a stimulant to that feeling.33
It is thus indeed starting from the body that the work of art should be
understood. But when the work of art can appear without an artist, for
example, as body34 or in other words, when the artist is not the sole artistic power,35 then the meaning of art is no longer exclusively bound to
the artists point of view, and the artistic point of view is but a preliminary stage36 on the path leading to the will to power. If art is the object
of physiology;37 if it is an organic function and the greatest stimulus
to life,38 which is always corporeal, then aesthetics should be dissolved
in physiology39 in order to be grounded on the analysis of bodythat
formation whose perfection surpasses that of the work of art.40 In short,
artistic beauty is but a shadow of living beauty,41 or beauty corporeal,
which, as we will see, always means intellectual.
The reasons justifying the methodological privilege of the body,
according to Nietzsche, are in large part formally identical to those that
had allowed Schopenhauer to make the body the starting point and guiding thread of metaphysical knowledge. Thus, to offer the body these new
possibilities, whose invention is the very task of philosophy42and only
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the reinterpretation of the body is liable to open these possibilitieswe

must again take up the concept of the body that is conjoined to the metaphysics of will, which, recall, is fulfilled by coinciding with Saint Pauls
predication. This is all the more necessary in that the new possibilities
we are seeking should answer for both the concealment of philosophy by
revealed religion and for its overcoming. If such were not the case, then
Nietzsche could never proclaim that the poets still have to discover the
possibilities of life, the stellar orbit is open to them, and not some Arcadia
or a valley in Campania: an infinitely bold imagination, resting on the
knowledge of animal evolution, is possible. All our poetry is so earthy
and petit-bourgeois, the great possibility of superior men is still lacking.
It is only after the death of religion that the invention of the divine could
again become luxuriant.43
In making the body the immediate objectivation of the will, Schopenhauer by the same token made the plurality of organs and functions
inconceivable. Indeed, how can an absolutely single and indivisible will,
in one and the same time be will to knowledge, which considered objectively is the brain, [and] will to walk, which considered objectively is
the foot, [and finally] will to grasp, which considered objectively is the
hand, etc.? This aporia finds its origin only in the will itself. If the latter
can will to know, to walk, to grasp, etc., then it is not in itself a will to
something that would be internal and essential to it. By thus posing the
unity and uniqueness of the will, Schopenhauer presupposes that the
willed as such is indifferent, that is to say external to the will, or again
that the will does not strictly want anything, since it can will anything and
everything without being modified in the slightest. The will is therefore
destined to its own annihilation. This is indeed that to which Nietzsche
objects: My thesis is: that the will, according to psychology up to now,
is an unjustified generalization, that this will absolutely does not exist, that
instead of grasping the development of a a will determined as so many
forms, we have crossed out the character of the will by subtracting its content, its toward what? And, he immediately specifies: This is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls will is but an empty
word.44 Consequently, and if only to allow for the phenomenal difference of the organs, we must begin conversely by describing the body as
a plurality without presupposing its unity, in such a way that it becomes
possible to determine its unity from this plurality and, by the same token,
define the content or, as it were, the intentional correlate, of the will,
which Schopenhauer said was the internal essence of the force that is
externalized.
What then is this plurality that Nietzsche emphasized early on since,
from the summer of 1875, he observed: Man seems to be a plurality of
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beings, a unification of several spheres, from which each can have a vantage on the others.45 What are these entities that constitute the body
and, above all, what are their relations to each other? Ten years later, in a
long and magnificent note entitled Morality and Physiology, which no
doubt forms the most complete and profound of his several analyses of
body, i.e., of our subjective unity,46 Nietzsche wrote: We consider that it
is by a premature conclusion that human consciousness was for so long
taken to be the supreme stage of organic development and most astonishing of terrestrial things, [and] even as their flourishing and their goal.
What is more astonishing is rather the body: we endlessly admire how the
human body became possible: how such a prodigious unification of living
beings, all dependent and obedient, but in another sense commanding
and acting by their own will, can live as a whole, grow and subsist for a
certain time: and this obviously does not happen through consciousness! Of this miracle of miracles, consciousness is but an instrument,
and nothing morein the same sense in which the stomach is an instrument.47 Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also qualifies the body as
the miracle of miracles. According to Schopenhauer, the body is the
miracle 48 because, in it, will and representation, subject and
object, coincide and are but one. For Nietzsche, the miracle of the body
is due to the coherence of its plurality. Indeed, if the body is made up
of living beings, each one acting according to its own will, and if consciousness is not the ground of its unity, then this cannot fail to astonish
us. Conversely, the unity of the body could not concern Schopenhauer,
since it rested on the unity of the will. For Nietzsche, then, it is a matter
of securing his starting point by understanding how the body is possible,
whence its unity comes and, in other terms, what this new love is to which
we have already alluded. But in seeking the unity of the subject elsewhere
than in consciousness, Nietzsche in turn gives himself the task of understanding this same consciousness starting from the body, as one of the
bodys functions, or as the symptom of one of its modes of being. We
will come back to this problem, which is none other than the egological
character of modern metaphysics, and whose solution must amount, in
the final analysis, to an advance destruction of transcendental phenomenology, which is the ultimate fulfillment of this egology.
The subjective unity, or better, unification49 that body denotes,
could only come from relations maintained by the plurality of its parts,
since it is first the relations that constitute beings.50 Thus, it behooves
us to specify what those living beings are that make up the body. Nietzsche described their plurality under several headings, which we must now
enumerate. As plurality of minds: Man is inhabited by as many minds as
there are sea animalsthey fight one another for the I mind: they love
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it and want it to ride on their backs. They hate one another because of
this love.51 As plurality of drives: In contrast to the animals, man has
cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself:
thanks to this synthesis, he is the master of the earth.52 As plurality of
forces: Man is a plurality of forces situated in a hierarchy, in such a way
that some command, but those commanding must also create, for the
ones that obey, everything needed for their preservation, in such a way
that they are themselves conditioned by the existence of those they command. All these living beings must be of a similar kind, or else they could
not serve and obey one another in this way.53 As plurality of souls: our
body is but a social structure composed of many souls.54 As plurality of
wills to power: Man as plurality of wills to power: each with a plurality of means
of expression and forms.55 From these multiple designations, it follows that
the unity of the body, which is always that of an antagonistic hierarchy,
should not be thought as a state or a being, but rather as an event or a becoming. That being said, is it possible to unify these various designations?
If, as Nietzsche claims, our drives are reducible to the will to power,56
then we must attempt to understand how these same living beings can
at the same time be called force or drive, will or will to power, and
in what sense thought belongs to them, failing which they could not be
qualified as minds or mortal souls.
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The Criterion
Let us begin with force. And first, how to accede to it? Has a force ever
been observed? No, only effects, translated into a totally foreign language.1 What are these effects then and where are they exerted? We
could not answer these questions without specifying the nature of force
itself. In 1885, after having opposed a plurality of subjects to the unique
or single subjecta plurality whose play and struggle are the grounds
for all thought and all consciousness; after having thus substituted the
plural body for the self-identical I, and under what he calls my hypotheses, Nietzsche noted the following: The only force that might be is of the
same nature as that of the will: a commandment given to other subjects
and according to which they are modified.2 Thus, it is because one force
relates to another that it can be named will. Consequently, the will is
no longer unique, but complex and plurala mechanism that is so well
practiced that it all but escapes the observing eye.3 And it becomes possible to determine its effects. While any command implies obedience,
in one way or another, the commanding will presupposes an obeying
one, and force could only produce effects on another force, since two
things foreign in-themselves cannot act on one another.4 Moreover, and
to sum up more directly the analysis of the body, the will should not be
conceived, following Schopenhauer, as acting on the organs through the
nervous system; but rather as acting on other wills. Will, of course, can
affect only willand not upon matter (not nerves, for example).
In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will
wherever effects are recognizedand whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of
will.5 Before being a system of organs, the body is thus a complex of wills
related to one another and, in a certain sense, on this point, Saint Paul
already knew what Schopenhauer did not.
The hypothesis according to which the will acts upon the will presupposes, however, that the content and the intentional side of the will
be determinedthrough a determination whose absence characterizes
and invalidates Schopenhauers concept of will. How should we thus conceive will or force that it be capable of being exerted on another will?
Nietzsche answered this question in the following way: The victorious
concept of force, by means of which our physicists have created God
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and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed
to it, which I designate as will to power, that is to say, as an insatiable
desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power,
as a creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate action at a distance
from their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or one
of attraction). There is nothing doing: one is obliged to understand all
movements, all phenomena, all laws, merely as symptoms of internal
events, and to use the human analogy. In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions
of organic life derive from this single source.6 While starting from the
physical concept of force, Nietzsche in fact proceeds according to the
human analogy, that is, according to the guiding thread of the body.
This provesif proof were requiredthat the concept of will to power
indeed stems from an interpretation of the body. In other words, if, relative to the physical mechanistic concept of force, the will to power is
understood as a supplement, then conversely and concerning the drives
and functions of organic life, this supplementarity has no reason for
being. In thus resorting to the methodological principle according to
which one should move from the richest to the poorest phenomenon, we
would simply emphasize that the will to power is not added on to force
from without. The determination of the will to power as inner will of
the victorious force thus means that power is that which, within force itself, wants and is wanted, and this, in such a way that it might defeat other
forces. The will to power is therefore that through which forces relate
the ones to the others, as dominant or dominated; it is consequently the
synthetic principle that ensures the prodigious junction of the forces
or wills that constitute the body.
How does this synthesis take place? Every force is a magnitude, a
measurable quantum. Our knowledge, writes Nietzsche, has become
scientific to the extent that it is able to employ number and measure . . .
We should attempt to see whether a scientific order of values could not
be constructed simply according to a numeric scale of force . . . All the
other values are prejudices, naiveties, misunderstandings . . . They are
everywhere reducible to this numeric scale of forceProgression up this
scale represents an increase in value: regression down this scale represents
a diminution in value. Here, we have appearances and prejudice against
us.7 If every force is a measurable magnitude, whose effects are exerted
on another force, that is, on another measurable magnitudeNietzsche
will speak of quanta of force whose essence consists in exerting power
over all the other quanta of force8then is the relation between forces
an equilibrium, or can it be reduced to a pure quantitative difference?
Neither the one, nor the other is the case. First, there is no equilibrium,
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that is to say, equality of forces, because change belongs to the essence

of force, and then, if the measure of force, as magnitude, [is] fixed, its
essence is fluid, tensorial, restrictive.9 Secondand as Nietzsche never
ceased insistingin the realm of forces there is no adiaphory, no indifference, and the isolation of a force is barbaric.10 Finally, the relation
between forces, constitutive of the force itself, is not only quantitative;
for, in the absence of all equilibrium, the quantitative relation between
forceswhich is that of the greater to the lesser or the lesser to the
greaterbecomes a qualitative relation between superior and inferior
forces.
Why and how does the quantitative relation between forces become
qualitative? When distinguished quantitatively, forces are ipso facto related to each other hierarchically, as superior and inferior, dominant and
dominated. Consequently, would the greatest force not unfold its effects
from a completely different perspective than that of the weaker ones?
Will it not be with respect to the first that the latter appear as obedient
or resistant? Will it not thus impose an evaluation? And will it not, by the
same token, have a value different than the other forces, since value is
measured solely by the quantum of enhanced and organized power, according to what occurs in every event, a will to more?11 Should we not then
qualify the one differently from the others since, on the one hand, the
first commands the others, which obey it, and which it thus subjects to its
own growth perspective; and since, on the other hand, qualities are reducible to value judgments?12 To the question: Might all quantities not be
signs of qualities? Nietzsche responds: The greater power corresponds
to another consciousness, to another feeling, desire, to another perspectival vantage; growth itself is an aspiration to be more; the aspiration for an
increase in quantum grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world
everything would be dead, stiff, motionless.The reduction of all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what appears is that the one accompanies
the other, an analogy13 And, in a note dedicated to the physiology of
power and to the body, he specifies: Mechanistic interpretation: allows
nothing but quantities; but force is to be found in quality. Mechanistic
theory can therefore only describe processes, not explain them.14 What
then are the qualities that forces derive from their relation with each
other? Nietzsche calls the dominating forces active, and the dominated
ones passive or reactive.15 Indeed, if, on the one hand, he asks: What
do active and passive mean? is it not to be master and mastered?,16 on the
other hand, in a note devoted to hierarchy, he declares: One needs
to have a criterion [Maasstab]: . . . I distinguish activity and reactivity.17
What is the criterion mentioned here? It is the criterion of hierarchy, the
criterion according to which we should determine the value of moral valu-
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ations.18 This is, in a word, the highest criterion, since it is the criterion
of the critique of values. If the criterion is what allows us to judge and if,
in a general way, there can be no critique without a criterion, then every
criterion establishes a partition. The distinction between the active and
the reactive is at the basis of every project of revaluation. When Nietzsche holds the confusion between active and passive to be humanitys
everlasting grammatical blunder;19 when he recalls that the criterion
remains the efflorescence of the body,20 and defines the criterion of
force as the fact of being able to live under inverted evaluations and to
will them again eternally;21 or finally, when he declares that he is the
first to hold in [his] hands the measure for truths in hand, . . . the first
who is able to decide,22 it is always, as we will progressively see, relative to
the distinction between active and reactive, whose function is fundamental because it is properly decisive.
How to understand activity, reactivity, and the double designation of
dominated forces? No force can be divested of its own power for, whether
dominant or dominated, it always remains nonetheless a force.23 The
qualitative difference between forces can thus only concern the mode
and perspective under which the force produces its effects and unfolds
its power. A force is active when it reaches out spontaneously for power;
reactive, when it reaches out for it following stimulation from without.
But since passive is equivalent to being mastered, is reactivity not the same
thing as passivity? If, to the question, what is active? Nietzsche answers:
to reach out for power; then to the question, what is passive? he
answers: to resist and to react. To be inhibited in moving forward: thus
an act (Handeln) of resistance and reaction (Reaktion).24 Consequently,
passivity comes under reactivity. Does it denote a structural moment of
reactivity? And if such is the case, then how should we characterize it?
A force is reactive when it obeys an outside solicitation. But for that
to occur, it is necessary that its inner tension toward power be inhibited,
that it consequently be prepared to receive a command, and that the
latter be followed by effects; in short, that it unleash an exercise of power
proper to the obeying force. No force could thus be reactive without a
prior inhibition of its own power. Consequently, passivity is a structural
moment of reactivity. Have we thereby exhausted the meaning of passivity? We have not, because Nietzsche not only assimilates passivity to the
suspension of the progressive movement of power, but also to an act of
resistance and reaction. How to understand this act, and this uncommon
activity within passivity? Passivity qualifies forces in reference to other
forces superior to them. It can be thus considered from a double perspective: if, for the dominant force, a force that is not enacted is passive;
the dominated force, in its turn, could not give itself up to domination
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without having previously resisted, and without having thus reacted to

its own power. Indeed, the inhibition of a forcewhich, by its nature,
reaches out for power spontaneouslywould be impossible if this force
did not oppose itself. Passivity should therefore be conceived as a resistance of self to self and as a reaction against oneself. Thus restored to its
verbal sense, passivity can be assimilated to reactivity.
The distinction between the quantity and quality of forces immediately raises the following question: from the moment that knowledge,
using number and measure, is essentially quantitative, can we know
qualities? Qualities, Nietzsche responds, are insurmountable barriers for us; we cannot help feeling that mere quantitative differences are
something fundamentally distinct from quantity; namely, that they are
qualities which can no longer be reduced to one another. But everything
for which the word knowledge makes any sense refers to the domain
of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity; while
inversely, all our sensations of value (that is to say, simply, our sensations)
adhere precisely to qualities, that is to say, to our perspectival truths
which belong to us alone and can by no means be known! It is obvious
that every creature different from us senses different qualities and thus
lives in a different world from that in which we live. Qualities are our authentic human idiosyncrasy; to require that our human interpretations
and values be universal and perhaps constitutive values, is one of the hereditary follies of human pride, which, ever and again, finds in religion
its most assured seat. Need I add, contrariwise, that quantities in themselves are not present in our experience, that our world of experience is
only a qualitative world, that consequently logic and applied logic (like
mathematics) belong to the tricks of the ordering, dominating, simplifying, abbreviating power, called life, and thus are something practical
and useful, namely something that preserves life but nevertheless, as far
as possible from something true?25
Qualities thus lead knowledge to its limits. But how is that possible
if each quality draws its source from quantitative conditions,26 which can
be known as such? Quality is a difference of quantity that we cannot
prevent ourselves from feeling as irreducible to quantity, once it is reduced to a value judgment.27 However, to understand the modality of
this reduction, we need to specify the constraint to which our sensibility
is subject. In a note that directly echoes the one we just cited, Nietzsche
explains that our senses have as their milieu a determinate quantum
within which they function; that is to say that we sense greatness and
smallness in relation to the conditions of our existence. This means
that if we sharpened or blunted our senses tenfold, we should perish,28
or again that the degree of precision of our senses is relative to our
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conditions of existence. But is it not absurd to imagine such a thing; is

it but an imaginary variation pure and simple? By no means. Does not
rapture, which is nothing but a high feeling of power, have the effect of
refining our organs, of making us perceive minute and fugitive things?
Does it not modify the sensations of time and space?29 In other words, if
the intensity or the power of our senses is prescribed by our conditions
of existence, and if the latter prescribe the general laws within which we
can see and touch what we see and touch as we see it and touch it, then
it is for the maintenance of our own life and for the sake of its preservation, that we have this degree of sensibility rather than another. In short,
our sensibility is governed by values, which, as thoughts, are by essence
liable to be modified. It is therefore possible to assert that qualities are
our authentic human idiosyncrasy or, which comes to the same, that
all sense perceptions are wholly permeated by value judgments (useful,
harmfulconsequently, pleasant or unpleasant).30
By reducing qualities to value judgmentsand our sensuous experience of the world is essentially qualitativeNietzsche, who exhibits
the axiological a priori according to which our senses function, radically
transforms the concept of sensibility. Resting on value judgments, that is
to say, on a new class of judgments whose structure could not be purely
and simply apophantic, sensibility should henceforth be conceived as
an intellectual phenomenon, which as such is liable to be modified.
Failing this, Nietzsche could never have ventured to learn to think differentlyin order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel
differently.31
The question of knowing how and why qualitieswhich characterize the very vitality of experiencelead knowledge to its limits, thus
takes on a greater clarity. Keeping in mind that in a purely quantitative
world everything would be dead, Nietzsche once defined values as conditions of preservation and enhancement with regard to complex formations
of a relative life-span within becoming.32 If qualities, that is to say values,
merge with the very conditions of our life, then it follows that any living
being different from us will feel other qualities and live according to another perspective and other values, according to a morality that is other.
Qualities are thus inseparable from our very being, and we could not perceive or know anything other than against the horizon previously opened
and circumscribed by our own conditions of existence. It is thus forever
impossible for us to know a thing as it is or could be in itself, that is, as
such. It is only possible for us to know from that point of view imposed
a priori by our conditions of existence33 or human values. Consequently,
if to know is to reach things in their true essence, independent of any
perspective, then qualities that are always likewise perspectives are in
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principle unknowable. This means, conversely, that the apophantic as

such, as a structure of the , implies the negation of the perspectival
character of all life, and therefore of all knowledge. It likewise implies
that a judgment of the kind this, as such, is that, which manifests an
entity on the basis of itself, is rigorously unverifiable. This is because the
self-identity of the entity, which is thus presupposed outside any perspective, is purely and simply inaccessible. As the traditional locus of truth,
apophantic judgment is, in the final analysis, truth undermined. Thus,
qualities indeed constitute the limits of knowledge, and that is why Nietzsche is justified in substituting, for epistemology, a perspectival doctrine
of the affects.34
What is, however, the legitimacy of such argumentation? Is it possible to describe the perspectival character of forces and of life; in a word,
perspective as such, when all description presupposes a determinate perspective? From whence is it possible to recognize as such our authentic
human idiosyncrasy, and who has the right to do so? Or, again and at last:
can we radically cast truth into doubt without falling back onto skepticism, which itself continues in one way or another to presuppose truth?35
To all these questions, only the death of God permits an answer. Indeed,
two paths are open to us to recognize and conceive perspective as such.
The first requires that our gaze go beyond any perspective, to reach the
essence of things. Nietzsche himself examined and precluded this possibility by attacking the distinctionhere more Schopenhauerian than
Kantian36between the phenomenon and the thing in itself. In order
to make such a distinction, he notes, we would have to think our intellect as having a contradictory character: on the one hand, oriented according to perspectival seeing, as is necessary for creatures of our species
to keep themselves precisely alive; and on the other hand, at the same
time, with a capacity to grasp this perspectival seeing as perspectival, [to
grasp] the phenomenon as phenomenon.37 It is thus impossible to posit
a reality in itself without contradiction and risk of death, since if we
would leave the world of perspective, we would perish.38 From where,
then, comes the right to name the perspectival character of knowledge?
The only path henceforth available consists not in exceeding perspective,
but in varying it. To recognize perspective as such it is not necessary to
look beyond the angle proper to us, it is enough to modify its aperture.
An angle may indeed appear as an angle from the point of view of an
angle that is widersuperior by comparison. Our privilege: we live in
the age of comparison.39 In other words, the values governing us can only
appear as such at the moment of their revaluation. And our human idiosyncrasy would appear as human, all too human, when this humanity is
overcome. It is thus in the light of the overman that it becomes possible,
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and legitimate, to recognize the perspectival character of knowledge. But

since the overman presupposes the death of Godall the gods are dead:
now we want the Superman to live,40 says Zarathustrait is ultimately of
the latter that assertions could arise according to which there is neither
thing in-itself nor absolute knowledge, and the deceptive perspectival
character belongs to existence.41
There is no doubt that this was Nietzsches thought. On the one
hand, in saying that he had the will to live the state from which each of
these angular perspectives on the world that we call a philosophy or a
religion had arisen,42 he thus asserts that he varied the degree of aperture of that angle without which, and outside of which, no world could
appear. On the other hand, he explicitly linked monotheism to the reduction of the multiplicity of perspectives. Indeed, in a paragraph from
The Gay Science, entitled The greatest advantage of polytheism, after
having noted that individuals have up to now never dared to institute
their ideal other than under the mask of a god, and that, consequently,
hostility toward the creation of proper ideals is the law of all morality,
Nietzsche goes on to say: There was only one norm, manand every
people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and
outside, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms: one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor
blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury of individuals was
first permitted; it was here that one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen of all kinds, as well as
near-men and undermen, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and
devils was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of
the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other godsone eventually also granted
to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on
the other hand, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal
human typethe faith in one normal god beside whom there are only
pseudo-godswas perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted
humanity. It threatened us with premature stagnation that, as far as we
can see, most other species have long reached. To polytheism, understood as the wonderful art and strength of creating gods or as the
strength to create for ourselves our own new eyesand ever again new
eyes that are even more our own,43 in short, as a plurality of perspectives,
Nietzsche thus opposes monotono-theism,44 which normalizes them all
by eternalizing and absolutizing one of them.
From what was just said, it follows that the death of God implies a
simultaneous modification of both the essence of the body and of knowledge. How to account for this simultaneity? If we must take the body as
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starting point and guiding thread, this is because we thereby obtain the
correct representation of the nature of our subjective unity; namely, as
regents at the head of a community.45 This community is constituted
by forces of the same kind, whose relations are ultimately qualitative. As
long as the unity of the body, as a complex of forces or wills, is ensured
by God, these can only be reactive since, obedient or disobedient, they
all react to the divine will. The Christian body is thus essentially and exclusively reactive and, in the presence of God, it is impossible to distinguish the active forces from the reactive ones; impossible to distinguish
between the quantity and quality of forces by interpreting their difference of power, their hierarchy, as a difference of value. Only his death
allows this, and it is by right that Nietzsche counted among his innovations the discovery of the active force;46 a discovery in principle impossible for Saint Paul and for all the Christian theology that depends on
him; a discovery liable to modify bodies and which ultimately supposes
the discovery of will to powerone that implies the hegemony of physiology over theology,47 and the priority of the active body to come over
the reactive body to be destroyed. Since any modification in the status
of our subjective unity necessarily entails a modification in the status of
knowledge, we can understand still better how the consideration of qualities invalidates and limits the scope of knowledge. Indeed, if the world
of our experience is exclusively qualitative, and does not offer quantities as such, then logic and applied logicin which Nietzsche includes
mathematicswhich proceed only according to numbers and measures,
can not fail to appear, by ineluctably reducing qualities to quantities, as
wholly dependent on the sole, numerical perspective. Number is a perspectival form as much as time and space.48 This is to say, finally, that
logic and applied logic appear superficial, since they level out all qualitative and hierarchical differences by examining them under the enumerable face of the same common denominator. Anytime something is
thought in a purely arithmetic manner, the quality is excluded from the
calculation.49 Conversely, and seen from the will to power, whence the
qualitative difference between forces as dominant or dominated, active
or reactive, derives, the scientific, logico-mathematical knowledge will be
held as a simplifying artifice, as far as possible from the truth to which it
pretends; in a word, as mendacious. In the manner of Husserl, although
in a different sense, Nietzsche could thus have asserted that genuine
science, so far as its real doctrine extends, knows no profundity.50
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Pleasure and Pain
After having distinguished active from reactive forces, let us return more
frontally to the analysis of the body and, to do this, take up our reading
of the 1885 note, Morality and Physiology, where we left it. We will leave
aside, for now, the elucidation of the instrumental status that consciousness takes on once it loses its sovereignty and ceases to be the instance of
subjective unification. Struck by the coherent plurality of the body, Nietzsche continued: The magnificient cohesion of the most multiple life,
the disposition and arrangement of higher and lower activities, the variously enacted obedience that is neither blind nor much less mechanical,
but rather elective, prudential, considerate, even grudgingthis whole
phenomenon of the body is, from the intellectual point of view, as superior to our consciousness, our mind, our conscious willing, sensing,
thinking, than is algebra to the multiplication table. The neuro-cerebral
system has not been so subtly and divinely constructed to produce willing, sensing, thinking; on the contrary, it seems to me rather that willing, sensing, thinking have, in themselves, no need for an apparatus at
all, but that they are, and they alonethe thing itself [die Sache selbst].
On the contrary, this prodigious synthesis of living beings and intellects
that we call man can only live once this fine system of relations and mediations is created, and thereby, that understanding, quick as lightning,
between superior and inferior beingsnamely, only through living mediators: but this is a moral problem and not a mechanical one!1
Once established that the will to power ensures the prodigious
synthesis of the multiple living beings constituting the body, it becomes
possible to pursue their conjoined analysis. As a domination-formation
[Herrschafts-Gebilde], which signifies unity but is not a unity,2 the body is
a hierarchy between commanding wills and obedient ones. What does
this hierarchical relation presuppose? Since no will can obey without
understanding the order to which it is, the hierarchical relation presupposes reciprocal understandingwhich does not imply a symmetrical relationbetween its terms. To the question of knowing the type of constraint exerted by a stronger soul on a weaker one, Nietzsche answers:
it might be possible that the apparent disobedience to the superior
soul rested on the non-comprehension-of-its-will; a rock, for example,
cannot be commanded. Buta gradual distinction of degree and rank
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is required: only beings best related to each other can understand each
other and thereby give rise to obedience.3 From the moment the body
is a plurality of forces synthesized by the will to power, which refers them
to each other like a sovereign will over the multiplicity of wills it rules,
and by which it must always be understood and heard, that body cannot but be a thoroughgoingly intellectual phenomenon; even, a great
intelligence,4 according to Zarathustras word. But in what way is it a
great intelligence? In what sense is the body intellectually superior to
mind as to consciousness? If this superiority is comparable to the superiority of algebra over arithmetic, that implies that mind, consciousness,
or reason, in the metaphysical sense, must derive from the body, since
the arithmetic of whole numbers was integratedthat is, dissolved into
algebra thanks to the theory of Abelian groups. Therefore, the correlative analysis of the body and the will to power necessarily goes together
with a critique of the privilege of consciousness, whose essential form is
reason; in a word, it is accompanied by the anticipated subordination of
transcendental phenomenology, which, according to Husserl, is the telos
of all modern philosophy.
Nietzsche described, we have seen, the multiplicity of living beings constituting the body under many headings. One of these is the
drive, from which it is possible to bring out the intellectuality of the
body. What is a drive? Every drive is a thrust toward something; a force
arranged and subordinated to an end that it intends. That toward which
the drive thrusts itself must be a priori accessible and appropriate to it,
for if that is not the case, then it could not tend to its end and, by the
same token, to its proper work, to the unfolding of its own quantum of
power, or even to its own satisfaction. Stated otherwise, every drive is
a drive toward something good, and this, from whatever point of view
considered; there is there an evaluation, which, for that reason alone,
was incorporated.5 In what sense can this end, toward which the drive
thrusts, be characterized as good? If every drive takes possession of itself in the movement and tension that carries it toward an end, then not
only does that end belong to it, but it is also good for it, since it is only
through that end that the drive can be what it is. Nevertheless, what is
good for one driveand which is none other than the condition of its
energycould not be good for another drive. The good is thus liable
to variation, since it is seen as something different from the standpoint
of two different beings.6 What is more, there is no isolated drive and all
our bodily drives are organized in a hierarchy. Consequently, the drive
which imposes itself upon others, imposes at the same time its own point
of viewevery drive is a certain need for domination; each has its perspective that it would impose as norm on all the other drives7and what
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is good for the former becomes, ipso facto, if not what is good for the
latter taken in themselves, then at least what they are good for and what
they serve. Being subordinated to a directive drive, all the other drives of
the body cannot then fail to unfurl their power in service to the whole
that they constitute, and thereby and at least contribute to the preservation of that whole. Following the guiding thread of the body, writes
Nietzsche, we know man as a plurality of animated beings that partly
fight each other mutually, and partly, being ordered and subordinated
to each other, also assert the whole involuntarily, through the assertion
of their individual beings.8
Drives are not only commanded by values, liable to change by virtue of their hierarchical relations. But more fundamentally, they are
themselves the late effects of old evaluations, still persisting because they
have been incorporated. All evaluations are the result of determinate
quantities of force and of their degree of consciousness: these are the
perspectival laws attuned to the being of a man and a peoplethat which
is proximate, important, necessary, etc. All human drives, as much as
the animal ones, have taken, under specific circumstances, the form of
conditions of existence, and have been placed in the foreground. Drives are
the subsequent effect of long-preserved evaluations, which now function instinctively as a system of judgments of pleasure and pain. At first constraint, then habit, then need, then natural tendency (drive).9 Values
result from the quantitative difference of forces, since this difference,
irreducible to quantity, is qualitative or hierarchical, and there could
not be hierarchy without evaluation. Values should thus be conceived as
the conditions of existence of a domination-formation, that is, of a set
of forces, subject to and unified by the greatest among them. Initially,
the union of these forces is the product of chancewithin the chemical
world, the organism is the exception and the accident10but at length,
the perspective or value imposed by the dominant force becomes the
very condition of existence of the dominated ones. This is ultimately
because, starting from dominant force, what is proximate, important,
necessary, etc. may be defined for the hierarchical structure constituted
by the totality of forces. Thus, in the midst of that relatively durable structure that is the body each dominated force is first compelled to deploy
its own power, within the perspective or according to the value of the
sovereign power. This constraint thereafter becomes habit, then need,
then drive. The becoming-drive of the forces is fulfilled once the evaluation becomes an instinct. I speak of instinct, writes Nietzsche, when
some kind of judgment (taste, at its lower level) is incorporated in such a
way that it henceforth sets itself in motion spontaneously, without waiting for excitations.11 What does this spontaneity mean? By thrusting
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itself toward its end, which is always the result of an evaluation, the drive
asserts ipso facto a value judgment. Its drive activity is thus in itself spontaneously moral, and this is the reason why Nietzsche can say of the body,
not only that it is the moral phenomenon par excellence,12 but above all
he can marvel that the effective morality of man in the life of his body is a
hundred times greater and finer than any conceptual moralizing has ever
been. The multiple thou shalt, continually working in us! The consideration between those commanding and those obeying! The knowledge
of the superior and inferior functions!13
Yet why do the drives function as a system of judgments of pleasure
and pain? We should first emphasize that there is no striving for pleasure: but pleasure steps in when what was striven for is attained: pleasure
accompanies, pleasure does not move . . .14 Indeed, if the will to power
is the internal principle of the force or that all driving force is will to
power,15 then it is not pleasure but power that is at the source of the drive
movement. What then is this pleasure which is, in any event, tied to drive
activity? Pleasure is but a symptom of the feeling of power attained, a
consciousness of difference.16 However, concomitant with the increase
of power, pleasurewhich presupposes comparison, without which the
difference could not become consciousconsequently never comes
without displeasure. Indeed, if the intensification of power is always a victory, there is no victory without resistance. Only the effort reveals the obstacle. This is the case, for example, in tickling, also the sexual tickling
in the act of coitus. It seems, a small inhibition is overcome and immediately followed by new inhibition that is again overcomethis game of
resistance and victory arouses more strongly the general feeling of superabundant, excessive power, which constitutes the essence of pleasure.17
Pleasure is thus of a rhythmic and tensorial nature: Pleasure is a sort of
rhythm in the succession of minimal pains and in their gradual relations;
a stimulation through rapid succession of intensification and relaxation,
as in the excitation of a nerve or a muscle; and taken as a whole, a rising
curve: tension is essential therein, and relaxation. Tickling.18
This determination of pleasure calls, however, for three remarks.
(1) If pleasure is made up of pains, there could not be great pleasure
without the pains being protracted and the tension of the bow, tremendous.19 (2) It is not enough to make pain an ingredient of pleasure
to define its nature. Indeed, since the sensation of pain does not increase thanks to small stimulations of pleasure, pleasure and pain are
two different things and not contraries.20 (3) From the moment that
pleasure is the feeling of an intensification of power, not only would
pleasure be stronger when intensification is higher, but also pleasure
and displeasure are based in being. If the innermost essence of being
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is will to power, if pleasure is any increase in power, and displeasure any

feeling of not being able to resist or dominate: should we not then posit
pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these
two oscillations of yes and no? But who feels pleasure? . . . But who wants
power? . . . An absurd question: if essence itself is power-will (Machtwille)
and consequently a pleasure-displeasure-feeling!21 Relative to this feeling, will to power is indeed a tensorial force [Spannkraft];22 however,
pleasure is more original than pain, since there can only be resistance
in regard to a will to domination or to victory. From this point of view, it is
then possible to consider pain as the consequence of a will to pleasure,
even as a sort of pleasure.23
Having thus described and interpreted pleasure against the horizon of will to power, we can henceforth bring out its intellectual character and understand in what sense the drives operate as a system of
judgments of pleasure and pain. Arising from the quantitative difference of forces, values must be instituted by will to power, which could
not grow without them. Consequently, pleasure presupposes the values
required for the intensification of power, of which pleasure is merely the
symptom. This is the reason why, in another note on instinct, Nietzsche
can write: The instincts as judgments based on prior experiences: not
experiences of pleasure and displeasure: for pleasure is first a form of
judgment of instinct (a feeling of increased power or: as if power had been
increased). BEFORE the feelings of pleasure and displeasure there are
on the whole feelings of strength and weakness.24 In short, and to sum up: if
pleasure is always the result of an evaluation, if pleasure and displeasure
are accidental and not originary things, value judgments of a secondary
rank that are derived from a ruling value,25 then drives do indeed work
as a moral system.
This latter statement does not go without difficulty, however. Indeed, if pain is of a wholly different nature than pleasure, can we assert
about judgments of pain what we just claimed for judgments of pleasure?
In other words, is pain as intellectual as pleasure? If this were not the
case, it would become impossible to claim that drives function instinctively as a system of judgments of pleasure and pain. What then is pain?
When, for example, I burn my hand in contact with fire, I do not suffer
before recoiling, but afterward. Thus, pain does not precede the reaction
but follows it. That pain is the cause of reflex actions has appearance
and even the prejudice of philosophers in its favor; but, if one observes
it closely, in cases of sudden pain the reflex comes noticeably earlier than
the sensation of pain.26 This description27 implies that pain does not
indicate what has been damaged at the moment, but the value of the
damage in relation to the individual as a whole.28 Indeed, to burn ones
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hand is to be unable to take hold of this or that as before. This impossibility reveals the importanceor the lack thereofand thus the value
of the possibilities of which the burned hand temporarily deprives me.
Pain is thus inseparable from an evaluation, and we must conclude from
this that it is an intellectual process in which a definite judgment is resolutely expressedthe judgment harmful, in which long experience is
accumulated. In itself, there is no pain.29 Consequently, bodily pain is as
intellectual as pleasure, and it is legitimate to consider the drive body a
system of judgments of pain and pleasure.
The process itself of corporeal pain is not yet described for all that.
Nietzsche will do this in the following fashion: It would go ill with me if,
when I stumbled, I had to wait for the fact to ring the bell of consciousness and for instructions about how to act to be telegraphed back . . .
What I notice with the greatest possible clarity is rather that the reflex
of my foot follows first to prevent my falling, and then, following a measurable lapse of time, a sort of painful wave that is suddenly felt in the
front of my head. Thus one does not react to the pain. Pain is projected
after the fact onto the wounded site:but the essence of this local pain
is nevertheless not the expression of the specificity of the local injury;
it is a mere place-sign whose force and tone correspond to the injury,
which the nerve centers have undergone. That, as a result of this shock,
the muscular strength of the organism is measurably lowered, does not
warrant our seeking the essence of pain in a diminution of the feeling
of power . . . To repeat, one does not react to pain; displeasure is not a
cause of action. Pain itself is a reaction, the reflex is another and earlier
reactionboth of them originate in different places.30
We must first emphasize that pain is not originally local, since it is
not the lesion as suchnor is it at the moment at which it occursthat
hurts. Pain is thus not initially relative to the sole place at which an excitation occurs. How is that so and why? Pain always comes after a break
in equilibrium, of which stumbling is a perfect example, and which concerns the body as a whole. What is properly specific in pain is always the
protracted tremor, the prolonged trembling of a terrifying shock in the
cerebral center of the nervous system: one does not really suffer from
the cause of pain (from some kind of injury, for example), but rather
from the long disturbance of equilibrium that occurs as a result of the
shock.31 If pain is the aftereffect of an imbalance, it cannot fail to be
a way of getting back on foot, a recovery, a restoration, in short, a defense. Pain should be thus understood as a disease of the cerebral nerve
center [Krankheit der cerebralen Nervenheerde]pleasure is certainly not a
disease . . .32 How is this defense set in motion? The most violent excitation is not in itself a pain: rather, in this shock that we feel, the nervous
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center is morbidly attacked and it is only that which projects pain toward the
site of the excitation. This projection is a defensive and protective measure. The shock entails a multitude of affects: aggression, fear, resistance,
irritation, fury, prudence, reflection on safety measuresmovements of
the entire body result from these. Pain is a deep restorative movement, with at
the same time a mass of thoughts; a disease following a loss of equilibrium
and a violence momentarily done to the will.33 The neuro-cerebral center
reacts to the concussion received by localizing the pain post facto, which
is thus projected onto a bodily site which is not its seat.34 The localization of pain, which is equivalent, then, to its reduction, is thus indeed a
defensive process.
8/31/11 3:12:33 PM
To Will, to Feel, to Think
This description of pain nevertheless remains insufficient, since we have

not yet determined the status of the neuro-cerebral center nor the conditions of possibility of pains localization. Let us begin with the problem
of localization. It goes without saying that pain could not be localized
unless the totality of the body, as a structure of domination, were itself
spatialized. It likewise goes without saying that this spatialization must be
founded on the synthetic principle that ensures the magnificent cohesion of the manifold living beings constituting the body; will to power. It
is through will to power, as we have seen, that one force relates to another
by acting upon it. Not a being, not becoming, but pathosis the most
elementary fact from which becoming and acting emerge . . .1 The will
to power is what enables a force to act on, or for the sake of, another. But
for a force to act on anotherand the body is a hierarchized plurality
of distinct forcesthese forces must be diversely localized: If A acts on
B, then A is first localized separately from B.2 In other words, it is will to
power itself that requires the spatialization of the body and the localization of pain, and it makes both of them possible. Furthermore, at the moment he conceived the will to power as the essence of being, Nietzsche
who had already related space to the will in 187071pointed out, in
1877, that force . . . is bound to a site.3 He thereupon noted in 1884 that
force and space are but two expressions and two ways of regarding
the same thing.4 Nietzsche presented this correlation clearly in the following remark: With solid shoulders, space resists nothingness. Where
there is space, there is being.5 The localization of pain, the spatialization
of the body, which makes it possible and, more generally, space, all derive
from will to power itself. Let us note in passing that it is not only space
but also time which are thus brought back to the essence of force, that
is, to will to power. Indeed, for want of general equilibrium, force cannot stand still. Change belongs to its essence, and with it, temporality.6
If the spatiality of body and the body itself remain incomprehensible
within ecstatic temporality, this is not the case for the will to power.7
It is henceforth possible to specify the status of the neuro-cerebral
center, which Schopenhauer had considered as the objectivation of
consciousness. The body is a hierarchical plurality of variously localized
forces, which must be able to understand each other, failing which, there
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would be neither command nor obedience. Now, on the one hand, to

command is not only to make an order known, and on the other hand, to
be obeyed, is rather to be in relation to an inferior; in short, to communicate and present oneself as a hierarchical superior. To communicate oneself
[sich mitteilen] is thus, originally, to extend ones power over the other, writes
Nietzsche who, having transformed the traditional concept of sign and
referred the origin of language to will to power, continues in this way:
An old sign language is at the foundation of this drivethe sign is the
imprint (often painful) of one will on another will. To make oneself understood
through blows (ants).8 There is no commanding without communication,
and the body is a domination-formation whose unity is that of a joust or
struggle,9 whose multiple constituent forces can temporarily exchange
roles such that the one that ordinarily commands obeys for a time10
and the center of gravity of the whole thereby shifts. For this reason, a
center of transmission, communication, and even telecommunication of
orders, a directing authority, is necessary to the understanding and coordination of all these forces. Such is the neuro-cerebral center: the nervous system and brain are a system of direction and a centralization apparatus for the innumerable individual minds of different ranks.11 But why
call the multiple constitutive forces of the body minds here? Because
the obedience of the ones to the others never goes without a mutual and
asymmetrical understanding, which is, Nietzsche noted, neither blind
nor mechanical, but rather elective, prudential, considerate, even grudging. And if this is so, it is because the understanding of a command
which originally is a feeling of suffering and the recognition of a foreign
poweris as painless as it is prompt: To understand quickly and easily,
becomes highly advised (to avoid as many blows as possible), the fastest
reciprocal understanding is the least painful mutual relation.12 Now, on
the one hand, and relative to those relations established brutally in the
realm of inorganic nature, in which the absolute instantaneousness of
the will to power reigns, the relations of power peculiar to organic life
are softened through the anticipation of the future, prudence, cunning,
in short, through the mind.13 On the other hand, Nietzsche did not fail
to emphasize the characteristic rapidity of spiritual processes.14 This is a
rapidity we become aware of, comparatively speaking, by absorbing hashish or by simply dreaming.15
This center of transmission and direction, which permits the lightning fast understanding between superior and inferior beings combined in a body, should not, however, be mistaken for consciousness or
the ego. Why not? First, by virtue of the unconscious character of the
activity of those multiple beings that constitute the body. If, from the
incipience of the thought of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche could assert
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that the great, fundamental activity is unconscious16while adding that

the consciousness of the ego is the last thing added when a completed
organism operates, something almost superfluous: the consciousness of
unity, something extremely imperfect in any event and often lacking in
comparison with the effective, innate, incorporated, laborious unity of
all the functionsthen, somewhat later, when he justified the methodological priority of the body, he would urge, in a nota bene, that even if
the center of consciousness does not coincide with the physiological center,
it is nonetheless possible that the PHYSIOLOGICAL center might also be
the MENTAL center. The intellectuality of feeling (pleasure and pain), that
is to say, that it is commanded from this center.17 Consciousness could
not therefore be assimilated to the center of transmission and direction
implied by the multiplicity of living beings constituting the body.
But notably thereafter, Nietzsche refuses to distinguish between a
neuro-cerebral center, that is, a set of coordinated organs, and the effects
of its functioningi.e., willing, feeling, and thinking. Why? To posit the
neuro-cerebral center apart from willing, feeling, and thinking amounts
to positing a constant being under the changing multiplicity of corporeal events. Such a hypothesis implies the separation of what comes into
being and what brings it about, between becoming and being. It goes
hand in hand with the mythology of the concept of the subject.18 How
should we understand this? If we ascribe to the neuro-cerebral apparatus
the production of volitions, feelings, or thoughts, we make the former
into the author of the latter. This conclusion is mythological, because it
separates what acts from the acting, says Nietzsche, who thus continues:
When I say the lightning flashes, I have posited the flash in one moment as an activity and, at a second moment, as a subject, I have thus
posited, beneath the event, a being that is not one with that event but is,
instead, fixed, is, and does not become. 19 The logico-grammatical interpretation of the event, which is based on the distinction between subject
and verb, is inadmissible because it implies that the force is something
more and other than its effects. For just as the popular mind separates
the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates
strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to
do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no being behind doing,
effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed
the deed is everything.20 Because what holds for lightning and flash also
holds for the neuro-cerebral apparatus and willing, feeling, or thinking,
it is thus most illegitimate to dissociate a set of coordinated organs from
the effects of their operation.
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That it might be impossible to conceive the neuro-cerebral apparatus as a subjective agent producing willing, feeling and thinking in no
way prevents us from understanding its formation out of the mere play
and relations between the multiple volitions, feelings, and thoughts of
which it is the centerquite the contrary. To begin with, what does this
repeated conjunction of willing, feeling, and thinking denote? Nothing
other than force itself. Would it not suffice, asks Nietzsche, to think
of ourselves, as force, and thus as a unity in which willing, feeling, and
thinking would still be muddled and indistinct? And to think of organic
beings as the beginning of a division, such that all organic functions
were assembled in this unity, thus self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition,
excretion, metabolism?21 How do willing, feeling, and thinking belong
to force? Since we have already seen that every force is a will inasmuch as
it is, by essence, exerted on another force to command or obey it; [and
again] that any force is, by virtue of this hierarchical relation, inseparable
from a valuethat is to say from a thoughtit remains for us to determine whether the will to power does not likewise entail that every force
is a feeling.
It occurred to Nietzsche to define willing as a pressing, very agreeable feeling; as the phenomenon accompanying any discharge of force.22
This no doubt means that pleasure is a symptom of an intensification
of power, but also that from the standpoint of the will to power itself,
the will, in Schopenhauers sense or, more narrowly, as a power of the
soul, is but a result, an outcome. If this were not the case, then never
could Nietzsche have said of the will what he would later say about pleasure; namely, that the will does not move, [that] it is rather an accompanying phenomenon23or again, if self-control is an equilibrium of multiple
forces, that voluntas is ultimately an overweight [bergewicht], unconditional and mechanical, a victory that comes to consciousness.24 However,
it goes without saying that the will, in the traditional sense of the term,
could not appear as a feeling if the latter did not also belong to the will
to power from which this will derives and which founds it.
In what sense does force, or will, include feeling as one of its elements? Replying to Schopenhauer, who maintained that the will is simultaneously simple and well known, and who therefore did not realize
that every word is a prejudice,25 Nietzsche responds in an important
paragraph of Beyond Good and Evil: As I see it, the act of willing is above
all something complex, something that has unity only as a wordand this
common prejudice of using only one word has overridden the philosophers caution (which was never all that great anyway). So let us be more
cautious for once, let us be unphilosophical. Let us say that in every act
of willing there is first of all a multiplicity of feelings, namely the feeling
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of the condition of the away from [weg], the feeling of the condition towards which, that feelings of this away and this towards themselves, and
then also an accompanying feeling in the muscles, which, without our
actually moving arms and legs, comes into play out of a kind of habit,
as soon as we will. Therefore, just as feeling (and indeed many kinds
of feelings) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, secondly,
should thinking also: in every act of will there is a ruling thoughtlet us
not imagine it possible to sever this thought from willing, as if any will
would then remain over! Third, the will is not only a complex of feeling
and thinking, but it is above all an affect: and specifically the affect of the
command.26
It is apposite first to emphasize that the theme of this analysis is
not the will to power itself, but our will as it appears to us. And we
can describe it in relation to the guiding thread of the body, that is to
say, in the light of the will to power. From a general manner, as we have
sufficiently seen, to will is to act on a will, to make oneself understood
and obeyed by it. But what happens when we are at the same time the
ones commanding and those obeying, when we want something from
or for ourselves, when we experience the freedom of the will? In that
case, we cannot fail to experience both the feeling of constraint and that
of control. To this is added the feeling of passing from the one to the
other, that is, the feeling of being victorious over a resistance. But why do
constraint and control, resistance and victory present themselves as feelings? What then is a feeling or, rather, what is it to experience a feeling?
It is to be in oneself open to something other than self, to be in oneself
concerned by something other than self. Feeling consequently implies
openness and relation. Now, no force could act on another unless the
one and other could accede to each other, each in its own way and this,
in the dual sense of an exposition unto . . . , which means openness, and
of a blow delivered against . . . , which marks the relation. For the will
to power to express itself . . . it should feel when something comes close
to it that this [thing] is apt to be assimilated, specified Nietzsche right
after having asserted, again with respect to will to power, that remote
action must not be set aside: something attracts something else, something
feels attracted. Such is the fundamental fact.27 Consequently, if the will
to power can be described and understood as a feeling, it is because it is
not exerted on matter or on an organ, but on another will, which must
be a priori accessible and open to it. Accessibility and openness constitute
the formal characteristics, as it were, of any feeling in general. However,
and we must again insist on this, this feeling is commanded by a thought
or a value, since each force can relate to the others only within the perspective opened to it by the unfolding of its quantum of power. That is
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why the will is nothing without the thought commanding it. That is also
the reason why thoughts are actions.28 That is [finally] the reason why
the will and the body can be known, for, as Nietzsche maintains against
Schopenhauer: Of the will, we can only know what is knowable in it
thus, supposing that we know ourselves as willing, there must be something intellectual in the willing.29 This intellectuality of the will, which
ultimately only denotes its perspectival character, extends all the way to
the muscular feeling that accompanies every volition. Indeed, muscular activity, whose metaphysical substratum is constituted by the will, according to Schopenhauer, is always the symptom of an intensification of
power, for Nietzsche. It is thus that love can be described as a tonic: The
muscular strength of a young girl grows the moment a single man comes
into her vicinity; there are instruments to measure this. When the relation between the sexes becomes closer still, in dancing for example, or in
any other social customs, this force increases to the point of allowing real
feats of strength [Kraftstcken]: one ends up disbelieving ones eyesand
ones watch! Here, in fact, it should be considered that already dancing,
in itself, like any rapid movement, gives rise to a kind of rapture in the
whole vascular, nervous and muscular system. In this case, one should
count on the combined effects of a double rapture.30 The latter, defined
as the feeling of intensification of force [Kraftsteigerung] and fullness,
as the feeling of a surplus of force, or as an exalted feeling of power
whose most ancient and most originary form is the rapture of sexual
stimulation, thus implies as constitutive moment vigor, as a feeling of
dominion in the muscles, as pleasure and suppleness in movement, as
dance, as lightness and presto.31 It is also thus and above all, that thought
can itself be described as a muscular and, more generally, corporeal phenomenon. Nietzsche never ceased observing this. After revealing that the
chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled On Old and New Tablets was
composed on the most onerous ascent from the [Nice] station to the
marvelous Moorish eyrie, ze, he immediately added: the suppleness
of my muscles has always been greatest when my creative energies were
flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired; let us keep the soul out
of it. Often one could have seen me dance; in those days I could walk
in the mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of weariness.
I slept well, laughed muchmy vigor and patience were perfect.32 The
muscular feeling that accompanies the will is thus ultimately none other
than a feeling of victory. And if it comes into play from the moment we
will independently of the movement of our members, this is because
that victory, whose highest form is dance, belongs essentially to the will
as will to power. That is why Nietzsche asserts, against Hegel, that the
spirit of a philosopher could wish for nothing more than to be a good
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dancer. For dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety,
his divine service. 33 But that the accompanying muscular feeling be
a feeling of victory means that it is indissociable from a value. Indeed,
the victory of one will over another is only possible by virtue of the axiological superiority of the former over the latter, since every value can
be reduced to a quantum of power. Consequently, muscular activity itself
must be understood as a value judgment. And Nietzsche can write, by way
of recapitulation, that our most sacred convictions, our immutability in
regard to the highest values, are the judgments of our muscles.34
Notwithstanding, the will is not only a complex of feeling and
thought, it is above all an affect: the affect of commanding. What does
this mean? If the will is above all the affect of commanding, the latter
must include in itself, as a moment, both feeling and thoughtor value.
How is that possible, and what should we understand under affect
here? Like feeling, affect is characterized by an openness and a relation.
To affect or to be affected is always to be in relation to what affects or is
affected, and this relation would be impossible without a foregoing openness that can be reciprocal without being symmetrical. But an affect is
not a passion, and it is rightly that Heidegger, following Kant, considers
anger as an affect, and hatred as a passion, both being considered feelings.35 What is it, then, that distinguishes an affect from a passion, if both
are feelings? Two distinctive characteristics differentiate the affect from
the passion. The first is its suddenness, and its instantaneous quality. Contrary to passion, an affect does not last. The second characteristic is the
fact that an affect is always either pleasant or painful. Now, on the one
hand, pleasure is, as we have seen it, the symptom of intensification of
power and, if commanding is compelling obedience, then commanding
will always be a source of pleasure, since any force that affects another by
dominating, is increased accordingly. This is why Nietzsche can say that
the most powerful affects are the most valuable, inasmuch as there are
no greater sources of force.36 On the other hand, and as we have also
seen, relations between the forces must be as rapid as possible, both in
order to reduce pain and because every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.37 In short, the will can be defined as the affect of commanding; for to command is suddenly to affect another will,
which must have been previously felt, and by subordinating it through a
higher quantum of powerthat is, through a higher valueto feel pleasure in the increase of ones own power. The will to power must therefore
be understood as the primitive form of affect, of which all other affects
are but derivative configurations.38 Psychology, whose object is traditionally feeling, willing, and thinking, must be conceived as morphology and
the doctrine of the development of the will to power.39 Finally, morality, which is
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nothing but the system of value judgments constituting the conditions of

life of a relatively enduring being within becoming, must be interpreted
as a semiology of affects for which the body is the instructor.40
However, the body could not assume this function as guiding thread
unless the will to power were the principle and the condition of possibility of incorporation. If to will is to commandand this is its primary
determinationand if a man who wills commands something within
himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience,41
then the will, possible only amidst a hierarchy of multiple forces to each
of which belongs by essence the trinity of thinking, feeling, willing 42a trinity that traditionally forms the soulthen the will implies
the body as the domination-formation which is the necessary seat of its
activity. The trinity thinking, feeling, willing no longer refers to separate
facultiesthere are not three faculties in the soul43but is peculiar to
force as such. And, after having asserted that the belief in an indestructible, eternal, indivisible soul must be excluded from science, Nietzsche will add that it is not at all necessary to get rid of the soul at the
same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable
hypothesesas happens frequently to clumsy naturalists, who can hardly
touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for
new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as mortal soul, and soul as subjective multiplicity, and soul as
social structure of drives and affects, want henceforth to have citizens
rights in science.44 Summarizing his entire analysis of the will, Nietzsche
can then conclude that the person exercising volition adds the feelings
of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful under-wills
or under-soulsindeed, our body is but a social structure composed of
many soulsto his feelings of delight as commander. . . . In all willing
it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as
already said, of a social structure composed of many souls. 45 The body
is thus indeed required by the will to power as the cardinal structure of
its unfolding. Moreover, we must recalleven if this is but a philological
confirmation, i.e., an external onethat from the time Nietzsche began
to see in the will to power the essence of life46 and the ultimate fact to be
attained,47 he would note: I conceive but one being, which is at once one
and many, which changes and remains, knows, feels, willsthis being is
my originary fact.48 At the moment, only the word body was missing.
What are the repercussions of such a conception of the will on its
freedom? How should we think freedom when it no longer belongs to
the ego but to the bodyi.e., to a domination-formation? In a general
and formal way, a will is said to be free when it is not constrained. Free
means, as Nietzsche specifies: not to be pushed and shoved, without
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a FEELING OF CONSTRAINT [ZWANGSGEFHL]. When related to the

will to power, which, as victorious, always implies resistance, the will is
free when it constrains: Where we encounter resistance and are forced
to yield to it, we feel unfree: where we do not yield to it but force it to give
in to us, free. That is to say that by freedom of the will we designate the
feeling of our SURPLUS of strength; the awareness that our strength compels
in comparison to another force, which is coerced.49 Thus interpreted,
as a feeling of superiority and sovereignty, as an affect of command, freedom can no longer be imputed to the will, as the latter is no longer one
but many. Conversely, it is the presupposition of the unity of the will, or
the ego, which is at the root of the doctrine of freedom of the will. The
will was taken to be free, because an action seemed to derive from it as
from its exclusive origin or cause. This illusion supposes the identification of the will that commands with that which follows it with effects. It
is clearly not without foundation in things themselves. Indeed, if in the
great majority of cases there has been exercise of will only when the effect of the commandthat is, obedience; that is, the actionwas to be
expected, the appearance has translated itself into the feeling, as if there
were a necessity of effect. The will gives itself the illusion of freedom by
providing itself with that of its unity. This is the case when he who wills
attributing to the will that commands what pertains to the will that executesbelieves that to will and to act are one and the same, a belief that
does not fail to increase his feeling of power. Freedom of the willthat
is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with
the executor of the orderwho, as such, enjoys also the triumph over
obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his will itself that
overcame them.50 Let us add, in conclusion, that, by referring the freedom of the will to the affect of command, Nietzsche is not unaware of
its transcendental determination as absolute spontaneity and as abrupt
beginning, since he wrote (in a note partly integrated into paragraph
19 of Beyond Good and Evil): To will is to command: but to command is a
determinate affect (this affect is a sudden explosion of force)tense, clear,
one thing exclusively in sight, the most intimate conviction of superiority, assurance of being obeyedfreedom of the will is the feeling of
superiority of him who commands toward the one who obeys: I am free
and this one must obey. 51
Having thus established that the constitutive forces of the body imply, as moments, will, feeling, and thoughtin other words, that the body
is a hierarchy of mortal soulsit remains for us beyond this to understand
how these forces can form an apparatus or an organ-complex and, more
generally speaking, how the forces of body can organize themselves. This
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task is necessary for at least two reasons. The moment the neuro-cerebral
apparatus (which we are attempting to explain through the sole play of
the bodys manifold forces to which the trinity of willing-feeling-thinking
belongs, and thanks to which each force may command or obey the
others, understand or make itself understood by them as quickly as lightning) cannot be distinguished from the system of hierarchical relations
fostered by these forces, does it not become impossible to imagine its central status? Is there not an incompatibility between the unity of the center
of direction, or even transmission, and the plurality of drives that alone
are constitutive? The difficulty would be lifted if we could show that the
organization is dissolved in the hierarchy, and that the organ-formation
arises from will to power. By the same tokenand this is our second reasonthe body as a system of organs, or organism, would be definitively
led back to the body as domination-formationand this, in such a way
that the body as a structure or formation would become the foundation
of the body as system.
8/31/11 3:12:34 PM
Organization and Reproduction
What then is an organ? Before we answer this question, we must first

determine its necessity and recall the horizon in which it is inscribed.
When Schopenhauer refers the body to the will, he thereby reduces the
plurality of the organs and functions to a single undifferentiated principle. The complexity of the body is therefore metaphysically obscure to
him, since the differentiation of its organs and functions does not come
from the will as such. It comes simply from the hierarchy in the degrees
of its objectivation; that is, from representation. Identifying the will to
live with this primary animal, Schopenhauer attributes the shape and
organization1 of the body to circumstances of life, and to its simple
reactive adaptation to external conditions. Conceiving the body as metaphysically devoid of organs, he assimilates its complexity to a pure fact
of representation, without foundation in things in themselves. On the
other hand, when Saint Paul acknowledges behind the plurality of organs a plurality of wills, it is essentially impossible for him to distinguish
them qualitatively, since they are all, whether submissive or rebellious,
dependent on the divine will; that is, reactive. In Schopenhauers case,
the plurality of organs is unconceivable for a metaphysical reason: the
will is one. In Saint Pauls case, the qualitative difference of wills is unthinkable for a theological reason: in the presence of God, all forces
are equal, of the same worth, and there is no active force. The Pauline
and Schopenhauerian concepts of the body, respectively theological and
metaphysical, do not allow us then to think its organization or activity.
Conversely, the bodys organization and activity could not be understood
without first questioning the metaphysics that culminates in Schopenhauers doctrine of the will, and without thereafter proclaiming, in the
same act, the death of Godthat God who reveals himself to the bodies
upon which he exerts his justifying, salvific power. The organs should
therefore be conceived in function of their adherence to the body as
domination-formation, and relative to will to power.
How does the will to power allow us to understand the formation
of the organs, and how do organic functions, like digestion or reproduction, derive from it? It is not enough, in effect, to reduce the organs to
drives; we must first describe the way in which the drives give rise to the
organs. In other words, and supposing that the organs refer to drives as
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to their conditions of possibility, it remains to be shown that these conditions are indeed their own. If the body, whether active or reactive, is a
domination-formation, it nonetheless remains that it could and still can
be considered an organism. It is therefore only after having explained
how the concept of organism draws its meaning and possibility from the
concept of domination formation, that we will ultimately have completed
the transformation of the concept of the body, without which the opening of new corporeal possibilitiesan opening that stands at the horizon
of this essaywould be simply inconceivable.
In a general fashion, an organ is something used for something
else. The eye is an organ because it is used to see, because it is useful
to the organism to which it belongs. But what should we understand
by utility, here? Can we derive from it an understanding of the organ
itself? When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility,
Nietzsche warns, one has however thereby taken not one step towards
explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it
comprehensible that a thing must necessarily exist.2 Why is it impossible
to account for the formation and existence of an organ on the basis of its
utility? Utility does not allow us to reach the origin of an organ, because
it is not itself originary. Utility could not be an explanatory principle,
because it is itself but a consequence derived from an evaluation. How
to understand this latter proposition, and to what state of affairs does it
refer? On the one hand, the utility of an organ is subject to variation,
since it can play vicarious roleslacking eyes, it is hearing that serves our
orientation in space.3 On the other hand, and above all, utility should
never be dissociated from that to which it relates. In a note directed explicitly against Darwinism, but whose argument is also valid against Schopenhauer, Nietzsche brings this out clearly: The utility of an organ
does not explain its formation, to the contrary!over the longest time,
during which a [particular] property is forming, it does not preserve the
individual and is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.What, ultimately, is useful? One must
ask in relation to what, useful? For example, that which is useful for the
long life of the individual might prove inauspicious to its strength and
splendor; what preserves the individual might at the same time arrest
and hold fixed its evolution. On the other hand, a lack, a degeneration,
can be of the highest utility, insofar as it acts as a stimulant to its other
organs. In the same way, a state of need can be a condition of existence
[Existenzbedingung], insofar as it reduces an individual to that measure
of expenditure which holds it together but prevents it from squandering
itself.4 To say that utility differs according as it refers to the enduring life
of the individual alone, or to the intensification of its power, amounts to
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saying that it varies according to quanta of force; that it depends on the

perspective in which it is engaged, and that it is always relative to a prior
evaluation. This is because the life that seeks its own preservation or becomes disorganized could not have the same values as that which seeks
the splendor of additional power.
The reason why utility does not allow us to explain the formation of
the organs nevertheless indicates the path to follow to that end. If utility is a very elevated principle, that we should above all not underestimate, it remains that it refers to the means, to subordinate ends, and
that it presupposes an evaluation and a table of goods [Gtertafel].5
Utility is thus always dependent on and correlative to an appreciation of
good and bad, since any determination of the useful necessarily6 implies
that of the harmful. While identifying useful with good for . . .7 and
once translating by the useful in the Neoplatonic expression , which he rendered by the useful is more
useful than truth,8 Nietzsche distinguishes two kinds of philosophers. If
the first serve the human task that consists in making all things useful,
the second, who rank higher, command and state: thus shall it be! they
begin by determining the useful, that which constitutes utility for man;
they dispose of the preparatory work of scientific men, yet knowledge is
for them but a means to create.9 From the moment the determination
of the useful is an act of command, and the latter the essence of will to
power, utility must be founded on the will to power.10 It is thus to the will
to power that we must go back, to understand the formation of organs,
as well as that to which they may be useful.
How to retrace the genesis of an organ, once we have reduced the
naivet that consists in believ[ing] that the eye has been formed for
the sake of seeing?11 In other words: how does will to power explain the
formation of an organ, to what structure of the will to power should this
formation be attributed? However, is posing the question in this way not
abstracting the organ from the organism to which it belongs? Can we
understand the formation of an organ independently of the plurality
from which it arises? Should we not, on the contrary, and here more than
anywhere, start from the principle according to which it is first their relations that constitute beings? What kind of relation then do the different
organs establish within the same organism? The body is not a juxtaposition but a hierarchy of organs. Thus, some organs, for example, matter
more than others in the preservation of the whole that they constitute.
From this perspective, their value is therefore greater and the hierarchical distinction between superior and inferior constitutes the organ as
such. The organ is a moral phenomenon. In noting that the judgments
superior functions and inferior functions should already be present
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in all organic formations, well before any sensation of pleasure and displeasure,12 Nietzsche is saying precisely the same thing, since an organ
is indissociable from one or several functions. It is thus indeed from the
hierarchy of organs that their formation should be understood; this, the
more so that the superior and inferior, the choice of what is more
important, more useful, more urgent, already exists in the most inferior
organisms. Living: this already means to evaluate.13
An organ, as the word indicates, serves for something. However,
before serving for something, it is in service to something. The eye could
not serve for seeing if it were not initially in service to the body. The
proof is that the capacity of the organs varies according to the strength
of the body. Nietzsche himself gives an example of this when he relates
that his visual forces increased as his vital force did.14 Thus, to explain
the formation of an organ, it is fitting to begin by understanding the way
in which something can be put into service of something else, and become useful to it. To explain the formation of an organ is not to proceed
to some morphological expos, which, even were it complete, explains
nothing, but only describes a prodigious state of affairs. How an organ can
be used to achieve some end, that is not explained.15 It is therefore not
a matter of accounting for a form identical to itself. The prior task is to
grasp, in its very movement, the becoming-organ,16 that is, that subjugation from which the organ precisely receives its meaning as organ. Now,
since there cannot be any possible subjugation except between wills or
forces, organ formation comes under the will to power. This shows that
the drive hierarchy is indeed the condition for the organ, and that the
concept of organism presupposes the determination of the body as a
socialization of the drives.17
How does will to power give rise to the formation of an organ? How
is it an organizing force? However well one has understood the utility of
any physiological organ . . . this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older earsfor
one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose,
the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understanding the reason why it originatedthe eye being made for seeing, the
hand for grasping. . . . But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will
to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed
upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a thing,
an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever
new interpretations and adaptations, whose causes do not even have to
be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed
and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.18 When it
imposes the meaning of a function on a dominated force, the dominant
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force makes it ipso facto into an organ. That is first to say that to subjugate
is to organize, and that there is no priority of function over the organ or,
conversely, of the organ over the function. The one, as the other, have a
common origin in domination. This is then to say that the organ, so far
as it can be the object of morphological description, is constituted by will
to power. This immediately raises the question of knowing how will to
power can convey a constant spatial form to an organ, without which no
morphological description would be possible. We will come back to this
later on. Now, this is finally, and above all, to argue that the formation of
an organ is that of a meaning, or rather a chain of meanings.
Before examining the way in which will to power can impose the
meaning of a function, it is necessary to understand how meaning in
general is required by will to power. If meaning is that in which the possibility of any sort of comprehension resides, then meaning is founded on
the will to power, whose essence is the relation of command. Indeed, to
command implies making oneself obeyed, and making oneself obeyed
implies making oneself understood. No command would thus be possible without the foregoing introduction of meaning, which permits the
enactment of command. This is why meaning [is] . . . necessarily relational and a perspective,19 reducible to will to power. All meaning is
will to power,20 all meaning is hierarchical in nature, is value, and the
supreme will to power resides in the very positing of values or meaning,
since meaning defines in advance the possibility of all obedience; that
to which obedience in general is itself formally subject.
To introduce, posit, or impose a meaningwhat is this if not to
interpret? The formation of an organ is an interpretation. The will to
power interprets: when an organ is formed, it is interpretation that is at
work; it delimits, determines degrees, differences of power. Mere differences of power could not yet feel themselves as such: something must
be present that wants to grow and that interprets according to its value
whatever else seeks to grow. In this, similarin truth, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something. (The organic process presupposes
continuous INTERPRETING.)21 An organ is thus at once the monument
to a domination and the document of an interpretation. What does this
mean? In determining the differences of power, the will to power, which
is the very principle of such a determination, institutes a hierarchy. Hierarchy is the first result of the evaluation,22 since a force imposes itself on
others, owing to the value that commands it. What then does hierarchy
imply, when, deriving from evaluation, it comes from interpretation as
an imposition of meaning? The institution of a hierarchy means that
one force sets others into its service, grows from their power by having
them serve its own, subjects them to its perspective by interpreting them
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according to its own value, thereby rendering them utilizable, useful.

All the functions of organic beings are invested with evaluations.23 And
what does to make something useful for oneself mean, if not precisely
to make it ones instrument and organ? To conceive the organ as an interpretation of will to power is thus to understand it, simultaneously in
its verbal meaning as a becoming-organ and relative to its constitutive
dependency.
But the body is not made of a single, unique organ. Consequently,
how and why does will to power give rise to a plurality of organs? Each
organ is distinguished from the others through its specialization.24 It
is thus a question of determining the reason why the will to power is
specialized as will to nourishment, to property, to tools, to servants,25
or again of determiningif every organ is a subjected onethe reason why a singular force separates from a synthetic one.26 What should
we understand hereby? A force is synthetic or creative when it binds
contraries,27 that is, what commands and what obeys; the commanding
instance and the executive organs. Synthetic is thus here a synonym for
organizingthe will to power is the organizing force.28 And to look for
the reason why will to power gives rise to a plurality of organs, amounts
to looking for the reason why will to power comes to diversify itself and
to organize its own diversification. To this end, and in order to explain
the way in which the organs are formed, let us consider the example of
the protoplasm to which Nietzsche often refers.
The term protoplasm comes from botany and designates the colloidal substance that, along with the nucleus, constitutes the living cell. It
is thus a concept belonging to the cellular theory of the living being.29 But
is starting from the protoplasm, in order to account for organization, not
to give up philosophical explanation for the benefit of scientific explanation? In no sense. On the one hand, by showing that matter extends
its power as far as it is able,30 chemistry shows that will to power rules
also in the inorganic world. On the other hand, and above all, Nietzsche
subordinated the chemical complexion of the body to morality. In a note
that defined morality as the figurative expression of bodily states, Nietzsche summarizes his project in the following terms: Thus, apparently, to
change the body without chemical means in truth, it is a matter of
changing, with morality, the chemical complexion [chemische Beschaffenheit]
of the body. To this he adds immediately: Vast detour. To what extent is
it possible to achieve this more directly?31 In asserting that the creation
of a higher body is a matter of morality, before being one of chemistry,
Nietzsche brings chemical forces back to evaluations and to will to power.
But in so doing, he also raises the question of the relations between body
and technology. Indeed, while it is no longer out of the question that the
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body be modified directly, without detours, in a chemical or technological way, this transformation never ceases to depend on the values that
had previously allowed its perspective to exist, by setting its aims and
meaningor even its lack thereof. Thus, far from blindly subordinating
the body, that is, the essence of man to a bio-technologywhose possibility he had clearly seenNietzsche refers all possible chemical modification of the body to a prior critique of moral values which, in any case,
constitute that body as a domination formation. And if he is justified to
set, on the same level, the artificial reinforcement of the body through
chemical means or through the delirious idea of a protector god, this
is because these two means are ultimately from one and the same evaluation.32 Without the vast detour via revaluation, the modification of the
body could not be the transformation of mans essence. It could only reassure nihilism. It is through this vast detour that Nietzsches thought
differs from all biologism, even as it uses its language. Before being the
object of an ethics, the body is already in itself a morality. And, as long as
the evaluations presupposed by the medical interpretation of the body as
organism have not at least been elucidated, bio-ethics shall only misinterpret itself and contribute to the extension of nihilism, whose secondary effects it attempts naively, blindly, to control.
Let us come back to the protoplasm, which is a plurality of chemical
forces or a plurality of beings in struggle the ones against the others.33
Does it allow us to explain the masterpiece of the construction of an
organism starting from an egg?34 That is to say, can it explain the formation of multiple and coordinated organs? In 1887, Nietzsche noted this:
The will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it seeks that
which resists itthis is the original tendency of the protoplasm when it
extends pseudopodia and gropes about itself. Appropriation and incorporation are above all a will to overcome, a forming, an information and
transformation [An- und Umbilden] until, at length, what was overcome
has passed entirely into the power of the aggressor and augmented it.
If this incorporation does not succeed, then the formation dissociates;
and duality appears as a consequence of will to power: to avoid letting go
what has been conquered, the will to power divides itself into two wills
(and, if the circumstances allow, without wholly giving up its connections).35 It is impossible to understand the way that will to power gives
rise to a multiplicity of organs, coordinated with one another, without
beginning by recalling that will to power always, by essence, wants more
power. What does this mean if not that the will to power tends to subject
an ever-increasing number of forces, whose quantum of force is itself
greater and greater? But there is no infinite force. While noting that
this proposition best expresses the new supremacy of scientific over re-
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ligious thought, Nietzsche warns: We forbid ourselves the concept of

an infinite force as something incompatible with the concept force. 36
What should explain this incompatibility? An infinite force would have
to be infinitely increasing.37 Whence could it then get that from which
it could grow, if not from other forces, likewise infinite? But to posit this
way a plurality of infinite forces is necessarily to presuppose their equality. Moreover, indifference, adiaphoria, ruins the concept of force which,
whether tensorial, constraining, or victorious, never goes without a
hierarchical difference and inequality. The infinity of force thus implies
its unity, and this unity implies Schopenhauers concept of the will, on
the basis of which it is impossible to explain the formation of different
organs.
How does a finite force increase its power? The feeling of power, at
first conquering, then dominating (organizing)regulates what it overcomes for the sake of its preservation, and to do this, preserves the very thing
that it has overcome.38 The will to power, which we need not distinguish
here from the feeling of power, could never grow without preserving
that from which it grew. In this respect, the intensification of the will
to power can be compared to a colonial process, and Nietzsche did not
refrain from doing this when, after noting that the individual is an egg,
he added: the formation of colonies is the task of each individual.39
But to colonize is not only to conquer, but above all to place under mandate, under tutelage, to administer and to organize. Will to power preserves itself through self-organization. But there is no organization without a hierarchical division of command, and the preservation of what
has been colonized requires that will to power split into a multiplicity of
wills to power. Likewise function is created out of the feeling of power
in the fight with still weaker forces. Function preserves itself in dominion and the control exerted over functions still inferior to itwhereby it
is supported by the superior power!40 The formation of organs carrying out
different functions is the work of will to power itself, and man should be
understood as a plurality of wills to power,41 because the will to power
requires, qua preservation, its own plural. Nietzsche has clearly said this:
The weaker thrusts itself toward the stronger out of a need for nourishment; it wants to find refuge, and perhaps become one with it. The
stronger drives others away; it does not want to collapse in this way; on
the contrary, growing it divides itself into two or more. The greater the
thrust toward unity, the more we may conclude that weakness is present; the greater the impulse towards variety, differentiation, dissociation,
the more force is present.42 The formation of multiple organs is thus a
sign of force, and the construction of the organism from the egg is the
masterpiece of the will to power, because complexity and organization
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are but functions of power. Greater complexity, sharp differentiation,

the coexistence of developed organs and functions, with the disappearance of intermediate membersif that is perfection, then there is a will to
power in the organic process through which the dominant forces that command, inform, invariably increase the domain of their power, a domain in
the midst of which they continuously simplify: the imperative growing.43
It is thus because complexity is a variable of power, and because perfection increases with complexity, that it is not only possible to say that
the human body is a formation much more perfect than any system of
thoughts and feelings, and even superior to a work of art,44 but also that it
can and must be raised to the rank of guiding thread.
That will to power gives rise to a plurality of organs is nevertheless not enough to explain their coherence. Indeed, in order that the
different organs be ordered the ones to the others, they must not be too
distant from each other. How is this possible, if domination does not go
without distancethe stronger defending itself from the weaker by repelling and distancing it. Whence comes the relative proximity between
organs, without which there cannot be a coherent organization? Force
organizes what is closer and closest.45 What does this mean? Each organ, as we said, is the document of an interpretation of the will to power,
which, by projecting a meaning or values, determines by the same token
what is useful and what is not. Now, only very closely related beings can
understand each other, and consequently, give rise to obedience;46 or
again, nothing that is far can be useful. A hammer is completely useless
when out of reach, and useful is but a point of view for proximity.47
All the while being the pathos of distance,48 the will to power is indeed
what ensures the cohesion of the organism, for the probabilities of preservation are at their highest when rapprochement and adaptation are at
their greatest.49
Let us return once again to the splitting of the protoplasm, which
Nietzche gave the following form: + does not = 1 but = 2.50 What
does this strange equation signify? By positing that one makes two and
two make one, the formula expresses that which we see in the generation and multiplication of inferior organisms.51 It is thus a solution to
the problem of the reproduction of living organisms, which is not essentially sexuate reproduction, since in the domain of the living, sexual
generation is but an exception.52 Sexuality is not an invariant of generation. What happens during the division of a protoplasm? When the
latter is no longer able to incorporate what resists it, it separates from
itself by dividing, and will to power can thus preserve itself by pursuing
its work through delegation. This is because the relation between the
two fission-products cannot fail to become a relation between two un-
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equal forces, between two forces of which the one becomes a function
of the other. Nevertheless, the circumstancesthat is to say, chance
since the organism is the exception and chance53do not always lend
themselves to the maintenance of this liaison of subordination, which is
the principle of all organization. What happens when circumstances do
not permit this liaison? If the formation of an organism depends on the
inequality of forces, then conversely, only the equality of the forces can
prevent this formation. In other words, when chance makes the formation of an organism impossible, two are formed. Relating generation to
the will to power, Nietzsche writes: The separation of the protoplasm in
the case where a form is created such that gravity is equally distributed
in 2 places. Starting from each, a centripetal, constricting force is produced: this tears the intermediary mass apart. Thus: equality of relations
of power is the source of generation. Perhaps every further development is bound up with the originary power-equivalences [entstehende
Macht-quivalenzen].54 This last statement does not contradict the thesis
according to which morphological development is fulfilled parallel to
transformations in the will to power, since, on the one hand, development should not be confused with the organization that is, contrariwise,
its presupposition and, on the other hand, in the absence of a general
equilibrium of forces, nothing forbids the formation of local and temporary equivalences.
This explanation of generation through the equality of forces
amounts to making it, in a sense, into the consequence of impotence.
Indeed, a protoplasm divides into two when its power is no longer sufficient to control what it has appropriated.55 Generation and organization thus have for their common origin an impotence in the will to power
which, in order not to let what it conquered escape, organizes what it has
already acquired by dividing off from itself, to continue ruling over what
it already seized. What then distinguishes organization from generation?
Where one will was not enough to organize the entire appropriated
material, there came into force a counter-will, which proceeds to the separation; a new center of organization, following a battle with the original
will.56 If, at the end of this struggle, the original will is victorious, then
the tie of subordination is maintained and there is the formation of an
organismtwo make one. But if it is defeated, the counter-will becomes autonomous and there is the formation of two organismsone
makes two. In the one as in the other case, the will to power, unable to
grow further, stabilizes itself so as not to decline, and reproduction is a
pure advantage.57 This means that the organismwe do not say the
bodyis a preservation structure and not a form of intensification of
the will to power.
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In showing that our entire drive life [is] the development and
ramification of one basic form of the willnamely, of the will to power,
and that we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power
and . . . also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and
nourishmentit is one problem,58 we have explained ipso facto how the
formation of the organs arises from will to power and show that organization does not proceed from the mind or from consciousness, but
from the sole hierarchy of forces to which mind and consciousness are
likewise subject.59 Let us add that this explanation of the organism by
the will to power confirms the privilege customarily accorded to touch.
There must have been thought well before there were eyes: lines and
forms are thus not initially given, it is from the feeling of touch that, for
the longest time, thought took place: this, however, lacking the support
of the eyes, taught degrees of feelings of pressure [Drckgefhls], not yet
forms [Gestalten].60 The will to power thus permits the intensive differentiation of the kinesthetic forces. At the same time, it creates organs and
is a principle of organization. This means that the body as organism is
definitively referred back to the body as a domination-formationand
this, in such a way that this latter body lies at the foundation of the body
qua organism
What then is the quality of the forces constituting the organism? Is
this a domination formation, commanded by active or by reactive forces?
If the preceding analyses have not yet allowed us to pose this question,
then this is because they did not allow its solution. We should therefore
pursue further our study of the organism, by taking up its point of departure, namely, the proposition according to which each organ results
from an interpretation of the will to power the moment that the organic
process presupposes a continuous INTERPRETING. Now, if the organic process implies a continuous interpretation, then the body is a becoming
and its organs themselves never cease changing, since the interpretations
from which they result never stop varying. After having asserted that the
history of an organ was but a succession of interpretations, Nietzsche
continued thus: the evolution of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus
by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by
the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of forcebut a
succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent
processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts
at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the meaning
is even more so. The case is the same even within each individual organism: with every real growth in the whole, the meaning of the individual
organs also changesin certain circumstances their partial destruction,
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a reduction in their numbers (for example, through the disappearance

of intermediary members) can be a sign of increasing strength and perfection.61 If the meaning that constitutes the organ is fluid, how should
the organ itself not be? Consequently, is referring organization back to
the will to power not tantamount to dissolving the organism in becoming? Such would be the case if it were impossible to explain, starting from
will to power, the relative duration and constancy of the organism. To
take up an expression we previously set aside as a toothing-stone [pierre
dattente], it is now a matter of knowing if and how the will to power is liable to confer on the organs, and on the organism as a whole, a constant
spatial form.
The constancy of an organ could only be due to the meaning to
which it owes its being. But how is this possible if its being is fluid? Fluidity must not be understood absolutely, here. Relative to universal becoming, the difference between fluidity and stability is but one of tempo,
and to say, for example, that meaning is more fluid than form, is to say
that the becoming of the one is more vivacious or rapid than that of the
other. It is to say that the form remains constant only with regard to the
variation of meaning, but not absolutely.62 Would it then be possible that
the meaning projected by will to power, qua principle of organization,
have a form liable to ensure the constancy of the organs? Indeed, what is
it, in meaning itself, that could be as constant as form, if it were not the
form of meaning? Form counts as something enduring.63 What then is
the form of meaning, required by the will to power broken down into organs? And where should we look for it if not in the hierarchical relations
between the organs, since meaning is always relational and imperative?
Abstracting from their hierarchical character, relations between
the organs are always stamped or marked by mercy. To the question, is
there compassion between the different organs in the human organism, Nietzsche answers, in effect: To be sure, in the highest degree. A
strong resonance and diffusion of a pain: a propagation of pain, but not
of the same pain. (The same goes for individuals among themselves!)64
What is the signification, here, of this compassion, mercy, or charity65 by
which Saint Paul already characterized the relations between different
members of the body, and especially of the ecclesiastical body?66 For the
will to power, to organize is to institute a hierarchy, an articulated sphere
of multiple commands that are never else than the violent exercise of
one will upon another, and that are consequently always accompanied
by pain. To command is thus to make suffer, and the pain is renewed
unceasingly because, as multiple and variable, the commands constituting a body in incessant becoming are never the same. If pain is an
organic function,67 then is not the body but a long pain reverberating
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itself in multiple echoes? From a principle of organization, would the

will to power not transform itself ipso facto into a principle of disorganization? Stated otherwise, how could the organism simply preserve itself
if pain, which increases in proportion to power, were not abridged and
reduced, or if the different organs did not show each other a reciprocal
compassion? Would solicitude and kindnessmorality in the usual and
restricted sense of the termnot be necessary to the preservation of the
organism? Problem: how deeply does the will to the good [Wille zur Gte]
penetrate into the essence of things? Everywhere, in plants and animals,
we see the contrary: indifference, callousness or cruelty. Justice punishment. The development of cruelty. Solution. Sympathy is present only
in social formations (to which belongs the human body, whose living
individuals [Einzelwesen] feel each another), as a consequence of the fact
that a greater totality wills to preserve itself in the wake of another totality,
and again because in the general economy of the world, where there is
no annihilation and loss is possible, the good would be a superfluous principle.68 But how does this compassion, sympathy, or charity occur? What
form does it take for the organism?
The organism is a complex structure made up of hierarchical relations, painful in essence. The complexity of the organism means that each
organ, under different relations, commands and obeys in turn or simultaneously. Each organ ongoingly understands and makes itself understood,
differently each time, since the body is a becoming, a dynamic. The innumerable thou shalt and it is necessary69which make the body the
moral phenomenon par excellencethus never have the same meaning.
This inconsistency or fluidity of meaning makes comprehensionthat
is, obedienceas slow and difficult as it is painful, even impossible, and
in the latter case, organic unity never fails to break up under the impact
of an excess of suffering. Reciprocal incomprehension among organs
then places the organism in danger and threatens it with extinction.
How does will to power manage to ensure the preservation of the organism, whose organizing force it is? How does it ensure a prompt, proper
understandingi.e., reciprocal comprehension and sympathyamong
its organs? In a note devoted to gregarious morality, Nietzsche wrote the
following: Fear. Will-to-understand-one-another [Sich-Verstehen-wollen].
To-make-oneself-identical [Sich-gleich-geben]. Becoming-identicalthe origin of the gregarious animal.70 In other words, in order for the organs
to understand each other unequivocally and, communicating as quickly
as possible, to manage to cut short the pain inherent in any hierarchical
relationship, they must make themselves identical to one another, equal,
for from below to above misunderstanding is necessary.71 Understood
as positing-oneself-as-equal [sich-gleich-setzen],72 mercy thus becomes the
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very condition of all understanding among the organs and beyond that,
of the preservation of the organism itself. Thanks to compassion, the
organs can agree rapidly among each other and protect themselves from
the suffering they impose on one another. But since an organ is, moreover, always an interpretation of will to powera meaningmercy and
the comprehension through it comes about, require that this meaning
or command, projected by will to power, be easily communicable and intelligible. Required by the preservation of the organism, communication
among the multiple organs would be impossible without a certain standardization of meaning. Communication is necessary, and . . . for there
to be communication something has to be fixed, simplified, specifiable
(above all in the identical case), writes Nietzsche, adding: but in order
that this be communicable, however, it must be felt to be ready in the
sense of recognizable. The material of the senses prepared by the understanding, reduced grossly to broad strokes, made similar, subsumed
under what is related. Thus: the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions
is as if logicized.73 Necessary to the preservation of the organism, communication between organs would thus be impossible without the reduction
of the innumerable multiplicity of different events, which constitute its
very life, to identical meanings or cases. Indeed, if the rapidity of execution of a commandalone liable to attenuate its painis proportional
to the rapidity of comprehension (which is the object of command),
then meaning will be understood as quickly as it is promptly identified,
recognized. The constitution of identical casesmore easily recognized
for being consistently equal to themselvesis thus the requirement of
all communication, since it foresees, within meaning, equivocations of
meaning. And if, by sense impression, we are pointing to the trace or
stamp of one will upon another, then communication between hierarchized wills, from which organs arise, will be the more rapidly followed
by effects as the meaning remains consistently communicable and discernible. Now, communicability and discernment characterize logical processes.74 It is thus by imprinting on meaning a logical form that will to
power foreshortens the suffering inherent to organization, and ensures
the preservation of the organism.
From this last statement, we can already draw several consequences.
(1) The constancy of organs is henceforth explained, since the meaning
to which they owe their being possesses an enduring form. And since will
to power is also a principle of spatializationinsofar as a force could not
act on another without being locally separated from itit is the entire
organism, as constant spatial form, which is thereby referred back to
will to power. (2) Relative to the will to power qua organization principle, logic is the form under which reciprocal compassion among the
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organs takes place. Should we conclude that logic is charity itself, or

that the is [agape ] and in essence Christian? It is impossible
to answer this question, which ultimately concerns metaphysics as ontotheo-logy without first answering that of the value of logic. (3) Because it
makes communication between different organs possible, logic is, in this
regard, the essential structure of the organism. But if Nietzsche indeed
argues that logic is a kind of spinal cord for vertebrates,75 he likewise
notes that the oldest errors provide, as it were, the spinal cord on which
everything else holds.76 And he adds, the will is our spinal cord and
this will is a compensation for belief in God.77 Why should will to power,
logic, and the oldest errors all take the name of spinal cord? How can
we refer logic back to the will to power, when, as an organizing force,
it may justly be qualified as a spinal cord? By what right is logicas an
essential structure of the organism whose spinal cord is will to power
an error, and in regard to what truth? How does truth, and knowledge
more generally, whose organon is logic, pertain to the organism? As long
as these problemswhich are, in one way or the other, all relative to the
value of logic, of knowledge, and of truthremain without a solution, it
will be impossible to describe the constitutive forces of the organism.
8/31/11 3:12:34 PM
Part 4
The Logic of the Body
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Dehumanization as a Method
How to explain the formation of logic? To what configuration of the

will to power can it be led back? Why can it be understood as an error
incorporated and, along with it, the truth that inhabits it? Or, again,
conversely, and to let Nietzsche himself recapitulate these questions in a
singular form: to what extent can truth endure incorporation?1
To attempt to respond to this question whose mere wording misplaces the site of truth and offers knowledge to the body to confer on
both of them, conjointly, new possibilities, is first to attempt to respond
to a question that Nietzsche never ceased posing, or addressing to us
in multiple forms. Without proceeding to draw up a comprehensive inventory, we propose to hold two of its numerous metamorphoses apt at
bringing out the ultimate character of the question.2 (1) In asking:
how much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth will it risk? Nietzsche determines the principle of every critique of values, since he adds
immediately after: more and more that became for me the real criterion of value.3 In other words, the harder the value is to incorporate
the more it requires and allows power, the more it has value, to the point
where value can be defined as the highest quantum of power that man
can incorporateman, not humanity.4 (2) In asserting: We are making an attempt with the truth! Perhaps humanity shall perish from it! Let
us go!5 Nietzsche is alluding to the doctrine of the eternal recurrence,
since Zarathustra, who is its proclaimer, declares: I have given you the
heaviest thought: perhaps humanity shall perish from it, perhaps it will
raise itself by eliminating, once overcome, the elements hostile to life.6
In leading back to the revaluation of values as much as to the eternal return, to the destruction of the last man as much as to the creation of the
overman, the question of the relations of the body to truth, to logic, and
to knowledge in general is as central a question as it is ultimate. Yet this
question, and the setting in play of the truth that it implies constitutes
a dangerous trialand Nietzsche never lost sight of itthe trial of the
supreme danger. Immediately before engaging us in it, Zarathustra addressed us these words, in which our history and the outline of our world
is announced and can be anticipated: I have taken everything from you,
God, dutynow you must provide the greatest demonstration of nobility.
For HERE the path is open to scoundrels [Ruchlosen]look there!the
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struggle for domination, at the end the most herdlike of herds, and the
tyrant more of a tyrant than ever.7
To determine how and to what point it is possible to pose the truth
in a body, to determine what the body must be in order to open itself to
truths whose incorporation was up until then impossible, to create a body
possessed of superior power, this is then and above all to attempt to accede to that great thought to which Nietzsche did not cease to be exposed
starting from August 1881. Indeed, the question concerning the possibilities of knowledge of the body and the incorporation of the truth appears
initially in the long addition entitled Philosophy of Indifference, which
follows the first note dedicated to the eternal recurrence. What does this
title signify and what should we understand here by indifference? Far
from having simply a negative or privative meaning, indifference consists
positively in seeing things as they are. Indifference! Something does not
concern us, we can think of it what we want, there is nothing there that
might be useful or prejudicial to usthis is one foundation of the scientific spirit.8 How do we come to this? In endeavoring to see with other
eyes: in working to see without a human reference, therefore as such! To
heal human megalomania! Whence comes this? From fear . . . Thus understood, indifference is the high courageous reason that protects from
the fundamental madness9 that consists in taking man as the sole measure of all things and humanity all too human, for the sole possibility of
his being. We could not reach this then through the mere variation of
human perspectives, themselves too human, but exclusively through the
formation of new beings.10 To be indifferent is to abjure the stupidity
that is never but a shrinking of perspective,11 never but an annulment of
perspectives to the benefit of one perspective; to be indifferent is to see
with other eyes, provided notwithstanding that this adjective [other]
likewise marks a difference of essence; it is therefore to open the path to
the over-man by means of a de-human-ization of knowledge.
Understood as a remedy for fear, as a method of knowledge, and
as access to the things-themselves, or even to truth, how can indifference
contribute to the metamorphosis of man? Nietzsche answers this question in the text of an addition. Having notedand the observation is
still validthat we behave like children in regard to that which at one
time constituted the seriousness of existence, Nietzsche continues: but our
aspiration to seriousness is to understand everything as becoming [als
werdend], to deny ourselves as individuals, to see the world with greatest
number of eyes possible, to abandon ourselves temporarily to life and IN
ORDER thereafter to lay our eyes on it temporarily: to maintain the drives
as the foundation of all knowledge, but to know where they become
adverse to knowledge: in some TO AWAIT AND TO SEE up to where the
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science and truth [das Wissen und die Wahrheit] can be INCORPORATED
and to what degree a transformation of man comes to pass when, finally,
he lives only in order to know [um zu erkennen].12 The practice of indifference which Nietzsche also calls renunciation [Verzichtleistung],13 since
to see the word with multiple eyes is to give up ones own and to vary
the evaluations means to give up holding a single one for the true in jutting and flying over all of them: as thinker we must also learn to fly.14
This practice of indifference or of renunciation is none other than a
great play of the drives with themselves, through which knowledge can
grow; it is thus prior to the creation of a superior body to the precise degree that it allows us to determine that part of truth that is liable to be
incorporated.
What then is the connection between this creation and eternal
recurrence? The one is the content of the other. To show thiswhich
does not yet mean to explain itit is enough to return to what Nietzsche wrote in memory of August 1881. The addition whose text we just
examined is tied to the fourth paragraph of the note, which ends with
the transition, preceded by a dash that accentuates its significance. Let
us recall what the two extremes are between which there is a transition.
The incorporation of the new doctrine follows or is substituted for the
incorporation of fundamental errors, passions, of knowledge and the
knowledge that abjures. Eternal recurrence is thus the principle of a
superior body whose coming signifies the destruction of man: to come
back to illusions already incorporated destroys humanity.15 However, in
order that the modification of human essence flow into the creation of a
superior body, it is necessary, on the one hand, that man be none other
than a body and that this body be the site of knowledge; moreover and
on the other hand, the fundamental errors among which Nietzsche
inscribes precisely logic, most have been constitutive of that older body
that eternal recurrence allows us with justification to disqualify. Thus it
is only from eternal recurrence starting from the most powerful consciousness [mchtigste Erkenntnis]16 that the essentially corporeal character
of all knowledge and therefore, secondarily, of logic, can and must come
to light. Conversely, the interpretation of the latter as a structure of the
organism cannot fail to contribute in its turn to that of the thought of
thoughts [eternal recurrence]. Let us add this: to make the body the
essence of the human necessarily comes down to taking the drives hierarchy for the foundation of knowledge. In science all our drives are at
work, however according to a particular order that is quasi-statelike,
and according to a reciprocal adaptation such that there results not a
phantasm of this: one drive excites another, each one of them fantasizes
and seeks to impose its type of error [will seine Art Irrthum durchsetzen];
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but each of these errors becomes immediately and anew malleable for
another drive (for example, contradiction, analysis, etc.). Thanks to all
these multiple phantasms we divine finally and almost necessarily reality
and truth . . .17 Consequently, the critical question must inevitably take
the following form: can the drive-life [vie pulsionnelle] turn back against
knowledge, even making it impossible; or again: what are the limits that
the drives ground assigns to knowledge? But also, we should ask: are
there sorts of knowledge favorable, or contrary, to the intensification of
the drive-life? In other words, how does knowledge founded upon error
accede to the ultimate truth that risks ruining this knowledge, and of
what truth is the body capable when its very life rests upon error? In 1880
Nietzsche already noted that no one knows to what point our drives can
increase.18 The critique of knowledge or cognition [connaissance] that
must respond to this question: are there limits to the incorporation of
knowledge [savoir] and truth, and what are they?could have no other
status, consequently, than that of an experience or a trial, since alone
the drive-life is apt to decide what agrees with or hinders it. Philosophy
is thus an preuve de force unlike any other where knowledge is measured
against life and life against knowledge, where the body is exposed to
truth and truth to the body, and philosophy must become the warrior of
experiential knowledge [Kriegsmann der Erkenntniss].19 Thus understood,
philosophy will bestow gloryor powerto its true dimension,20 which
is that of the truth of the truth and, at the same time but secondarily, will
reduce the glory of God to impotence. This means first that philosophy
has no task that is more its own than to surmount the Judeo-Christian
tradition and thereupon, that the death of God must be understood on
the basis of the thinking of recurrence.
Yet again, how do we explain the formation of logic and, to begin
with, what are its originary presuppositions? Logic is tied to this condition: let us suppose that there are identical cases. Actually, in order to be able
to think and conclude logically, this condition must first be fulfilled. That
means: the will to logical truth [Wille zur logischen Wahrheit] can only be
completed once a fundamental falsification [Flschung] of all events has
been carried out. It follows from this that here reigns a drive apt to accomplish both means: first, falsification and second, the application of a
point of view. Logic does not derive from the will to truth.21 What should
we understand by identical cases? A case is what occurs by chance like
a throw of the dice; it is what comes to pass suddenly like an event. Yet,
whether it be a throw of the dice or an event in the midst of becoming,
each case is unforeseeable and new, singular and different, in such a way
that the concept of identical cases is as contradictory as that of the
squared circle. Let us emphasize this once and for all, to neglect this
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contradiction or falsehood forbids our understanding anything in Nietzsches analysis of logic and experiential knowledge [connaissance].
What sense can there then be in presupposing identical cases and
raising this supposition to the level of a foundation of logic and of all
knowledge? To answer this question is not possible without a long detour. Logic is related to the world, it is a logic of the world and the total
character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaosin the sense
not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form,
beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic
anthropomorphisms [sthetischen Menschlichkeiten].22 Nietzsche gives several names to this chaos to which the logic of the world refers: chaos of
representation, jumble of sensations, chaos of sensations.23 Stated
otherwise, chaos is as much the character of the world as it is our character, and the logic whose genealogy we attempt to retrace could hardly
be anything other than transcendental, even speculative, since it must be
simultaneously objective and subjective. But nevertheless, how can
we have access to the chaos that we were before the formation of logic?
Starting from the chaos that we have again become. In fact, modern soul
is a chaos, European man is a cosmopolitan chaos of affects and intelligences, a chaos of contradictory evaluations.24 It is therefore because
we live in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos,25 opened by the death
of God, that we can come back to the chaos prior to the creation of the
world and the revelation of God. No doubt the chaos prior to logic is not
the chaos posterior to theology, but we could not think the first without
the trial of the second. And this implies, we repeat, that logic is of the
same essence as Christianity. Nietzsche says nothing else when, after having noted that the great synthetic man in whom different forces are yoked
together without difficulty, is lacking; he continues: We have multiple
man, the most interesting chaos that, perhaps up to now, has yet been
given: not the chaos of before but that of after the creation of the world,
the multiple man [der vielfache Mensch] . . .26
Under these conditions, what is the meaning of the determination
of man and of the word? To assert that the world is chaos is to proceed
to its dehumanization. Proof of this is found in the outline dating from
26 August 1881, where Nietzsche envisions dividing his coming work into
four books. While the first treats of the ring of eternity, the third of the
new and perfect ego that no longer belongs to God, the second devoted
to the incorporation of experiences defines knowledge as an error that becomes organic and organizes, and the first (in which the equivalence
chaos sive natura is posed) opens the entire work with a dehumanization of
nature.27 To understand the world as chaos is thus to dehumanize it, but
what then is the scope and aim of this dehumanization?
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We must first observe that Nietzsche never ceased insisting on the

humanization of the world, which finds one of its most beautiful expressions in the proposition, we are an arable ground for things.28 From 1870,
he will quote Goethe according to whom man never conceives to what
degree he is anthropomorphic.29 In 1872, he points out that if for the
plant the entire world is a plant, for us it is man, or again, that the philosopher does not seek the truth but to metamorphose the world into
man, and he emphasizes that all constructions of the world, and even
all the sciences, are anthropomorphisms.30 This observation is progressively augmented by a challenge. At the beginning of 1881, he writes in
Daybreak that things are only the boundaries of man; and to the question, why does man not see things? Nietzsche answers: he is himself
standing in the way: he conceals things.31 But it is above all after August
1881, in light of the thought of eternal recurrence, that the requirement
of dehumanization comes to be fused with what Nietzsche will henceforth recognize as his task. My task: the dehumanization of nature and
thereafter the naturalization of man, once the pure concept of nature
has been won.32
What then is the extent of this dehumanization? It is obviously a
function of the extent of the initial humanization. Now, if the latter is
at work in all the valuations of which we are the inheritors, since the
existing world in its entirety is also a product of our evaluationsin addition to those that have remained equal to themselves,33 then the initial
humanization is likewise at work in knowledge itself, because causality
is not a truth but a hypothesisthrough which, moreover, we humanize
the world.34 In short, the humanization of the world is complete and
without remainder.
Nevertheless, and considering the global character of this humanization, is it possible to proceed to any kind of humanization without
in one way or another presupposing a world, a nature, and things in
themselves? After having assigned himself the task of seeing things such
as they are, Nietzsche thereby defines the means: to be able to look with
hundreds of eyes . . .35 To see things such as they are, outside of what
man attributes to them, is therefore not to see them prior to any gaze
but according to other gazes, higher, vaster gazes. It is not our perspectives through which we see things; but rather the perspectives of a being
of our type [eines Wesens nach unserer Art], of a being greater: through whose
images we gaze.36 The dehumanization of the world thus implies neither
the positing of an in itself, which Nietzsche always took to be an absurdity, nor an abandoning of the world of perspective from which, in
seeking to get out of it, we would perish.37 But why then speak of dehumanization?
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Once we allow that there is no world in itself and that it is impossible to escape all perspective, dehumanization can signify nothing other
than a setting in question of the too human essence of man. Nietzsche
did not fail to state this, whether in highlighting the antagonism between
the humanization and the aggrandizement of man,38 or in noting that
the request for humanization (which believes, altogether naively, that
it posses the formula what is human?) is tartuffery under which one
well determined species of man attempts to come to domination: more
specifically, a well determined instinct, the gregarious instinct [der Heerden
Instinkt].39 Dehumanization, which must precede the naturalization
of man, [is a] prelude to sur-humanization, since the pure concept of
nature (which Nietzsche had not used in August 1881) is that of will to
power.40 However, this double movement draws its possibility from the
death of God. Must we recall Zarathustra who, after having proclaimed
this death and while addressing the people to teach them the overman
and the last man, pronounces words that also bespeak the urgency to
which all of Nietzsches thought answers: Alas! The time is coming when
man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing [Sehnsucht] out over
mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! I
tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell
you: you still have chaos in you. Alas! The time is coming when man will
give birth to no more stars.41 Because it allows us to accede to this chaos
which we continue to harbor in us at least for a while, dehumanization
aims only to avert this unequaled misfortune, lacking any common measure that might be or that already perhaps is dtente, even the breaking of the bow. In that sense, the chaos that we still are holds within it
the future of the overman that we are not yet, for IT IS NECESSARRY
that Zarathustra come, or else everything on earth is lost.42 This name of
Zarathustra thus means that man has not yet exhausted his highest and
most noble possibilities.
As we have just seen, dehumanization has for its function to allow
all that man has given to the world to come forth, in order to grasp its
dimensions and inform its critique. Prior to any critique of reason, dehumanization is not a reduction to the given, for to be given in this sense
is to be received, and if every reception is dependency, then something
is given only for the reactive man.43 We must not forget that the finitude
presupposed by the given is a concept whose origin is theological, and
being finite does not mean the same thing as being mortal. As a reduction of the given that could not proceed blindly, dehumanization would
be impossible without some foregoing acknowledgment of the very principle of humanization, a principle whose identification will alone allow
the ultimate determination of the point of application and of aim, the
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target of dehumanization. If chaoswhich does not mean the absence

of necessity but the absence of order, or articulation of form, beauty,
and wisdom, of identity and constancyqualifies the world once it is
deprived of (or better, protected from) our aesthetic humanizations,
then the entire question amounts to knowing what is the meaning of the
last adjective here.
In the same period in which he reduces the world to chaos, Nietzsche notes that aesthetic judgments (taste, discomfort, disgust, etc.) constitute the foundation of the table of goods [Gtertafel]. The latter is, in
turn, the foundation of moral judgments.44 If moralitywhich is never
but the totality of valuations that make the existence of a body possible
arises from aesthetics, and if the body is the moral phenomenon par
excellence,45 which comes on the same, then aesthetic humanizations
could designate none other than the conditions thanks to which a body
can durably exist in the midst of the chaos of the world. However, specifying the function of the humanizations is nevertheless not enough to
determine the way in which they fulfill that function.
What is the essential trait thanks to which these judgments can be
qualified as aesthetic? What do art and humanization have in common?
The one and the other cannot do without ordering [mise en ordre], or
shaping [mise en forme]. Now, ordering and shaping are above all logical
in nature. The majority of aesthetic evaluations, Nietzsche says, are
more fundamental than moral valuations; for example, the satisfaction
derived from what is ordered, from what is clear and distinct, circumscribed, from repetitionthis is the sense of well-being [Wohlgefhle] of
all organic beings relative to the danger of their situation, or the arduousness of their nourishment. The well known does good, the sight of
something one hopes to master easily does good, etc. The logical, arithmetical, and geometrical senses of well-being form the basis of aesthetic
evaluations: certain life conditions [gewisse Lebens-Bedingungen] are felt
to be so important and their contradiction with reality so frequent and
great, that pleasure originates with the perception of such forms.46
Aesthetic thus signifies logic, and the aesthetic humanization of
the world is a logicizing of the chaos.47 Consequently, and also conversely, the determination of the world as chaos, prior to the true critique of reason, signifies a methodical reduction of all that (in one way
or another) comes out of logic without which, facing the jumble of impressions, no living being could live;48 thus ultimately it is a reduction
of identical cases. That is first to say, and we thereby arrive at the end of
our aforementioned detour, that the supposition of identical cases that
founds logic draws its meaning from the comfort and pleasure that a
living organism wants to feel relative to the chaotic, flowing reality in
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unceasing becoming, which is unforeseeable, dangerous, and threateningthat reality in which it attempts to live. It is then to say that logic
springs from this latter feeling, i.e., the pleasure accompanying any intensification of the will to power.
Before explaining the constitution of identical cases, which should
allow us to determine the scope and status of logic qua principle of all
human mastery and of all humanization to humanize the world
means always to feel ourselves more like masters in it49let us pause at
the reductive implications of Nietzsches dehumanization.50 In Husserls
sense of the term, the reduction (which is dehumanization insofar as it is
demundanization) reduces the word to a pure datum of consciousness.
The transcendental reduction nevertheless observes at least two limits:
(1) it does not concern logical axioms, like the principles of contradiction and identity, for which, according to Husserl, descriptive phenomenology could make their universal and absolute validity evident,
on the basis of examples included among its own data.51 But how can
these serve as an example, if on the one hand, that of which they are
exemplary is not previously given, or presupposed, and if, on the other
hand, identity is wholly indefinable?52 (2) Even if it is quite thinkable
that the discordance of lived experience annihilates things and world,
it remains that, in making the perceived thing into the guiding thread
of phenomenological analysis, Husserl presupposed its unity only to reconstitute it after the fact. In other words, if each object provides a rule
for concatenating lived experiences, the world as a set of objects is the
universal rule for all subjectivityand this, notwithstanding the contingency of the initial givenness of that world. In thus supposing the unity of
thing and world, the constitutive analysis is colored from the outset with
irremediable contingency, which contradicts phenomenologys vocation
as absolute science.53
In contrast with Husserls reduction, which allows the constituting work of the absolute and temporal, transcendental subjectivity, without touching identical casessince it is a universal and fundamentally
essential fact that every now, in sinking back into the past, maintains
its strict identity54Nietzsches dehumanization of the world is more
radical, as it presupposes neither unity, nor identity, nor the thing given.
It is also not demundanization, since it consists in overcoming the world
and ourselves in it.55 And more radically, Nietzsches dehumanization
alone brings out all the human munificence, all that man has conceded,
given away, even abandoned to the world; all that consequently belongs
only to him: his very essence. Without this foregoing dehumanization,
Nietzsche could never have conceived his task in the following terms:
my task: all the beauty and sublimity that we have attributed to things
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and to fictions, to reclaim them as the property and product of man and as
his most lovely adornment, his beautiful apology. Man as poet, thinker,
God, power, compassion. Oh, the royal munificence with which he gratifies things, to impoverish himself and to feel himself miserable! This is his
greatest abnegation [Selbstlosigkeit], how he wonders and adores and
knows not and would not know that he created that which he admires.
It is poems and paintings of originary humanity, all these realistic natural
scenesthere was a time when man knew none other than to rhapsodize
and paint by seeing something into [Hineinsah] things. And we have made
this heritage.This sublime line, this sentiment of mournful grandeur,
this feeling of the moving sea, all poetically dictated by our forebears.
This firm and determined seeing above all!56
What is this vision that reigns over all the forms of humanization if
not precisely the logical vision? The , as Aristotle already pointed
out, immobilizes thought on something, and without this brief stop nothing is determinable or thinkable.57 The dehumanization of the world
or again, and which comes on the same, the recognition of its globally
chaotic character, restores to man all that belongs to him by isolating the
logic of the world with which it could be fused, a logic whose formation
and constitution it then (but only then) becomes possible to explain.
From the moment humans pose the as their most essential good,
dehumanization cannot fail to be its reduction. To dehumanize is to suspend the work of logic in order to question its ultimate foundations.
In a word, if identical caseswithout which there is no logicmust be
understood relative to chaos, then dehumanization amounts to a suspension of logic, about which we may perhaps begin to think that it was the
originary poem of humanity, and which we have inherited as though
it were reality itself.58 The affirmation of chaos, which puts logic out of
play and with it reality as well, gives dehumanization a reductive scope
vaster than that of the phenomenological reduction. It thus opens to a
higher knowledge, to great knowledge [ la grande connaissance], such
that the intentional analytic of constituting consciousness gives up its
rank to the morphology of the will to power.
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Fear and the Will to Assimilation
Asserting the globally chaotic character of the world, Nietzsche also cautions against the thinking that holds that the world would be a living
being. The hypothesis that the whole [das All] would be an organism
contradicts the essence of the organic.1 Nevertheless, though the world is
not an organism, all organisms live in the world in which they find something, for example, to nourish them. This claim immediately raises the
following question: how can an organism live in a chaotic world of multiple and finite forces, in a world that suffers no immobility and never
has an instants rest,2 in an unstable, changing world in becoming? The
question is all the more unavoidable as the formation of the organic
[is] the exception of exceptions.3 In other words, the body is a product
of chance. What does this mean if not that the individual himself is no
longer an eternal singularity but the most complex state of affairs in the
world, the supreme ACCIDENT [der hchste Zufall]?4 How, consequently,
could the body, as a domination-formation and an organized hierarchy
of forces, draw its origin from mere chance when the latter is none other
than the collision of creative impulses?5 How could such body keep itself alive if the forces constituting it are at once essentially variable and
fortuitously connected, and when chance breaks everything up anew?6
In a world in becoming, and in the midst of the absolute flux of the event,7
how is a durable, hierarchical formation possible, and how could the
most complex state of affairs preserve itself there without itself ensuring
the constancy of the world?
To last is to preserve oneself, and no body could preserve itself in
the world without ensuring its own constancy and that of the world. How
is that possible, and how does the necessity of this come to be felt? In a
chaotic world, from the moment unequal forces enter accidentally into
relation to give rise to a bodyand inequality is the very condition of
this relationthat body is ipso facto threatened with dispersion upon the
slightest hierarchical dysfunction as with the slightest change in its relation to the world: from one instant to the other. As soon as they are conjoined in a body, forces can come apart and, since the world is originally
dangerous for the body, the latter could not live other than in fear.
What should we understand by fear, here? Is it a matter of the
pain or disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil
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in the future, to take up Aristotles definition?8 No doubt, the fear that

the body experiences is tied to a possible, imminent destruction. However, as there is only one kind of force,9 the threat comes as much from
the body as from the world in the totality of its becomingand not from
some kind of intra-worldly entity. With the entity ends both becoming
and danger. Fear is thus not one sentiment or feeling among others but
ratheron the account of him who called himself the conscientious man
of the spiritmans original and fundamental sensation. It is a feeling on
the basis of which everything is explained . . . original sin and original
virtue. From fear grew also my virtue, which is called: science,10 he adds.
Nietzsche never ceased making fear the fundamental disposition of
man. Fear is, first, the originary feeling of humanity, since man was for
many hundreds of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear.11 If the age of fear [was] the longest of all the ages,12 we
must grasp fear as that which was earliest implanted in man.13 But fear
is then, and above all, the sentiment from which humanity originates,
humanitys formative sentiment. It is the instructor in understanding,14
that bids us to know,15 the mother of morals.16 And it gives rise to the
will to truth and certainty.17 Fear not only lies at the source of all morality
and of all science, but equally at that of all philosophy, since astonishmentwhich Plato and Aristotle place at the origin of philosophyis
but a weakened fear.18
What is the essential character of that fear that, qua feeling of weakness,19 is opposed to the feeling of power? When fear is consecutive to the
approach of a danger arising from the world or from another person [autrui], I become ipso facto dependent. When fear is fear of self, and I grow
afraid of myself, this is because I can be an other yet not have the force to
appropriate, that is to say to dominate, all the possibilities that arise from
the multiple forces that constitute me. And when fear is fear for self, this
is because the self aims only to preserve and to keep itself.
Whether obeying an external solicitation or one that reveals my
own weakness, fear is thus servile;20 it engenders gregaritythe necessity of the formation of the herd lies in fear.21 To think on the basis of
fear, whatever the objects of that reflection or that fear, is always to think
basely. If fear leads to deliberation,22 as Aristotle again observes, then this
could only be a poor manner of thinking.23 More generally, however, it
is all Europe that bears the mark of a frightened manner of thinking,
accustomed to servility.24 Fear is thus essentially reactive, and with it our
whole being and whole knowledge, once they are traversed and inhabited as if by their ultimate pathetic foundation.
To what is fear reacting, or what is it that every domination-formation
dreads? After reasserting that for primitive man, fear of what is bad
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[Frcht vor dem Bsen] is preponderant, Nietzsche asks: What is bad?

and immediately responds: There are three sorts: the accidental, the
uncertain, the sudden.25 Bad thus denotes everything upon which it is
impossible to rely. Now, if the accidental, the uncertain, and the sudden
characterize events and becoming, then no one could protect himself
from fear without converting the accidental into necessity, uncertainty
into certainty, suddenness into predictability, the event into a state, and
becoming into being. Yet how is this conversion possible, outside the
formation of identical cases, which precisely imply the fundamental falsification of every event? As fundamental, this falsification could only
concern the essence of events [vnementialit] itself. With regard to a
flow of ever-new events, there are no identical cases. Consequently, and
if truth is an adequation to the real, presupposing identical cases falsifies the event-like or chaotic character of the world, since it posits an
identity where everything differs, and constant being where everything is
becoming. To what necessity does this falsification respond? Why is logic
indispensable to maintaining the unity of the body, which is to say also
that of the world?
Let us return to the analysis of the body, in order to understand its
logical structure. As a domination-formation or a society of mortal souls,
the body is at once a political phenomenon and an intellectual one. It is
political provided we understand by that term the art of enduring the
difficult, tension relations [Spannungsverhltnisse] between the various
degrees of power.26 It is intellectual because our lives are none other
than the concert of a plurality of drives or intelligences, once every force
is commanded by a thought. But how are the political and intellectual
dimensions of the body conjoined to each other? As corporeal life is
a combination of forces which it behooves us to obey or command, to
command and obey, it is important to the preservation of the body that
the dominant force not annihilate the force being dominated. While to
command may be to hypnotize,27 it could not be to paralyze for, if dominating is bearing the counter-weight of the weakest force, and therefore
a kind of continuation of the struggle, to obey is also a struggle: in proportion to the force that remains to resist.28 If the exercise of commanding is always a sudden explosion of force29 and if it alone can ensure
the durable cohesion of the multiple forces constituting the body, then
how does commanding manage to prevent the paralysis consecutive to
fear, whose suddenness could not fail to provoke it? The question is not
only one of knowing how the dominant force softens its domination, but
rather how all the forces of the bodywhich may be dominant or dominated, or even simultaneously dominant and dominated according to
different relationscome to understand each other and communicate,
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to constitute a society living in security; or again, how it is possible to reduce the fear inherent in the always violent exercise of command.
To attempt to respond to this question and to examine the articulation of the logical and political dimensions of the body, we can follow Nietzsches injunction according to which the LAST organisms whose formation we see (peoples, States, societies) should serve to teach us about
the first organisms.30 According to this, it is consequently fitting to proceed not from the most complex to the simplest organismthe human
organism is not less complex than a political one, to the contrarybut
from that whose formation we can see, to that whose formation is imperceptible since it is older than our gaze. Is it legitimate, all the same, to explain our organism on the basis of a political organism? It is without the
slightest doubt, insofar as life is will to power and the relation between
quanta of power, which is proper to it, is understood as political.31
An additional proof is to be had in that the reversal of moral or servile
values into naturalist or aristocratic ones has as its consequence the replacement of sociology by a doctrine of domination-formations.32 Now,
while the one and the other have the same themerelations between
the multiple, living beings in a body or an organismthey positively
do not have the same principle. Whereas sociology knows no instinct
other than that of the herd, that is, of zeros added together . . . , where each
zero has equal rights, where it is virtuous to be a zero, the theory of
domination-formations works out a hierarchical principle, the instinct
of an aristocratic society by virtue of which the meaning of the sum depends on the value of its constituent units.33
Once again, how do the manifold living beings that constitute a
bodyindeed by reason of their difference of forcenevertheless protect themselves from the danger that they represent the ones to the
others, as well as from that which the world represents to their fortuitous
conjunction? Once it is established that social organization exemplifies
the living organism, we are justified in elucidating the latter by proceeding from the former. The necessity, at times of great danger, of making
oneself understoodwhether in order to help one another or to subject anotherwas only possible to that sort of primitive men who could
express comparable experiences through comparable signs; should the
signs through which they attempted to understand each other be too
different, they would understand each other wrongly: thus the rapprochement, and so ultimately the herd, would not succeed. It follows that, generally speaking, the communicability of experiences [die Mittheilbarkeit
der Erlebnisse], or of needs, or expectations, is a power of selection and
breeding [zchtende Gewalt]: people who are similar remain. The necessity of thinking, consciousness as a whole, first comes about on the basis of
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the necessity of understanding one another. First signs, then concepts,

finally Reason [Vernunft] in the habitual sense of the term. The richest organic life can play out its game, in itself, without consciousness:
however, as soon as its existence is tied to the coexistence [sein Dasein an
das Mit-dasein anderer] of other animals, the necessity of consciousness
arises. How is this consciousness possible?34
Let us leave aside the problem of consciousness to which we will
return later. If the body, as the product of chance, never ceases being
threatened with dispersion, then it could hardly protect itself from such
a danger and from the fear that this peril elicits, unless all its forces
cooperated toward their common cohesion; that is, in pursuit of the
combat that assembles them. Yet they could not achieve this without understanding each other, or making themselves reciprocally understood.
Moreover, this comprehension could not take place without a system of
communication that, to create commonality, inevitably effects a reduction to the smallest common denominator. If the absolute condition of
man is a community [Gemeinschaft], then it is the drive thanks to which
this community is protected that will develop most strongly in him.35
By protecting itself from the forces of the chaotic world that, at any moment, threatens its cohesion, the body simultaneously protects itself from
the fear proper to the hierarchy that is the very reason and foundation of
its existence. In other words, if from above to below, or below to above,
misunderstanding is necessary, then every good understanding implies,
conversely, an equalization and leveling of the intellects or forces that
arrive at this understanding. At once necessary and equalizing, communication becomes ipso facto a selection instance or function. The empire
of communication is that of consensus, that of gregarity.
What are the requirements of this communication that guarantees
the unity and duration of the body by holding together (that is, by assimilating the ones to the others) the multiple entities that compose it?
It must be as clear and univocal as possible, in order to forestall the
mistrust that is a waste of spiritual force.36 It must be rapid and
immediately comprehensible; for, if it is the need to make their needs
rapidly and easily comprehensible that ties people most firmly to each
other,37 then the same goes for that society of multiple souls that is our
body. Nevertheless, to clearly grasp the signification of these requirements and the problem that they pose, we must recall once again that
the body is a domination-formation. Thus, when a sovereign body gives
an order and communicates its instructions, this is not to establish a relationship of equality with subordinate forces, but to make them into its executive organs. Originally, all communication is properly a willing-to-take,
a grasping and (mechanically) a willing-to-appropriate. To incorporate the
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otherultimately to incorporate the will of the other, to make it ones

own, is a matter of the conquest of the other. To communicate oneself is thus,
originally, to extend ones power over the other.38 Is there not a contradiction,
then, between the originally hierarchical principle of communication
and the equalization that its work requires? The clearer and more rapid
is the communication between multiple forces in the body, the more it
ensures its cohesion and favors its preservation. However, if the communication is clearer and faster for taking place inter pares, then does its
development not tend to reduce every hierarchy and, thereby, weaken
the body? Does the necessity of self-preservation, confronting the body,
not then operate at the expense of any possibility of intensification? No
doubt the rapidity of communication between the multiple mortal souls,
whose society forms the body, attenuates the pain and fear inherent in all
command; however, and conversely, by assimilating these same souls to
each other, this rapid communication likewise ruins the hierarchy, which
is the synthetic principle of that body. If comprehension of an order is
always painful, since it implies acknowledgment of a superior power and
conceding a privilege or right, suffering will diminish with the acceleration of comprehension and the reduction of hierarchical differences.
Understanding quickly, easily is highly recommended (to receive the fewest blows possible). The fastest mutual comprehension is the least painful
relation: this is why we aspire to it. Negative sympathyoriginally creative of
the herd.39 When the constitutive units of the body become equivalent to
each other, the body is no longer but the summation of units of the same
power, an addition of zeros, if zero is the sign of indifference, that is, of
gregarious equality. The perfecting of communication between the multiple wills of the body, a perfection that is but a form of pity, has the same
consequence as the death of God: the weakening, even the dispersion, of
the body and the individual. In this respect, the manor the body that
is henceforth only communication because the values that govern it are
exclusively conservativeis the last man, whom Nietzsche reminds us
that he created him at the same time as the overman, as his contrary.40
Now, the stage of communication that is confused with that of credit
and world commerce, wherein an immense and gentle confidence in man
is expressed,41 is the stage of the last man, to whom commanding and
obeying have become toilsome, and whose will to power (the bodys spinal column) is made of the will to equality.42 This is the last stage of a
man determined to remain in the state of a super-ape43 or again a kind
of Chinese.44 What should we understand here by Chinese? Chinese
morality is essentially stationary,45 the Chinese way of thinking is the
most remarkable monument to the spirit of duration; the Chinese person
is the man who endures, a man virtually immutable for millennia and
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for whom the great man is a public disaster.46 However, if the communicative leveling of the constitutive forces of the body gives rise to the last
man, the intensification of their tensions under the yoke of one of them
is liable, conversely, to give rise to a superior body, to an overman who is
in no way destined to become the master of the last men. Nietzsche will
say this as clearly as possible and it is not irrelevant to our understanding
of his politics.47
How then to lead this equalizing and helpful communication that
reassures and keeps watch back to the will to power? Or again, how does
the latter become a will to equality? Let us return to the analysis of communication. Cooperation among the manifold living beings that constitute our bodies is indissociable from a clear, univocal, rapid, and rapidly
intelligible communication. Under what conditions is this communication possible? As we have already seen, such a communication supposes
identical cases and must have a logical form.48 Yet if it is thus, then it must
be possible to explain the formation of these cases on the basis of the
forces or drives of the body.
Let us begin by recalling that in a world dehumanized and reduced
to chaos, there is nothing identical or, to reuse an example common to
Leibniz and to Nietzsche, relative to a similar overall situation, no leaf
is ever completely identical to another.49 However, contrary to Leibniz
who holds identity to be the ultimate degree of resemblancethere is
no perfect similarity anywhere,50 as goes the statement of the principle of
indiscerniblesNietzsche considers that the similar (das hnliche) is not
a degree of the identical (das Gleichen), but something entirely different
from the identical.51 Wherein lies the difference between the similar
and the identical? That which is similar . . . arises when there is hardly
any difference of degree between the quantity of forces. Scarcely different
for us! And similar for us! Similar qualities, we should say, rather than
identicaleven in chemistry. And similar for us. Nothing happens
twice, the atom of oxygen has not its identical part, in truth the hypothesis SUFFICES us for there to be innumerable identicals.52 In fact, in the
absence of an equilibrium of forces, the world does not cease becoming
and nothing could be identical to anything. Yet if the universal flux renders the coexistence of two identical things impossible,53 this does not
exclude our perceiving resemblances. In the midst of the world of forces,
resemblance appears to us at its maximum when the difference between
forces appears to us to be at its minimum; when it is hardly perceptible
at all. Now, the finesse of our sensibility is not set once and for all, it varies in function of our knowledge and our valuations. In other words, the
world of identical cases loses breadth as our experience expands,54 and
conversely our oldest experiences, on which all the others rest, cannot
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fail to be founded on a weak view that has, as its characteristic, the vision
that assimilates and identifies,55 that is, on an original myopia. To the
question Whence, in mans head, did logic arise? Nietzsche once responded: Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been
immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different
from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those,
for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is like
or the same [das Gleiche] as regards both nourishment and hostile
animalsthose, in other words, who subsumed [subsumirte] things too
slowly and cautiouslywere favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar
instances that they must be like or the same. The dominant tendency
[berwiegende Hang], however, to treat as the same what is merely similar
[das hnliche]an illogical tendency, for nothing is really the sameis
what first created any basis for logic. In order that the concept of substance could originatewhich is indispensable for logic although in the
strictest sense nothing real corresponds to itit was likewise necessary
that for a long time one did not see or perceive changes in things. The
beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those that saw
everything in flux [im Flusse].56 A certain coarseness of intellect, a particular form of stupidity, is thus at the origin of logic.
The formation of identical cases that, in supposing diminished
vision, responds to fear as the defense against attack, is dictated by the
will to self-preservation and rests on the penchant toward treating the
similar as the identical. Logic is thus indissociable from a reduction of
differences of forces, a reduction of their inequalities; in a word, indissociable from equalization. If every difference is hierarchical, then every
identity is egalitarian. To identify is to level off, to equalize, and logic is
by essence democratic. For nothing is more democratic than logic.57
This proposition not only signifies that logic appeals to what is most
common in minds, that it is nothing more than a criterion of utility in
the interest of the greatest number58 but, moreover, that the reign of
logic merges with that of democracy.59 In a world of events, where each
event is a difference of force, where equality is a grand illusion,60 supposing identical cases is a falsification that draws its origin from a will to
myopia, from a will thatnot to let itself be surprised and to maintain
its dominationassimilates the seen to the already-seen, the new to the
old. The mode of logical thinking, which is never but a defensive way
of living, and which is thus true in the Roman sense of verum, is not
only preventative [conservatoire] but also conservative [conservateur]. Let
us note in passing that this is to say that Nietzsches critique of logic and
its truth could not be the final consequence of the translation of
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[ale theia] by verum, the ultimate figure of the military, imperial interpretation of .
What is the will to assimilation; what is its primary form, and where
does it come from? No doubt, from the will to power itself; but how?
Let us return to the protoplasm, that is, to the simplest, perfect61 organism, which for this reason is the most apt to let the will to power
show through. Such a being, Nietzsche writes, assimilates what is closest to it, transforms it into its property (property is first nourishment
and the accumulation of nourishment), it seeks to incorporate the
greatest possible amount, and not only to compensate for lossit is RAPACIOUS [HABSCHTIG]it divides itself into two beings. Growth and
generation derive from the drive to unlimited appropriation [unbegrenzten
Aneignungstriebe].This drive leads it to the exploitation of the weakest, and in jousts with those of a similar force, it battles, which is to say,
it HATES, fears, dissimulates. To assimilate, is indeed: to render identical
to oneself something that is foreign, to tyrannizeCRUELTY.62 If will to
power is a will to incorporation, assimilation, appropriation, identification, then the same goes for any drive in the body that, in one and the
same movement, tends to its own good and to dominate the others to set
them in service to it and make them its organs, to incorporate them into
itself. To reduce the similar and the different to the identical is thus the
very destiny of the will to power qua principle of organization.
Is this will to assimilation at work in the formation of identical
cases? Without any doubt, for before logic, which everywhere works with
identifications, the making-equal, the assimilating must have ruled: and
it continues still to rule, and logical thought is itself a durable means of
assimilation, a means in service to the will-to-see of identical cases.63 Yet
how does the will to assimilation give rise to identical cases or, once again,
how does the will to power become a will to equality? In a note whose
scope is at least equivalent to the text Husserl devoted to The Origin of Geometry, Nietzsche writes: The formation of arithmetic must be preceded
by lengthy practice and a long apprenticeship of the seeing-identically,
of the will-to-take identically, through the presupposition of identical
cases and through counting. The same goes for logical deduction. More
even than the belief: this and that is true, judgment is originally an it
is precisely such and such that I want to be true! The drive to assimilation, that fundamental, organic function on which all growth rests, is
also internally adapted to what it appropriates in proximity: the will to
power functions in this comprehension of the new, under the form of
the old, the already experienced, that is still alive in memory: and this is
what we call to conceive!64 What is the meaning of the internal adaptation of the drive to assimilation to that which it assimilates? Why does a
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dominant, organizing force come to adapt itself to the forces that it dominates and organizes? Assuming that the body is domination-formation,
the dominant force could not exert and maintain its domination without
likewise permitting the preservation of the dominated forces. How is this
possible? All forces being of the same nature, the only thinkable alterity
is the differencefirst quantitative, then qualitativebetween forces,
and assimilation could only be an equalization. Now, to equalize is not
to absorb, and equality is a relation between distinct magnitudes. Therefore, in order that the assimilation of one force by another not disturb
the preservation of the bodythat is, their common preservationis it
not the case that the dominated force must not only be preserved, but
also that the dominant force adapt itself (and this, in order to preserve
the former) to the dominated force by making itself equal to the former
internally? But how could a force become the equal of a lesser force without inhibiting its own power, and how to inhibit this superior power itself
without turning it back against itself? In other words, and to give an interrogative form to a Nietzschean affirmation: is democracy indeed, for all
time, the declining form of the power to organize [die Niedergangs-Form der
organisirenden Kraft]?65 If the drive to assimilation is cruel and tyrannical,
then it must also exert this cruelty and this tyranny upon itself. To assimilate is consequently to reduce the distance inherent to commanding by
weakening the power that exerts it and by turning the will to power back
against itself: to decline. The internal adaptation of the will to power to
that which it orders and organizes thereby modifies its quality, for adaptation is never but an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity.66
Once the body is exclusively governed by an imperative to preservation,
this adaptation comes to the foreground and one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces
that give new interpretations and directions, although adaptation follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within
the organism itself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving
is denied.67 As a principle of organization, assimilation, and above all of
preservation, the will to power could only be reactive in the final analysis.
Principally directed toward its own preservation, the body qua organism
is then just like the Christian body but for different reasons, a reactive
body. Henceforth, we can begin to understand why philosophy let itself
be Christianized at the level of the body.
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Simplication and Judgment
It is not enough to say that identical cases are formed on the basis of the
drive to assimilate, itself starting from the will to power; this does not explain the way in which identical cases take shape. In a note dedicated to
the birth of logic, which takes up what we showed in the previous chapter, Nietzsche writes that the fundamental inclination to equate, to perceive
as equal, is modified, curbed by the useful and the harmful [durch Nutzen
und Schaden], by success: an adaptation is formed, a degree attenuated in
which this inclination can be satisfied without simultaneously denying
life and placing it in danger. This process corresponds altogether to that
external, mechanical one (which is its symbol), according to which the
plasma continually makes that which it appropriates equivalent to itself
and integrates it into its form and its series [Formen und Reihen einordnet].1 If the formation of identical cases responds to the absorption, in
the blood plasma, of organic nutrients resulting from digestion, then
this is because there reigns, throughout, the same will to power, the will
to assimilation, to equality. Nietzsche will recall, under the title Equality and Resemblance: 1) that the crudest organ sees much apparent
equality; 2) that the spirit [der Geist] wants equality, that is, to subsume a
sense impression under am available rank or series: just as the body assimilates to itself something inorganic. For the understanding of logic :::
the will to equality is the will to power.The belief that something is such
and such, or the essence of judgment, is the consequence of a will, that it
should be as much equal as possible.2 It is thus indeed the same will to
assimilation and to equality that is at work in nutrition and the formation
of identical cases.
Nietzsche often emphasized the kinship between the mind and the
stomach, intellectual processes and those of digestion. Not only should
the stomach be described morally, intellectually,3 but the intellect should
be understood as the stomach of the affects.4 This kinship, which finds
its foundation in the assimilative force working throughout, was never so
clearly brought to the fore as in a beautiful paragraph from Beyond Good
and Evil where spirit of mind receives its proper name.
That commanding something which the people call the spirit wants
to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is
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master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that ties up,
tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities
are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that
lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirits power [die Kraft des Geistes] to
appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate
the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse
whatever is totally contradictoryjust as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the external
world, retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in
all this is to incorporate [Einverleibung] new experiences, to file new
things in old filesgrowth, in a wordor, more precisely, the feeling of
growth [das Gefhl des Wachsthums], the feeling of increased power. An
apparently opposite drive serves this same will: a suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of ones
windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a refusal to let things approach [ein Nicht-heran-kommen-lassen], a kind of state of defense against
much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting
horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignoranceall of which is necessary in
proportion to a spirits power to appropriate, its digestive capacity, to
speak metaphoricallyand actually the spirit is relatively most similar
to a stomach.5
Such a parallel would evidently be impossible if the same will to

assimilation were not at work equally in the labors of the stomach as in
those of the spirit or mind. No doubt, the will to assimilation is but a moment or a form of the will to powerthe will to equality is not the pathos
of distance, it is not victoriousbut this moment and this form are essential to the preservation of the body and the constitution of logic. But
is that not already to say that the latter is necessary to the former and that
it is possible, for this reason, to confuse them?
How does the will to power equalize events or differences of force,
to give rise to a world of identical cases, to a world of concepts, species,
forms, ends, laws, but also to a world of identical things, of subjects,
of predicates,6 to a world knowable and known, to a world in which
life is lastingly possible? The concept of identical cases thus defines
the form of any possible knowledge, the form of any possible form, and
it constitutes the highest formal concept of knowledge. Consequently,
the problem of the formation of identical cases is that of the foundation
of formal logic, in the double sense of formal apophantics and formal
ontology. But we must recall further that if the equalization of the constitutive forces of the body is necessary to its preservation, then the problem of the formation of identical cases is likewise that of the foundation
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of transcendental logic since there is, on the one hand, only a single
type of force and since it is the body and not consciousness, on the other
hand, that is the original site of knowledge. To retrace the genesis of
identical cases thus amounts to seeking the sole foundation of all logic
in general, whether it be formal or transcendental.
The formation of identical cases results from a simplification, a
falsification of the real. Nietzsche often insisted on the essentially
simplifying character of the intellect. The entire knowledge-apparatus
[Erkenntniss-Apparat] is an abstraction and simplification apparatusnot
aimed at knowledge but at the mastery and overpowering of things.7 Knowledge is not prior to the mastery of the world as its condition of possibility,
it is mastery itself. Knowledge is technology. Further, having affirmed that
the true world of causes, unspeakably complex, is hidden from us, Nietzsche adds: the intellect and senses are above all a simplification apparatus
[vereinfachender-Apparat]. False, shrunken, logicized, our world of causes
is nonetheless the world in which we can live. We are knowledgeable
[erkennend] insofar as we can satisfy our needs.8 And a few years earlier,
he had already observed: Low intellectuality, non-scientific being is the
condition of existence, of acting, short of which we would have died of
hunger. Skepticism and circumspection were permissible only later on
and very rarely.9
Let us begin by removing one difficulty. What sense is there in
arguing that the knowledge apparatus is not destined to know, that the
world such as we know it is false or again, that truth is the sort of error
without which a specific type of living being could not live?10 Since such
assertions require the confrontation between the world as such and its
logicization, and between becoming and being, it is a matter of knowing
how it became possible to accede to this chaos and this becoming despite
the logicization of the worldor again to what inversion of knowledge
we owe our ability to undertake its critique. To this question we must
first respond that it is not despite but because of the logicization of the
world that chaotic becoming is accessible. Already in August 1881 Nietzsche noted that without the hypothesis of a sort of being opposed to
true reality, we would have nothing according to which to measure it,
compare and depict it: error is the presupposition of knowledge. A partial persistence, relative bodies, identical, or resemblant processesit is
with this that we falsify the true state of affairs, but it would be impossible
to know something about it without having first falsified it in this way.
No doubt, each instance of knowledge [jede Erkenntnis] is always false,
but there is nevertheless a representing thereby and, among representations,
again a multiplicity of degrees OF THE FALSE. To establish the degrees of
the false and the necessity of the fundamental error as condition of the
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LIFE of the representing beingtask of the science.11 In other words, on

the one hand, becoming is accessible on the basis of being by virtue of
the principle according to which it is impossible to change without permanence; on the other hand and consequently, truth does not designate
the contrary of error, but rather the position of certain errors relative to
others, the fact for example that they might be older, more profoundly
incorporated, or that we might not know how to live without them.12 Yet
if becoming is today more accessible than it was in the past, if logic itself
can henceforth be put into question, then it is, subsequently, that the degree of falsehood of knowledge is today no longer what it was yesterday.
In what sense has it varied? If the crudest organ is that which sees the
greatest equality, then those types of knowledge that are the oldest are
necessarily more crudely false, while the more recent ones are relatively
less so. From etymology and the history of language, we have it that all
concepts have become, that many are still becoming; and this, in such a way
that the most general concepts, the falsest ones, must also be the oldest.
Being, Substance and unconditioned, equality, Thing: thinking
invented first and earliest these Schemata that effectively contradicted
most fundamentally the world as becoming, but which, relative to the
obtuse and uniform character of the initial and less than animal consciousness, seemed first to correspond to it [the world]: each experience
seemed again to underscore them and them alone. With the sharpening
of the senses and the attention, with the development and the struggle of
the most manifold life, equality and similarity gradually became increasingly rarely established: while, for the most inferior beings, everything
seemed eternally identical to itself, one, persistent, unconditioned,
quality-less. 13 It is thus because the senses and the intellect have gained
in subtlety that knowledge [connaissance] can, by itself, turn back upon
and against the archaic errors that found it. The crisis of foundations
no longer concerns this or that region of knowledge or science [savoir],
it touches the very idea of science and truth. It is no longer a matter of
comprehending how error is possible but of explaining how a sort of truth
is in general possible, despite the fundamental untruth of knowledge.14
Nevertheless, would learning that knowledge is a crude error necessary
to the preservation of the life of our body not place that body in peril?
And are we not thereby rejoining the question of knowing to what point
truth is liable to incorporation? Without the slightest doubt, this question sets the philosopher before his ultimate responsibility. Nietzsche
realized this very clearly. In order that there might be some degree of
consciousness in the world, he writes under the effect of the thought of
the return, an unreal world of error hadto be born: beings with belief
in the persistent, in the individual, etc. It is only after the formation of
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an imaginary counter-world, in contradiction to the absolute flux, that

something was able to be known on this foundationeven the fundamental
error, on which everything rests, can finally be seen through (because
contraries can be thought)nevertheless this error could not be annihilated otherwise than with life itself: the ultimate truth of the flow of
things does not tolerate incorporation, our ORGANS (for living) are set up
according to this error. Thus is born, in the sage, the contradiction of life
and his ultimate decisions; his drive toward knowledge has belief in the
error and the life therein as its presupposition.15 Once again, the final
question concerns knowing how knowledge, founded upon error, can
nevertheless reach the ultimate truth that ruins its possibility, or again
of what truth the body is capable the moment its very life rests upon
error. To this ultimate contradiction that strikes at the very principle of
knowledge, the philosopher, to whom it is the sole and unique passion,
can only respond by an ultimate decisionone that could have no other
form than that of a thought, of the thought of thoughts.
To comprehend how the eternal return saves the knowledge of the
flux,16 which deprives it of all foundation (for it is indeed that which is
at stake), let us return to the formation of identical cases, to simplification. In a general manner, to simplify is to reduce something complex
to one of its components to facilitate its comprehension and use. The
moment the formation of identical cases is imputed to the body and to
its drives, we have to know if and how simplification is at work therein.
There have been innumerable modi cogitandi, Nietzsche remarks, but
only those that made organic life progress were preservedwere they
the finest ones?Simplification is the principal need of the organic; to see
relationships more summarily to grasp cause and effect without multiple
intermediaries, to find similarity in much that is dissimilarthat was necessarythus an incomparably greater quest for nourishment and assimilation took place, because the belief that there was something to find with
which to nourish oneself was more often exciteda great advantage for
the growth of the organic!17 However, does this simplification, which is
always a mode of thinking, characterize exclusively the relations of the
organism and the world in which it draws nourishment and lives, or is it,
simultaneously, at work in the hierarchical relations maintained by the
multiple corporeal drives?
In order to respond to this question, let us reread the great note of
1885 entitled Morality and Physiology.
We have today forbidden ourselves to fabulate about of the unity,
of the soul, of the person: with such hypotheses one makes the
problem more difficult, that much is clear. And even these smallest
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living beings that constitute our body (more correctly: from whose
collaboration that which we call body is the best comparison) do
not count for us as soul-atoms, but much more as something growing,
struggling, self-expanding, and dying-off-anew [Sich Vermehrendes und
Wieder-Absterbendes]: in such a way that their number changes variably,
and our life like every life is at the same time an ongoing dying. There
is thus in man as many consciousnesses [Bewusstseins] as there are
beingsin every moment of his existencewhich constitute his body.
What distinguishes the conscious, habitually thought to be single, to
be intellect, is precisely that it remains protected and closed off from
the innumerable manifold of these many consciousnesses in experiences, and, as a consciousness of a higher rank, as a ruling multitude
and an aristocracy, only a choice of experiences is presented to it, what
is more these are experiences simplified, clarified and comprehensible, thus falsifiedsuch that for its part, the intellect might pursue
this simplification and clarification, thus this falsification, and prepare
what one generally calls a willeach such act of the will presupposes
as it were the nomination of a dictator. But what presents this choice to
our intellect and what has already, beforehand, simplified, assimilated,
interpreted lived experiences is in any case not at all this intellect: the
less so that it is what carries out that will, what takes on a pale, thin, and
highly imprecise representation of force and value and translates it
into a living force and a precise measure of value [lebendige Kraft und
genaue Werth-Masse]. And the same sort of operation that unfolds here
must unfold continually at every deeper level, in relation to all the
higher and lower beings together: these same choices and presentations of experiences, this abstraction, and this thinking that assembles,
this willing, this retranslation of the always highly indeterminate willing into determinate activity. From the guiding thread of the body, as
stated before, we learn that our life is possible through the interaction
of many intelligences highly unequal in value, and thus only through a
continual thousandfold obeying and orderingstated in moral terms:
through the uninterrupted exercise of many virtues. And how could one
stop speaking morally!18
Let us first set aside an objection liable to weaken the preceding

argument in its entirety. Is it only by comparison, or qua image, that our
subjective unity receives the names of a body, and if this is not the case,
then for what reasons is it not so? On the one hand, texts in which Nietzsche understands by body the subjective unity itself are too numerous
for our preceding note to stand as an exception. Set between quotation marks, the body is taken there in its common understanding as
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an organism. Now, as we have seen, the concept of an organism does

not cover the concept of body as a domination-formation into which,
by contrast, it blends. But on the other hand and above all, having recourse to comparison and images, Nietzsche never thought to contradict the requirements of truth. In regard to what poets of strong ages
have called inspiration, and thinking of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he will
write in effect: Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree
but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all;
one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It
actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things
themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors [zum Gleichnisse] (Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter
you: for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to
every truth).19
That much said, let us look at the relationships that multiple beings have among themselvesthose multiple beings, consciousnesses,
or intelligences that make up our body, with the reciprocal behaviors
of those multiple subjects, since it is permissible to allow for a multiplicity of subjects whose combined interplay as a whole, and whose combat lies at the basis of our thinking and especially our consciousness.20
As a domination-formation, the body is indissociable from a constant
and polymorphous command and obedience exercise. Each force must
therefore be apt to comprehend orders received or to make given orders
comprehensible. The body is therefore, indeed, a society of intelligences
and intelligences, differing by rank and power. Yet how is the execution
of a command by a force possible, if, on one hand, every force can have,
simultaneously and in various rapports, to obey and to command, even simultaneously to obey several commands issuing/issued from one or several other forces; or if, on the other hand, the constancy of the organism
requires the rapid and perfect execution of orders received? No force
can act without excitation. Obedience shall therefore be the more perfect that the excitation be easily understood. However, to comprehend
one by one these excitations, or to comprehend one excitation among
others, without confusing it with the others, and to be able thereby to
respond, that is to say thereby to obey, it is necessary to identify the force
from which it comes, since only the latter projects the meaning through
which its own commands are intelligible. This identificationwhich cannot fail to proceed according to the single perspective of the order receivedis ipso facto a simplification, since it isolates one excitation from
all the others without differentiating the other excitations. To simplify is
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therefore to abstract according to a determinate perspective and evaluation. Conversely, to give an order is to consider the subordinate from
the single angle of its possibility of executing that order, and therefore
to effect anew a simplification. Nietzsche says nothing else when, having
pointed out that a subject would be impossible without something persistent, without much equality and resemblance, he continues,
Without something enduring there would be no mirror there in which
a juxtaposition and a succession could be shown: the mirror already
presupposes something enduring [etwas Beharrendes].But this is now
what I believe: the subject could arise insofar as the error of the identical takes shape, as when for example the protoplasm receives diverse
forces (light, electricity, pressure) from a single excitation and, from
the unity of that excitation, conceives the identity of the causes: or
when, capable of a single excitation, it feels all the others as though they were
identicaland it is thus that things should occur in the lowest levels of
the organic. First arises belief in persistence and the identity outside
usand only later do we grasp ourselves following enormous practice
with what is outside us [nach der ungeheuren Einbung am Ausser-uns] as
something enduring and self-identical, as unconditioned. The belief ( judgment) must therefore have arisen BEFORE self-consciousness: in the
process of the assimilation of the organic, this belief is already there
that is, this error!That is the secret: how did the organic come to the
judgment of the equal and the similar and the enduring? Pleasure and
displeasure are only consequences of this judgment and its incorporation,
they already presuppose the habitual excitations of nutrition starting
from the identical and the similar!21
In inferring from an excitation received, the unity and the identity of the
different forces liable to produce it in assimilating all the excitations to
which it does not respond, in supposing constancy, the protoplasm proceeds to a simplification. This is not simply at work in the protoplasms relation to its environment, but also in the entirety of the relationships that
the constitutive forces of a body maintain among themselves, because, if
the protoplasm is the lowest degree of the organic,22 then it exemplifies
the will to power as every relationship of forces in general, and what is
true for the simplest organism is so a fortiori for the most complex. All living beings, all those drives whose cooperation constitutes our body, proceed and never proceeding toward simplifications; they tend and never
stop tending toward assimilation, to equalization. In other words, the moment the formation of identical cases is imputable to drives and to their
combined interplay, logic cannot fail to be a structure of the body. The
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logic of our conscious thought is only a crude and lightened form of that thinking
which is necessary to our organism and even to each of its organs.23
But in what sense does the organic judge the identical, the resemblant, and the enduring? Why speak of judgment here? In what sense
does the simplification result from a judgment? To judge is to utter something about something else, [legein ti kata tinos]. Kant
takes up this Aristotelian definition, recalling that in all judgment . . . the
relation of a subject to the predicate is thought.24 But predication draws
its sense and possibility from the apophantics of judgment. Judgment
shows and reveals the subject to which it attributes or denies this or that
predicate.25 But in order that judgment could thus let us see and re-see
what is intended, it is first necessary that that which it manifests be continually accessible, or a being. It is thus a matter of knowing how on the
basis of the universal becoming that knows no constancy, a being could
be constituted as a constant being. Nevertheless, this constitution could
not be the work of apophantic judgment since it presupposes it. In that
respect, logic, as the doctrine of judgment, and ontology, as the science
of beings, have the same age and origin, and to enquire into ontology is
tantamount to seeking the ultimate principle of all possible knowledge.
How does Nietzsche determine the essence of judgment? We have
already encountered two definitions of judgment, albeit without stopping. Let us recall them here. According to the first one, more again
than the belief this and that is true, judgment is originally it is this
or that, which I want precisely to be true! And, according to the second definition, the belief that something is such and such, the essence
of judgment, is the consequence of a will, this must be as equal as possible.26 Other notes say the same thing. In 1884, Nietzsche writes: in
the judgment stands a belief it is so and so; as if, precisely the belief itself
were the closest fact that we could grasp! How is believing possible??27
And in 188687, as against Kant, for whom to compare something as a
characteristic mark with a thing is to judge. The thing itself is the subject;
the characteristic mark is the predicate. The comparison is expressed by
means of the copula is or are. When used absolutely, the copula designates the predicate as a characteristic mark of the subject. If, however,
it is combined with the sign for negation, the copula then signifies that
the predicate is a characteristic mark which is incompatible with the subject.28 Against Kant then, Nietzsche emphasizes that comparing is not an
ORIGINARY activity, equalizing is. JUDGMENT is not originally the belief
that something is thus and so but the will that a thing be thus and so.29
Following this, Nietzsche opposes more distinctly the Kantian thesis according to which to know is to judge, exclaiming, But judgment is a belief
that something is thus and so! And not some knowledge!30
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From these multiple, concordant definitions that open the possibility of a new class of judgments more fundamental than predicative
judgments, it appears clearly that, on the one hand, the essence of judgment does not lie in predication but in belief and, on the other hand,
that belief is tied to the will to equality as its foundation. What does this
mean, and how can this double proposition be justified? Let us start from
a predicative judgment as simple as the hammer is heavy. The effect of
this judgment is first to make the hammer visible. Yet how does it discover
the hammer? In asserting that the hammer is heavy, the judgment shows
first a hammer without weight only to make the weight appear immediately afterward and inasmuch as it belongs to the hammer. Apophantic
judgmentwhich is always and essentially disposed to double vision
shows the hammer as the subject of a predicate. Yet this double position
of the subject and the predicate, inscribed in the apophantic function
of judgment, would be impossible if the hammer were not taken for a
being, that is, for something relatively durable in the midst of the universal chaos and which remains equal to itself through the flow of becoming. The assumption of the being [des Seienden] is necessary, to be able to
think and conclude: logic only wields formulas for what remains equal.31
How is this possible?
It is certainly not possible by way of respect for truth. Indeed, if by
the latter we understand the adequation of the thing to the intellect, and
of the intellect to the thing, then no truth is possible where, in principle,
there is neither a being nor a thing. Truth presupposes identical cases.
Such is the reason why the predicative or apophantic judgmentthere
is no difference between thesecould not be knowledge in the veritable
sense of the term. However, that judgment might not be knowledge subject to or capable of truth is nevertheless insufficient to preclude knowledge resting upon judgment. In fact, nothing forbids knowledge from
resting on judgment otherwise than as on a foundational truth. In holding judgment (which could not be fundamentally true) to be the very
site of truth, the traditional analysis of knowledge ultimately has done
nothing else than to hold it to be true. Now, to grasp something as true
is to rest upon it . . . , to rely upon . . . , to believe in . . . If every belief
is a holding-for-true [Fr-wahr-halten],32 it then becomes possible to begin
to comprehend in what sense judgment is our most ancient belief. Echoing the Greek definition of man as a [zoon logon ekhon],
Nietzsche writes:
Man is above all a judging animal; in judgment, however, lies hidden our
oldest and most abiding belief, in all judgment there lies a fundamental holding-for-true and an assertion [Fr-wahr-halten und Behaupten],
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a certitude that something is so and not otherwise, that herein man

has really cognized [erkannt]: what is this, that in each judgment is
believed to be true?That we have a right to distinguish between subject
and predicate, cause and effectthat is our strongest belief; indeed,
belief in the cause and in the effect, in the conditio and the conditionatum is already itself, fundamentally, only a particular case of the first
and universal belief, our arch-belief in subject and predicate (namely
as the assertion that assumes that every effect be an activity, that everything conditioned be conditioning, every activity an actor, in a word, a
subject). Would this belief in the subject- and predicate-concepts not
[be one great stupidity?]33
Yet how was this great stupidity, on which all knowledge rests,
possible? Why did such a belief take shape and what does it signify? To
what necessities does it respond? What we say of belief can be said of
the will, we could not dissociate it from what we call, in grammatical
terms, its direct object. If Yahweh is the rock of Israel and Christ a cornerstone,34 then this is because the faithful, the believer, can rest on these
as on something unshakeable, firm, and constantwhich then bestows
the same constancy on him, in return. When Isaiah says, If you will not
believe, surely you cannot be trusted,35 he determines the proper content of belief. To believe is to strengthen oneself, to reinforce oneself, to
establish oneself in Yahweh: Do you not know? Have you not heard? Yahweh is an eternal God, he created the earth from end to end, He never
grows faint or weary, His wisdom cannot be fathomed. He gives strength
to the weary, Fresh vigor to the spent. Youths may grow faint and weary,
And young men stumble and fall; But they who trust in Yahweh shall renew their strength As eagles grow new plumes; They shall run and not
grow weary, They shall march and not grow faint.36
Independently of the form its object can take, every belief posits
what it intends as constant and enduringly equal to itself. Yet, in so doing,
and in return, it likewise posits the constancy of the believer himself. To
believe is to rest upon . . . and there is always in belief a moment of submission. Is faith not an obeisance? In a paragraph from The Gay Science,
dedicated to believers and their need to believe, Nietzsche observes:
How much one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is firm
and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is
a measure of the degree of ones strength (or, to put the point more
clearly, of ones weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by
most people in old Europe even today; therefore it still finds believers.
For this is how man is: An article of faith could be refuted before him a
thousand timesif he needed it, he would consider it true again and
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again, in accordance with that famous proof of strength [Beweise der

Kraft] of which the Bible speaks.37
From whence does the belief in constancy, which is to say, in Being
[ltre], draw its necessity? Before answering this question, we should emphasize that Nietzsche defines belief and judgment in the same terms.
After having noted in 1884 that in every sense impression, belief is already the prime originary [das Uranfngliche]: a sort of yes-saying, first
intellectual activity! A Holding-for-true in the beginning! Thus what
is to be explained: how a holding-for-true arose! What sensation lies behind true?38 In 1887 he will write, the essence of judgment (positing
the yes).39 To what is this silent yes addressed, which is stated in every
judgment and which makes them fundamentally a belief? To the constancy of Being. But to say yes has meaning only where it is possible
to say no, and if each yes marks a preference, every no implies a
rejection. There could nevertheless not be preferences and rejections
without a foregoing evaluation, without a division between the useful
and harmful, without a table of goods and ills. If to believe is to say yes
to being but not to becoming, if believing being reduces our fear before
chance, the uncertainty, the suddenness, and the unpredictability proper
to becoming, then this yes-saying affirms that the preservation grounded
on an erroneous constancy is better than the truth of becoming, is an
evaluationand if predicative judgment is essentially a belief in being,
then such a judgment would be quite simply impossible without a foregoing evaluation. Value judgments are thus one species of predicative judgment, but rather judgments whose structure and possibility differ radically from those of apophantic judgment, which conversely derives from
value judgments. Predicative judgment is thus identical with a determinate sort of value judgment, that is, those which posit the preservation
of the body as being preferable to any other thing and which, in order
to do this, assume the fiction of identical cases. Value judgments are not
one class of predicative judgments, rather predicative judgments are a
class of value judgments, and it is just as impossible to assign, as Heidegger does, a Kantian ascendancy to Nietzsches concept of value, as
it is to argue that the work of the last thinker of metaphysics must be
conceived independently of value-representation.40 We can henceforth
understand why judgments are 1) the belief that is so and 2) that has
this and that value. 41 Indeed, in a chaotic world in which everything
becomes without there being anything that might be truly constant, the
belief that holds being to be true by affirming that this is that, must
result from an evaluation according to which those errors or fictions
that are Being, apophantic judgment, truth, in a word onto-logic, are
more favorable to the preservation of living beings than is an unpredict-
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able becoming which never stops threatening their security, or exposing

them to fear. The sense for truth . . . is really the sense for security.42
And belief qua holding-from-true is a necessity of preservation. It would
be possible in itself that to the preservation of living beings fundamental
errors were necessary and not fundamental truths. One might for example think an existence in which knowledge itself were impossible, because there is a contradiction between absolute fluidity and knowledge
[Erkenntnis]: in such a world, a living creature would have first to believe in
things, in duration, etc., in order to be able to exist: the error would be
its existence-condition [Existenz-Bedingung]. Perhaps it is so.43
Thus understood according to its full intentional structurequa
condition of possibility of knowledge and requirement for preservationbelief is a work in the formation of identical cases. Without the
belief in being, which is none other than a manner of making identical
cases possible, no judgment, no knowledge, no truth in the traditional
sense of these terms could be possible. An original fiction thus lies at the
ground of truthand this up to the present time. That there are identical things, identical cases, is the basic fiction [Grund-fiktion] already in
judgment, then in concluding.44 Yet that the entire edifice of knowledge
should rest on a belief that essentially has an error, a lie, or a fiction for
an object need not imply that the transcendental imagination be the ultimate ground. On the one hand, positing a faculty which as such separates
the actor from its activity is already to posit an identical casethe subject. On the other hand, the double homogeneity of the transcendental
schematism to the category, as to the phenomena, maintains the division
of the sensible and the intellectual, a division that is undermined by the
discovery of judgments of value that destroy any idea of sensuous data
or pure sensibility. And when Nietzsche underscores the poetic character
of logic, noting, for example, that we do not poetize: we calculate but
in order to calculate we first poetized,45 this is solely because, as Homer
says: many lies tell the poets. 46
The belief in the stability and the constancy of beingand being
is the identical case par excellence, the pure form of every possible
identical caseis thus necessary to the preservation of any living organism, because it is necessary to the combined interplay of the multiple
intelligences of unequal value that constitute organisms and that only
understand each other by simplifying the ones for the others. Now this
necessity governs as much the relations of the body in this totality with
the external world in which it strives to live, as it governs the relationships
among the multiple drives or miniscule living beings whose socialization precisely shapes the body. Belief in being is useful to preservation
and assumes that preservation has been raised to the rank of a principle
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of evaluation, for the viewpoint of the preservation of self differs from

the viewpoint of growth [Optik des Wachsthums],47 and what is useful to
the one is not necessarily useful to the other. To the question of knowing why the philosopher wants to know . . . and accords more value to
the truth than to appearance? Nietzsche responded once, and indeed
once and for all: the true is more useful (preserves the organism better).48 Judgment, as the adequation to constant being held for true by
belief, and upon which logic and knowledge rest, is not only the work of
the body but above all at work in the body. And if constant being (there
is no other, for constancy is the very meaning of being as distinct from
becoming) is equality to self, and if constancy simplifies the multiplicity
of difference proper to becoming, then it is the drive to assimilation that
states such a judgment and proceeds to such a simplification where statement and simplification define its very activity or essence. The drive
judges because it evaluates, and the apophantic or predicative judgment
is ultimately a judgment exclusively given over to value of preservation.
Judgment, truth, logic preserve the living being. Every bodily drive is
thus a subjectivating and subjectivated intelligence; it is subjectivating
because the judgment it sets in motion posits identity outside itself; it is
subjectivated because identity outside itself identifies, in return, the self
with itself. Organized in view of its own preservation, the body is a society
of subjects identical to themselves, equalized and, for that reason, liable
to cooperate enduring in all security. Collective security is required by
the self-preservation of the body as a society of mortal souls having to
communicate rapidly among themselves. Nietzsche perhaps never better
defined judgment in its corporeal function (and the corporeal function
of judgment) than when he countered Schopenhauers thought with
the following thesis. Judgment (that is, belief in a reality, and therefore
a designation) is older than the drive in the development of organic
life. Judgment belongs to the functions of self-regulation that the most
inferior organic creatures already exercise.49 Thus it is in judging, and
through judgment, that the drive to assimilation or will to power given
over to the preservation and self-regulation of the body, gives rise to
identical cases.50 In other words, and to recapitulate, the identical cases
on which judgments of knowledge are made, the identical cases that are
these vey judgments, are the work of the body inasmuch as they result
from judgments of determinate value, values of preservation.
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Part 5
The System of Identical Cases
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Sensation and Evaluation
The previous parts of this work show clearly that logic is the structure
necessary to a body organized in view of its own preservation. Logic fulfills this role by favoring rapid understanding between the multiple, constitutive forces of the body and through the presumption of identical
cases, without which the rapidity of this antalgic comprehension would
be impossible. Yet, since the presupposition of identical cases and of the
logical form is tantamount to belief in being, it is not so much logic, as
onto-logic that ensures the preservation of the body. This onto-logic is
the necessary structure of a body organized in view of self-preservation. It
is the will to power as will to assimilation and equalization, as will to powerlessness. It is the will to power turned against itself. Will to truth
impotence of the will to create.1 These statements, which lead ontology back
to will to power, imply that an enduring body is never other than the persistence of an organized error, and that corporeal life could only maintain itself at the price of a truth that exceeds it. This is the truth of the
flow, the flux, because the latter reaches the very principle of the bodys
preservation. If every belief is a taking-for-true, and if the taking-for-true
differs from the ultimate truth of the flowwhich, by not allowing itself
to be incorporated, is strictly unbearablethen the body, to preserve
itself, must be a believing body. Nietzsche says nothing else when, having
considered the evaluation: I believe that this and that is such as the essence of truth, he asserts that in evaluations are expressed conditions of
preservation and growth, that all our organs of knowledge and our senses have
developed only with respect to conditions of preservation and growth,
and that trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, [and] therefore
the evaluation of logic, proves only its utility for life, a utility proved by
experienceand in no way its truth. 2
We already had the opportunity to see that values are the conditions of preservation and intensification of the will to power. But are
they primarily conditions of preservation and only then conditions of
growth, or the converse? The question is not of secondary importance
for, if growth is function of preservation, growth will never exceed what
is necessary for preservation. The will to power would only be a will to
adaptation, assimilation, and equalization, a reactive will. Whereas if, on
the contrary, preservation is a function of intensification, then the will to
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power will be a will to conquest, to victory, an active will. Once again, the
perspective of preservation is not a perspective of growth. Preservation
wants being; intensification requires at least becoming. Opposed to selfpreservation is the will to appropriate, the will-to-become-master, the
will-to-be-stronger.3 The preservation of its own power is perhaps not the
only thing to which a living being aspires, it is rather but a consequence
of the will to intensify this same power. Physiologists, writes Nietzsche,
should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as
the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all
to discharge its strengthlife itself is will to power; self-preservation is only
one of the indirect and most frequent results. In short, here as everywhere
else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principlesone of which
is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinozas inconsistency).
Thus method, which must be essentially economy of principles, demands
it.4 To raise self-preservation to the highest rank is to take the result for
the foundation, and this misunderstanding stands at the origin of ontological knowledge, of onto-logic itself.
Although preservation would derive from intensification, it remains
that logic first, and the knowledge that thereupon merges with it, are ordered according to preservation alone. Logic and truth preserve life,
because we have projected our conditions of preservation as predicates
of being in general. And if we have made being the highest condition of
our preservationNietzsche will not talk about intensification here
then this is because to prosper, we must be stable in our beliefsand,
to satisfy this requirement, we have made the real world, a world not
of change and becoming, but one of being.5 Being, logic, and truth,
which Nietzsche understands as forms of constancyand thus in a temporal wayhave the function of making the world stable, preparing it,
through knowledge, for the preservation of life. And what holds for being, logic, and truth also holds for language: Linguistic means of expression are useless for expressing becoming; it belongs to our ineradicable
need for preservation [unablslichen Bedrfnis der Erhaltung] to continually
posit a cruder world of stability, of things, etc.6 Language, as means of
expression, and according to the grammatical comprehension it offers
through itself, preserves because it fixes, and fixes in order to preserve.
But knowledge is not simply in thrall to the preservation of the body.
It is also founded on belief and error. Is it then possible to liberate it,
make it sovereign, by acceding to the truth of truth? Is it possible to direct knowledge in an entirely other direction? It is improbable that our
knowing should extend further than what is strictly necessary for the
preservation of life.7 Nevertheless, in thus writing the word knowledge
between brackets, Nietzsche intends only the ontological and preserving
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mode of knowledge. This is demonstrated in an important note of 1884,

where Nietzsche opens the possibility of a mode of knowledge different
from the one that preserves, different from the ontological one: Of the
multiplicity of modes of knowledge. To enquire into ones own relationship to multiple other things (or into the relationship of kinds)how
should that be knowledge of something other! The mode of knowing
and of becoming knowledgeable is already itself part of the conditions of
existence: to conclude from this that there could be no other modes of
intellect (for us) than that which preserves us, would be precipitous: this
de facto condition of existence is perhaps only fortuitous and is perhaps
absolutely unnecessary. Our apparatus for knowledge is not designed for
knowledge. 8 What should this mean if not that a different knowledge
and intellect are possible, but which would not be primarily and above
all means to preserving life by falsifying the world? To preserve oneself
is to lie, to prevaricate with full knowledge, and to turn knowledge into
an imperative of preservation. It is finally to ground knowledge on the
fear of death. When he emphasizes that the principle of preservation of
the individual (or the fear of death) should not be derived from sensations of pleasure and displeasure, but is something directive, an evaluation,
which is already at the base of every feeling of pleasure and displeasure, Nietzsche means by the same token that the preserving values are
reactive since fear, as we know, is reactive. But can reactivity extend to
the ontological knowledge, which in any case could not be individual?
Certainly, because what holds for the individual holds still more for the
species. The same note continues immediately with the following: This
holds still more for the preservation of the species: the latter is but a
result of the law of preservation of the individual, and in no way an original law.9 The will to preservation, that is, the fear of death as European
sickness,10 therefore grounds reactive values in general, and if the ontological knowledge peculiar to Europe is its instrument, this knowledge
cannot fail to be integrally reactive. Referred to will to power, ontological
knowledge and onto-logic itself are reactive structures. And, supposing
another knowledge is possible, it should no longer be an instrument of
preservation but should actively open for the body the possibility of intensifying its power. It should create a superior body by revaluing reactive
values. For a higher kind of creature, knowledge, too, will acquire new
forms, which are not yet necessary today.11
Is it not absurd to entrust knowledge alone with the task of elevating the body to a superior power? Indeed, how would knowledge be able
to change bodies, if the world in which they live, and from which they
live, remains unchanged? The body is in the world the moment it nourishes itself, and in order for knowledge to transform the body, it must
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necessarily transform the world. Is this possible? Is it even sensible to ask

this question? To be sure. For knowledge has never been other than a
means to inform chaos, to build a cosmos, a world. A note dedicated to
the will to power as knowledge begins with these words: Not to know,
rather to schematize, to impose on chaos enough regularity and form
to satisfy our practical needs.12 No body could live enduringly amidst
chaos; the constancy of the world is necessary for the constancy of the
body, whose preservation requires a world of identical cases. We have
already seen it, first is created the belief in the persistence and identity outside usand only later do we grasp ourselves following enormous
practice with what is outside us as something enduring and self-identical, as
unconditioned.13 This is not to say that the unity of the body lags behind
that of the world. While confirming the mundanity of the subject to the
world, Nietzsche emphasizes, on the contrary, that the feeling of a subject grows insofar as we build, with memory and imagination, the world
of equal things. We invent ourselves as unities in this world of images that
we have created, as what remains stable through change.14 Given that,
it is not the case that we borrow our unity after the fact from that which
we attributed to the world to survive, it is rather that the apprehension
of this unity, our consciousness of unity, comes late. If our unity and
constancy are interdependent with regard to those of the world, then
identical cases are not only necessary to the relations between the constitutive drives of the body. They are also necessary to relations between
the drive-body [corps pulsionnel] as a whole and the world in which it is
attempting to survive. Let us recall that the quest for nourishment supposes the constitution of identical cases. Moreover, after having asserted
that without the transformation of the world into forms and rhythms,
there would be nothing equal for us, and thus, nothing that returned,
neither any possibility of experience, appropriation, or nutrition, Nietzsche could then say that from this point of view, knowledge proves
to be but a means of nourishment.15 An ontological body could thus remain alive only in an ontological world, that is, in a world ontologically
equalized: leveled down. If science is democratic, onto-logic is still more
democratic.
Once knowledge has already transformed the world, by informing
chaos, it is not impossible that another form of knowledge allows the
creation of a superior body in a transfigured world. But how can we
reach this knowledge without first bringing ontological knowledge back
to its ultimate foundation, and without thereby modifying this foundation, in order to subordinate preservation to intensification, and being
to becoming? We must begin by analyzing the way in which ontological
knowledge has, up to now, assured the constancy of the body and world,
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to determine thereafter how another knowledge could authorize the intensification of power and the creation of a superior body in a world
appropriate to theseall this, even as it ensures for world and body a
constancy that is no longer false, fictitious, and reactively grounded on
the belief in being. This is to say that the difference between ontological
knowledge subordinated to preservation, and the great sovereign knowledge liable to raise the body up, must be led back to two different ways
of guaranteeing constancy. This will beindeed, contrary to Kanta
matter of suppressing belief, to make room for higher knowledge, higher
power, and a higher will.
To analyze ontological knowledge, we must first suspend what it
does. Yet how to determine its extent, without proceeding to a radical
dehumanizationsince knowledge is the factum of man. The return to
chaos is prior to the elucidation of knowledge and as we said, it has the
sense of a reduction. To determine the world as chaos is to think of it independently of any connection to possible knowledge; it is to think it as
a world deprived of any order, a-cosmic, in-becoming, in which nothing
makes knowledge possible because there is nothing yet to know. That is
to say, there is no constant being on which to set a judgment of any kind.
This chaotic worldflowing and in becomingis not only foreign to
knowledge, it is moreover incompatible with knowledge. Knowledge of
what is totally fluid is impossible.16 In his own way, Husserl will restate
this when describing the constitutive flow of timethe phenomenological absoluteas a flow of continuous change; and this change has
the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither
faster nor slower. Amidst this absolute phenomenological flow, Husserl specifies, any object that changes is missing here; and since something runs its course in every process, no process is in question. There is
nothing here that changes, and for that reason it also makes no sense to
speak of something that endures. It is therefore nonsensical to want to
find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during
the course of its duration.17 Where there are no objects, no beings, and
where consequently no nominal positing could take place, no knowledge
could evidently be possible. This is no doubt what Husserl wanted to
show when he noted that the constitutive flow is something we speak of
in conformity with what is constituted, or again, when he concedes that to
designate the flow of the absolute subjective time we lack names.18
The moment there is a principial discrepancy between knowledge,
which up to now was never but a way of tarrying with an entity by slowing down its becoming, and the world of forces whose chaotic fluidity
excludes any global equilibrium or definitive standstill, knowledge is only
possible against-the-world, much the way we say against-the-grain. But
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what does it mean to-be-against-the-world if not to be in another world?

And how could knowledge have this other world as its theme, if it did
not create itand this, in such a way that the other world were wholly
appropriate to it and completely mastered by it? Those operations by
which knowledge stabilizes becoming, convert every event into a state,
every verb into a noun. They are ultimately none other than operations
through which man created a world, over which he became master in order to preserve himself in it. In this way, he mastered it through falsificationnot merely the falsification of nature with its own order, but rather
through the falsification of chaos. What ontological knowledge had always taken as [phusis] is but [techne ], technological domination. It is therefore by analyzing the structures of this knowledgewhich
always created what is knowable through the same process by which it became aware of itand by determining its ultimate axiological principle,
that we will be able to accede to the essence of technology and qualify the
domination that up to now has been its own. Indeed, and provided we
understand creation here as the effective incidence of method on its
objectit is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth
century, but the victory of scientific method over science19the general
characterization of knowledge as creation is appropriate not only for
quantum physics or theoretical physics, which Heidegger said was the
true, pure technology,20 but to all knowledge as suchand this, regardless of the values commanding it. In other words, nuclear physics merely
corroborates the technical essence of all ontological knowledge in general. Nietzsches analysis of knowledge thus responds in advance to the
epistemological upheavals following the quantic revolution. Bohr or Heisenbergs opposition to Kant, which constituted their properly scientific
oeuvre, often rejoins that of Nietzsche, whether concerning causality,
the status of classical concepts, or the constitutive function of language.
Bohr, for whom classical concepts become images, metaphors,21 is simply
echoing Nietzsche, for whom time, space and causality are but metaphors
of knowledge by which we explain things.
To analyze the structures of knowledge, let us start with a note from
1885. Continual transitions, writes Nietzsche, do not allow us to speak
of individuals, etc.; the number of beings is itself in flux. We could
know nothing of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see what is at rest beside what is in motion. The same applies
to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of empty
space, we would certainly never have acquired the conception of space.
The principle of identity has, as background, the evidence that there
are equal things. A world in a state of becoming could not, strictly speaking, be comprehended or known. It is only to the extent that the com-
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prehending and knowing intellect encounters a coarse, already-created

world, exclusively crafted out of mere appearances but solidified, and to
the extent that this sort of appearance has preserved lifeit is only to
this extent that there is anything like knowledge; that is to say, a measure for earlier errors against later ones.22 If the world in becoming is,
in principle, a world in which everything changes and passes, it could
not be known since the operators of knowledge, like causality, number,
time, space, and movement, are always relative to identifiable things
to identical cases. In other words, if knowledge is incompatible with the
flux, this is because the former rests on the principle of identity, whereas
the latter excludes any identity and all difference, so far as difference
presupposes identity. Thus, to analyze the processes of knowledge comes
down to analyzing the way in which space, time, and causality have permitted the creation of a counter-world, where identities could always be
controlled; of a counter-world that appears as true, and represents itself
as true in order to preserve life: the true world.
If knowledge of the world starts with sensationno one can learn
or understand anything in the absence of sense [perception]23we
must start from what Nietzsche calls the formless and unformulatable
world of the chaos of sensations.24 Concerning such a starting point, it is
first a matter of explaining how sensation becomes possible. Contrary to
Kant, Nietzsche does not hold sensation to be something given. Indeed,
if chaos is the global character of the world reduced to itself, this means
that we always feel the outer world differently, since each time it detaches
itself from the drive predominant in us. And as the drive, qua living being, grows and disappears and is nothing enduring, our sensation of the
outer world is, in the briefest of moments, always becoming and passing,
and therefore changing.25 In the midst of the chaotic world, and for a
living being that becomes, there could only be a chaos of sensations, or
some unique sensation of chaos. Yet, both a chaos of sensations and a
sensation of chaos prevent a single sensationin the dual sense of act
and objectfrom being discriminated, that is, from being given. Now,
discrimination is essential to sensation the moment that it is a sensation
of something, and in order for it to point to something. If sight distinguishes white from black, taste differentiates the sweet from the bitter
and thereby is distinguished from sight.26 Every sensation, in the dual
sense of the act of sensing and the sensed object, is discriminating with
regard to other objects or acts, and it is only through this discrimination
that something is sensed as such. Under what conditions is a sensation
given? Under what conditions is a sensible datum possible? A sensation
could not be given, and a given could not be sensed, as long as its own
object is not itself discriminated, identifiable; consequently, just as long
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as the chaotic becoming of the world has not been relatively stabilized.
And how indeed could it be stabilized, if not relative to the conditions
of preservation of some organism? This is to say that every sensation presupposes an evaluation. Every sensation contains a valuation and all
the activities of the senses are invested with value judgments.27 Not only
every sensation is morally colored28and we need to understand sensation in both dimensions of acts and objectsbut colors (and with them
the set of properly sensuous objects, which Aristotle considered as invariably true)29 are also evaluations. All sensations, all sense perceptions,
are in a certain way originally related to the pleasure and displeasure of
the organic being: green, red, hard, soft, light, dark mean something with
regard to its living conditions (that is to say, to the organic process).30 If
pleasure and displeasure are correlative to the will to power, which always
posits values, then green, blue, red, hard, soft, are hereditary evaluations
and their distinctive signs.31 Understood as evaluations, properly sensuous objects are thus always false, by virtue of a falsehood that is not the
contrary of truth but one that constitutes truths origin and ground.
There is thus no sensation or impression without a preliminary
evaluation. The structures of receptivity, and receptivity itself, depend
on a primary intellectual activity, and if the intellect seems to be older
than sensation,32 this is because intellect is an identifying and falsifying
apparatus. After having asserted that, without informing the world, we
could not feed ourselves, Nietzsche continued: In every perception, that
is to say, in the most original form of appropriation, the essential event is
an act or, more strictly: an imposition of form [Formen-Aufzwingen]:only
superficial minds speak of impression. Man thereby becomes aware
of his strength as a resistance force and even more so, as a determining
forcea force that refuses, elects, shapes properly, serialized in its schemata. There is something active in the fact that we accept a stimulation in
general and that we take it as this stimulation [Reiz].33 This activity consists in receiving this particular stimulation instead of another; in saying
yes to this stimulation and not to another; in letting oneself be affected
by one stimulation, excluding the others; and these discriminations and
distributions are grounded on an evaluation, on value judgments. To
perceive is then to evaluate.34 Perception is a moral phenomenon, and
the phenomenology of perception could not permit the elucidation of
the origins of knowledge, because in every so-called sense perception,
there is a judgment, which approves or denies the process before it penetrates into consciousness.35 An organic being could not sense a sensation without first accepting it, without letting itself be affected by it, without judging this sensation acceptable with regard to the conditions of
preservation and growth of this existent in the midst of becoming, with
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regard to its values. And this also holds for any primal impression or sensation of self by self, since such a sensation could not sense itself without
being capable of identifying itself by differentiating what is proper to it
from what is foreign. Now, the proper and the foreign are never determined once and for all absolutely. They vary according to the values of
the existent to which they are relative. According as a body wants first to
preserve itself or first to grow, the proper and the foreign will have neither the same meaning, nor the same value, and will be differently distributed. Our value judgments determine the things we accept and how
we accept them. But these value judgments are inspired and regulated
by our will to power.36 Again, there is no pure primal impression without a prior intellectual activity, and if the former derives from the will to
power, then intentionality could also be brought back to it. Thus, Nietzsche is from the outset opposed to Husserl, for whom the primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further
consciousness and being. Nietzsche would thus reject Husserls claim
that the primal impression is the absolute beginning of this production
[to wit, production of temporal modifications], the primal source, that
from which everything else is continuously produced.37 The moment
any impressionand particularly the primal impressionpresupposes
a primary intellectual activity, the insurmountable difficulties of hyletic
or passive constitution, and those of the self-constitution of the ego on
which all constitution in general rests, find a solution; no doubt, to the
detriment of the egological and transcendental character they have in
Husserl, but with the advantage of a higher and vaster intelligibility.
What is the meaning of this process of sensation-constitution out
of the chaos of sensations in which nothing allows us to distinguish one
from one another? Moreover, how is this constitution realized? Governed
by value judgments, dependent on prior intellectual activity, sensations
are not given but constituted as identical cases. No sensation can be felt
without having been previously equalized to other sensations. That weak
sensations are regarded as alike, sensed as the same, that is the fundamental fact.38 The equalization of the chaos of sensations, which implies
the reduction of their difference in intensity, is above all the condition of
possibility of any sense perception. This same equalizing and ordering
force that governs in the idioplasm, also governs in the incorporation
of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this
making-similar and this equalization relative to the entire past in us; they do
not follow directly on the impression. 39 But then, and above all, the
equalization of sensations is necessary to life and to knowledge, which is
why it is a fundamental fact. The equalization of sensations is necessary to
life for, without it, we would be continually threatened by chaos [menac
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par le chaos], that is to say threatened with chaos [menac de chaos]. The
pleasure we take at simplicity, clarity, regularity, brightness, from which a
German philosopher could ultimately deduce something like a categorical imperative for logic and for the beautifulfrom that, I conceive the
presence of a strong instinct [einen starken Instinkt]. It is so strong that it
governs all our sense activity and reduces, regulates, assimilates, etc., for
us, the fullness of the effective perceptions (which are unconscious) and
presents them to our consciousness only under this prearranged form [zurechtgemachten Gestalt]. This logic, this art, is our continuous activity. What
is it that made this force so sovereign? Obviously, the fact that without
it, and facing the confusion of impressions, no living being could live.40
Necessary to the preservation of the body and to the maintenance of its
coherence, the equalization of sensations is likewiseand for the same
reasonnecessary to knowledge. If, on the one hand, knowledge aims
at the real world, whose reality we reach through sensation and, on the
other hand, the world is originarily chaotic, then no knowledge would
be possible so long as we do not feel the world as real. Now, if in a world
of becoming, reality is never but a simplification for practical ends, or an
illusion founded on the coarseness of our organs, or [again] a difference in the tempo of becoming,41 then to feel the world as real is to posit
something as constant, to which sensation provides an initial access. Consequently, and on the basis of chaos, no knowledge would be possible
without foregoing equalization of the imperceptibly and unconsciously
different sensations; that is, without an arrangementa falsification
of the chaos of sensations, through which these same sensations could
be felt as being constant and identical to themselves, or again, as being
homogeneously distinct, the ones from the others. After noting that communication required the formation of identical cases, Nietzsche added:
The material of the senses prearranged by the understanding, reduced
to rough outlines, made similar, subsumed under related things. Thus
the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions are, as it were, logicized. The
world of phenomena is the prearranged world which we feel as real. Reality lies in the continual recurrence of related, known, and equal things
in their logicized character, in the belief that here we can calculate and
predict. The antithesis of this phenomenal world is not the true world,
but the formless unformulatable world of the chaos of sensationsthus
another sort of phenomenal world, a world unknowable for us.42 Equalization and assimilation do not concern sensations alone but operate
on all levels of knowledge with which they are merged. With knowledge
understood as a regulation of chaos, Nietzsche could then specify that
in the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that served
as norm: need, not to know, but to subsume, to schematize for the pur-
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pose of intelligibility and calculation . . . Prearrangement, the fabrication

of the similar, the equalthe same process that every sense impression
goes through, is the development of reason!43 If the categories, logic,
and reason derive from the same process of equalization at work starting
from sensationssince no sensation could be given, that is, distinct and
conscious, without being a prior logicizationthen, on the one hand,
aesthetics and logic in their Kantian sense, and consequently, the transcendental deduction, are led back to the will to assimilation as a preserving, conservative, and reactive form of will to power. And, on the other
hand, knowledgefar from deriving in some way or in part from experienceis the very thing that makes experience possible. Knowledge: the
possibilization of experience through which actual events are simplified,
[and this,] as much on the side of impacting forces, as on the side of our
shaping, immense ones: in such a way that there appears to be similar and
equal things. Knowledge is FALSIFICATION of the multiple and innumerable
into something equal, similar, enumerable. Thus, life is possible only thanks to
such a falsification-apparatus. Thinking is a falsifying rearrangement, feeling is a falsifying rearrangement, willing is a falsifying rearrangement:
in all of these resides the force of assimilation: which provides a will, to
make something equal to us.44
We cannot emphasize enough this priority of knowledge over life
and experience, a priority without which, we note in advance, the thought
of thoughts would remain unintelligible. This domination means first
that life and experience, such as we know them today, are essentially
false, but thereafter and above all, it opens the possibility of another life,
another experience, since the foundation of this human all too human
knowledgethat is, ultimately, this all too credulous knowledgeis not
invariable. The moment that knowledge makes possible both life in the
world and the experience of the world, it is also the only thing that could
allow its transformation. It is henceforth possible, then, to assert that any
modification of the foundation of this knowledge will modify the world
itself. And if, up to now, philosophers have never done so, it is because
they have always interpreted it in the same way. To give to knowledge a
foundation other than ontological may therefore suffice to creating a
superior body.
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The Formation of Categories
Toward what does the process of constitution of a sensation tend, when

it starts from an undifferentiated chaos of sensations? At what does the
making-equal, proper to all operations of reason, aim? And, if equalization is as much at work in sensations as in the categories, then what difference is there between the former and the latter? By forming distinct
sensations, knowledge gives rise to identical cases. Now, liable to repetition, an identical case is, in principle, calculable and predictable. The
calculability of an event does not consist in the fact that a rule was followed,
or that a necessity obeyed, or again that a law of causality was projected
by us into each event. It consists in the recurrence of identical cases. 1
Without the formation of such identical cases, no causal prediction of
events would be possible. Moreover, in a chaotic world in the process of
becomingabsolutely unpredictable and uncontrollablethe preservation of the organism would be hazardous, that is, very quickly impossible. One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts,
species, forms, ends, lawsa world of identical casesas though we were
thereby apt to fix the real world; but rather as a compulsion to prearrange
a world for ourselves, in which our existence becomes possiblewe thus
create a world for us, calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc. This
same compulsion exists in the activity of the senses that reason supports
this simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and fabrication on which
rests all re-cognizing, all being-able-to-make-oneself-intelligible. Our
needs have made our senses so precise that the same [gleiche] apparent
world always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of effectivity
[Wirklichkeit].2 In principle, reality is always coarse and, by creating the
simplified world of identical cases, by falsifying the chaotic world, by instituting a world equal to itself, knowledge therefore only makes it usual
and habitable; in short, livable. Conversely, a world wherein nothing is
equal to itself, a world without any recurrence of the identical would be
precisely unlivable, and it is worth our pointing out here that not only do
knowledge and logic, but also reality and causality, presuppose such a
recurrence. This should suffice to confirm that the thought of thoughts
could be nothing less than the foundation of knowledge itself.
Allowing calculation and prediction through the formation of identical cases, the will to power, as a will to assimilation, reduces and attenu226
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ates fear before chance, uncertainty, and suddenness. If by culture we

understand the very work of knowledge, the whole history of culture,
says Nietzsche, represents a diminution of this fear before chance, before
the uncertain, before the sudden. Culture means precisely learning to
calculate, to think causally, to forestall; learning to believe in necessity.3
The formation of identical cases thus aims at the creation of a world on
which we can rely, a safe world in which the organism can live in security,
failing which it could not durably preserve itself. The formation of identical cases through equalization is the very essence of security, and logic
essentially makes secure [scurisant], even is a security device [scuritaire].
This not only means that the sense for security is the very heart of the
sense for truth. It also means that equality among humans, democracy,
is the condition of this public security, which industrial society raises ever
higher, to the rank of supreme divinity,4 as the technological mastery of
the world is founded on and against fear. Is it possible to specify further
the way in which logical security is assured? In a long note dedicated to the
will to truth and to logical thought, Nietzsche writes: B. Differentiating
thought as the result of fear and caution in the will to appropriation. The adequate representation of an object is originally but a means for seizing,
grasping, and taking hold. Later, this adequate representation itself is felt
as a seizing, as a goal whereby satisfaction arises. To think ultimately as
domination and exercise of power: as assemblage, as insertion of the new
in old series, etc. C. The new FRIGHTENS: on the other hand fear must
already be there for the new to be seized as new[;] astonishment is weakened fear[.] The known inspires confidence[]true is something, which
arouses a feeling of security[]inertia attempts first the equalization of
each impression: that is, to equalize the new impression and the memory;
it wills repetition. Fear teaches to differentiate, to compare[.]5
What is this differentiating thought that stems from fear? What is
this securing thought? It is obviously that which presides over the creation of identical cases. Indeed, to posit identical cases is to introduce
differences amidst chaos; recognizable differences, that is, difference as
such. In this regard, difference comes from identity. Identity and differencethat is, without any doubt, knowledge itself, the entire science of
logic, and the logic of science. As we have already seen, the formation of
identical cases is prior to any sensuous datum insofar as it must be distinguished from other sense data and, more generally, only that which has
first assumed the value of an existent can be given. To what does this differentiating thought tend? It aims at an adequate representation. The
conformity of a representation to what it represents is none other than
its truth. Consequently, as the formation and differentiation of identical
cases, thoughtwithout which there would be no conformity, since it
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institutes the very terms of any relationship of conformity (and makes all
conformity between things possible)thought is consequently originary.
Indeed, this frightened, logical thought lies at the origin of all intentionality and all truth. Once again, it is knowledge, understood as the formation of identical cases, that makes experience possible. Arising from fear
before uncertainty, suddenness, and chance; arising from fear before
chaotic becoming, differentiating thought could aim at nothing less than
their mastery. Now, to master chaos on the basis of the fear it provokes is
to dominate the world with a counter-world, in a reactive manner. Fear
of technology should be understood in the dual sense of the genitive,
and if technology can cause fear, this is above all because it is made up
of it. To be sure, differentiating thought is an exercise of power, but it
rests on a prior falsification, and truth is the very expression of this fallacious, servile domination of the world. The fictitious world of subject,
substance, reason, etc., is necessary: there is in us a power to artificially
separate, falsify, simplify, order. Truththe will to become master of
the multiplicity of sensationsto serialize phenomena according to determinate categoriesin so doing, we start out from a belief in the in-itself
of things (we take phenomena as real). The character of the becoming
world as unformulatable [unformulirbar], as false, as self-contradictory.
Knowledge and becoming shut each other out. Consequently, knowledge
must be something else: there must first be a will to make-knowable, a
sort of becoming must itself create the deception of the existent [Tuschung
des Seienden].6
If truth (to which logic and the whole work of knowledge is bound)
can be understood as the will to master the plurality of sensations, and
as causing a feeling of security, then this is because the will gives rise to
that security. Together, the mastery of the chaotic and indistinguishable
flux of sensations and the falsifying constitution of sensation as a given,
form the first moment of this domination of the world, without which no
living thing could be preserved enduringly. No entity, whatever it be, for
appearances of the void and the full, of the firm and the loose, of what is
at rest and what is moving, of the equal and the unequal, constitute the
human-animal criteria of security.7 How does this domination unfold,
which starts with and through the recognition of a given? At what price
does it unfold? To the question, What is truth? Nietzsche once answered:
inertia; the hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; the smallest expenditure of spiritual force, etc.8 What should we understand with this
pacifying, satisfying, and lazy inertia, which is at the basis of truth or the
domination of the world? Nothing other than the reduction of the multiplicity of perspectives to a single one. Moreover, by the same token, we
understand the triumph of gregarity over hierarchy.9 It is because inertia
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is at the basis of truth that logic is democratic: Reduction of logical value

judgments to moral and political value judgments (value of security, of
rest, of laziness [the smallest force]), etc.10 If the will to inertia, which
is simply the will to assimilation, creates the knowable entity, in whose
midst any organism can be preserved, it forbids, at the same time, the
creation of a superior body. The possibility of the overman is thus the
price paid for the technico-democratic domination of the world.
But once again, how is such domination exerted? To raise this question is to inquire about the quality of the will to power at work in the
human domination of the world, beyond the forms it could take. It is
therefore to inquire into the nature of the operations by which knowledge secures the chaotic world. What is to know? To lead something
unknown back to something known, familiar. First principle: what we are
accustomed to no longer counts for us as an enigma, a problem. Blunting
of the feeling of the new, of the unknown: all that occurs regularly no longer seems questionable to us anymore. This is why the search for the rule is
the first instinct of the knower: whereas, naturally, with the establishment
of the rule, nothing yet is known at all!Hence the superstition of the
physicists: where they endure, that is, where the regularity of phenomena allows the use of abbreviated formulas, they consider having known
them. They feel security: but behind this intellectual security lies the
alleviation of fear: they want the rule because it strips the world of its frightening character. Fear of the incalculable as the ulterior-instinct of science.
Regularity puts the questioning (that is to say, frightened) instinct to
sleep: to explain, that is, to indicate a rule for the event. The belief in
the law is the belief in the dangerous character of the arbitrary. The
good will to believe in laws helped science to triumph (particularly in
democratic ages).11
The first operation whereby knowledge masters the world by creating it consists in reducing the new to the old, in converting any event
into a reproducible state, in slowing down or immobilizing becoming.
Nietzsche often insisted on this assimilation. Not only does the will to
inertia, which stems from fear, attempt to equalize any new impression
to the memory of old ones but, more generally, to know is the means
to make us feel that we already know something: therefore, the struggle
against the feeling of something new and the transformation of the apparently new
into something old.12 Or again: In our thought, essential is fitting new material into old schemas (= Procrustes bed), making equal what is new.13
However, if knowledge, following the example of Procrustes, who violently adapts bodies of different sizes to the dimensions of his bed and
who by forcing different bodies to take their place in that same bed,
equalizes them; if knowledge, consequently, starts by eliminating the new
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from any event or case, to reduce them to the identical, it carries on this
task by inscribing these identical cases in series.
How does this serializing take place? As we have already seen (without dwelling on it), serializing consists of assimilating the new to the
old, the event to the memory, and proceeds according to determined
categories.14 Does this mean that serializing is the work of a categorial
memory or rather, that memory and the categories have a common origin? Let us leave memory to the side for a moment and begin with the
categories. The inventive force that forged the categories labored in
service to our needs, namely to our need for security, to quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, to means of abbreviation:
substance, subject, object, being, becoming have nothing to do
with metaphysical truths.It is the powerful who made the names of
things into law, and among the powerful it is the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories.15 Derived from the need for security, categories are the auxiliaries of the will to preservation. Further,
because they result from the inventive force of artists specialized in abstraction, they are useful instruments of the falsification of the world.
They cannot lay claim to the slightest truth, although without them no
enduring life would be possible. The categories of logic are categories of
need, and logic is essentially drudging. Nietzsche is saying nothing else
when he asserts that all our categories of reason have a sensual origin, for
sensualism is plebeian.16 How then should we understand that the categories were the work of the powerful? Having qualified sensualism as
plebeian, Nietzsche went on: Conversely, the charm of the Platonic way
of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense-evidenceperhaps among men who enjoyed even
stronger and more demanding senses than our contemporaries, but who
knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of the senses
and this by means of pale, cold, grey concept nets which they threw over
the motley whirl of the sensesthe mob of the senses as Plato said.17
The categories are the work of the powerful by virtue of the mastery
and domination that made their creation possible. But if this mastery is
bound to preservation alone, and if the falsification of the world is its corollary, then it could only be reactive. Praised as legislator but blamed for
having instituted a counter-world of values purely conservative and reactive, Plato is then a figure as ambiguous as the Jewish priest who created
a reactive morality and law, which were fulfilled by Christianity. We can
now understand why, when he undertook to revalue all reactive values
the adjective is essential hereNietzsche ended up qualifying Plato as
a Jew, and speaking of Pauline Platonism.18 We can understand, too,
how much these qualificationslegitimated by no philology but which
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ultimately undermine the authority of all philologyare rich in meaning, the moment that Judeo-Christian values and ontological ones are
understood simultaneously, if for different reasons and to different degrees, as reactive values.
Let us return directly to the categories according to which identical cases are serialized. The categories do not only originate from a need
for security but also from the need for rapid comprehension, from that
for abbreviation. To abbreviate is at the same time to simplify and to accelerate. The categories abbreviate, because they allow us to dominate
in a single move a multiplicity of identical cases, more or less affiliated
with each other. Without this abbreviation, the successful mastery, case
by case, of the plurality would inevitably be slower and more painful to
obtain. What then is the function of this acceleration and how is speed
constitutive of knowledge? We have seen previously that pain, which is
inherent in any hierarchical relation, varied in inverse proportion to the
speed of transmission of commands. And, consequently, we have understood that the speed of communication among the multiple forces
constituting a domination formation favored its cohesion, duration, and
unity. Speed thus has a synthetic function, and this is founded on will to
power. N.B. The struggle for existencethis designates a state of exception. The rule is rather the fight for power, for more and better
faster and more often. 19
Is the same thing true for knowledge? Does speed operate there as
a synthetic principle, and what would be its result? On the other hand,
speed contributes to the formation of identical cases and to all unity in
general. Nietzsche early on gave a description of this in a paragraph of
Human, All Too Human. All stronger moods bring with them a sympathetic
resonance on the part of related sensations and moods: they as it were
root up the memory. Something in us is provoked to recollection and
becomes aware of similar states and their origins. Thus there come to be
constructed habitual rapid connections between feelings and thoughts
which, if they succeed one another with lightning speed, are in the end
no longer experienced as complexes but as unities. It is in this sense that
one speaks of the moral feelings, of the religious feelings, as though
these were simple unities: in truth, however, they are rivers with a hundred tributaries and sources. Here too, as so often, the unity of the word
is no guarantee of the unity of the thing.20 Thus, the faster a series can
be scanned, abridged, the more it takes on the figure of unity, and the
abbreviation constituting the categories, which accelerates its domination of multiplicities, unifies by reducing comprehension (that is, conformity and truth) to increase extensionthat is, to increase domination.
Domination and truth thus vary in an inversely proportionate fashion.
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No doubt, speed unifies in a rough and falsifying manner, but knowledge

and the formation of identical cases, which always come with simplification and myopia, are founded on errors. Speed is not added on top of
knowledge: to accelerate is already to know, and if the speed proper to
the operations of knowledge never ceases increasing with the accumulation of knowledge, then the acceleration of knowledgein the double
sense of the genitive, since speed is a logical functionhas for effect to
slow down, or even immobilize becoming. How should we understand
this paradox? Our logic, says Nietzsche, our sense of time, our sense
of space are prodigious capacities of abbreviation for the purpose of
commanding. A concept is an invention that does not correspond fully
to anything, but rather somewhat to many things: a statement such as
two things equal to the third are equal among themselves presupposes
1) things, 2) equalities: there is neither the one nor the other. However,
with this invented and fixed world of numbers and concepts, man acquires a means of mastering a prodigious quantity of facts, as with signs,
and of inscribing them in his memory. This sign apparatus is his superiority, as he thereby distances himself as much as possible from singular facts. The reduction of experiences to signs, and the ever-increasing
multiplicity of things that can be seized in this way: that is his highest
force. Spirituality as the faculty of mastering a prodigious multiplicity of
facts through signs. This spiritual world, this sign-world is pure appearance
and deception [Schein und Trug], just like every thing-appearance
[Erscheinungsding]and the moral man is wholly carried away.21
To conceive is to grasp-with or grasp-together, and every concept
unites. But what does it unite? The concept does not unite identical things,
since the identity of things results from it. Thingness [Dingheit] was first
forged by us, out of logical need, thus for the purpose of designation, intelligibility.22 Lacking things, the concept can only unite passing events,
fleeting intuitions do not really reveal anything, fugitive visions, motions
of mind, or images.23 How does the conceptor general caseassemble those multiple special cases?24 How does it assemble equalized
sensations? Through the word. The small sum of emotion that is born
with the word, and thus with the intuition of similar images for which a
word is already presentthis weak emotion is the common element, the
basis of the concept.25 Without words there would not be concepts
which does not mean that to each word corresponds a conceptand
lacking words there could not be things. Heir to the nominalist tradition,
Nietzsche had early on identified the identifying, conceptual function of
the word. In a text from 1873, which he sought to keep secret,26 On
Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche already wrote the following: Every word immediately becomes a concept precisely because it
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is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique, entirely individualized primal experience to which it owes its existence, but because it
has to fit at one and the same time countless more or less similar cases,
which, strictly speaking, are never equal or, in other words, are always
unequal. Every concept comes into being through the equation of nonequal things.27 It is for two reasons, then, that concepts and categories
are signs. On the one hand, simplification governing perceptible experience implies that the smallest common denominator in a multiplicity
of events should pass for the unique event itself; and to take the part for
the whole amounts to making the former the sign of the latter. On the
other hand, this simplification never goes without words, which cannot
be considered as the signs of things, but rather as the signs of these signs
of events, which are already things. As identical case, each thing grossly
condenses a multiplicity of events or relations, for which it is thus the
abbreviating sign. This is the reason why the relation between concepts
(or the intellect) and things is no longer the locus of truth or error. The
opposition is not between false and true but between the abbreviations
of signs and the signs themselves. The essential is: the constitution of
forms that represent numerous movements, the invention of signs for entire species of signs.28 If by categories we understand the most general
concepts of knowledge, and if knowledge is the condition of possibility
of experience, then the categories constitute the most powerful abbreviators of becoming. Indeed, to reduce a multiplicity of events, movements,
or different cases to a sign or a category appropriate to them (and which
represents them at the same time), is to permit their quasi-instantaneous
mastery. Categories thus have a temporal meaning, since thanks to them,
that which becomes and flows by can be given more rapidly than its passing, and even before it passes. Succession turns into simultaneity, and becoming into being. The acceleration peculiar to categorical knowledge
thus has as its paradoxical effect that of slowing down becomingand
falsifying abbreviations lie at the source of the onto-logic.
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Space and Time
Yet what are space and time without which there is no speed? In what
way do our sense of time and our sense of space constitute, like the
logical categories, these prodigious capacities of abbreviation? From
the moment it is a matter of our sense of time and space, real time and
space are not concerned. This precision is important insofar as Nietzsche
never excluded the hypothesis of a time, or even of a space, peculiar to
becoming. With the thought of recurrence, he noted: We know nothing
of space, which belongs to the eternal flux of things,1 and almost immediately thereafter: An effective time must correspond to the effective
course of things, if we abstract the feeling of spaces of time more or less
long or short, as experienced by knowing beings [erkennende Wesen]. In all
likelihood, real time is inexpressibly slower than the one that we, humans,
feel.2 What can we say about the time and the space peculiar to becoming? Let us start with space. Nietzsche not only asserts that force and
space are but two expressions and two modes of considering the same
thing.3 He also declares: I believe in absolute space as the substratum
of force: the latter determines and forms.4 But what does force inform
and determine if not space itself? On the one hand, indeed, space is
not infinite and, on the other, the eternity of movement must have, as
its cause, the form of space. Let us explain these two theses. (1) If space
were infinite, then force would have already dissipated in it, since it is
essentially finite. It is only on the false hypothesis of an infinite space,
in which force, as it were, fades away, is the last state unproductive, dead.
The simplest state is at once and +.5 This last proposition means that
the simplest state is the simple hierarchical difference between the plus
and the minus, and the will to power, as primal fact; for this reason, will
to power is no more in-becoming than it has-become. Since the will to
power cannot have become,6 the eternity of space is thereby founded.
(2) But the eternity of space wherein all movement of forces occurs is not
the eternity of that movement, itself. If by virtue of the infinity of time,
finite forces are always in movement, this is because equilibrium is impossible for them. This impossibility is not explained only by the infinity of
time, for if space were infinite as well, i.e., undetermined as to its form, or
if it were spherical, then equilibrium of forces would already have been
reachedif only through their dissipation. As this is not the case, the
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FORM of space must be the cause of eternal movement, and ultimately of

all imperfection. 7
What about the time peculiar to becoming, to which we just alluded? Time, in which the whole exerts its force, is infinite, which is
to say that the force in it is eternally equal, eternally active:up to this
instant, an infinity has already elapsed, which is to say that all possible
developments must already have taken place. The instantaneous development must, consequently, be a repetition, just like the one that engendered
it, and the one that will emerge from it, and so on forward and backward! Everything has already occurred innumerable times, inasmuch as
the integral situation of all forces [Gesamtlage aller Krfte] always returns.
Apart from this, were something equal to exist, that [would be] indemonstrable.8 What does this infinity of time mean? It marks out the farthest
point of dehumanization; for if, in an infinite time (whether backward
or forward), in a ring-shaped time, each instant is a repetition, then the
repetition of all the instants separates each one from all the others. In
other words, the real instants do not succeed to one another. This is the
reason why time, here, is not properly speaking cyclical. In cyclical time,
the instants follow one another and this succession is repeated. In other
words, if each instant is repeated therein, each instant is nevertheless not
itself a repetition.9
But why does this infinity of time manifest the furthest point of dehumanization? Quite simply because we consider succession to be the
essential character of time. Upon having the thought of thoughts, Nietzsche noted: Only succession produces the representation of time. Supposing that we did not feel causes and effects but a continuum, we would
not believe in time. For the movement of becoming does not consist of
points at rest, of equal slots at rest. The external periphery of a wheel
is, as much as its inner part, always in movement and, although the first
already moves more slowly than the second which goes faster, it is not at
rest. By means of time, we cannot separate slower or faster movements.
In absolute becoming, force can never be at rest nor ever non-force: the
slow or fast movement of the latter is not measured according to a unit,
which is lacking here. A continuum of force is without succession and
without juxtaposition (that would suppose the human intellect and gaps
between things). With neither succession nor juxtaposition, there would
be neither becoming nor plurality for uswe could only assert that this
continuum would be one, at rest, immutable, and not a becoming, without time or space. But this is, precisely, but the human contrary [Aber das
ist eben nur der menschliche Gegensatz].10
By describing becoming as a continuum of force, in which nothing momentaneously identical to itself becomes, and which we cannot
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for this reason even grasp as a becoming opposed to being; by specifying that this primal becoming is incommensurable to any unity and to
any plurality, such that it excludes all identity and difference in general,
Nietzsche is not proceeding from the reduction of objective, mundane
time to a subjective one. But conversely, he is reducing subjectivity or the
subjectivation of time, if not to a real or absolute time, then at least to
the horizon of its possibility.11 From this reduction, it follows that succession and juxtaposition are projected onto becoming, to give rise to our
representations of space and time. What does this mean? To say there
is no time without succession, or even without juxtaposition, is to say
there is no time without a one-after-the-other, without a one-next-tothe-other. But all difference between the one and the other presupposes the identity of the one and the other, and thus the formation
of identical cases. Thus, space and time are not forms of sensibility, but
forms of intellect or knowledge, and as such, they can and should be considered as abbreviators, as instruments for the domination of chaos in
service to preservation. In leading space and time back to knowledge
which, up to now, was never but an error necessary for the preservation
of lifeimmediately raises two questions. (1) Will the modification of
the essence of knowledge imply a modification of our sense of space and
time? Nietzsche seems to have excluded such a possibility. We cannot
look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know
what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward,
or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). Nevertheless, he
immediately adds: But I should think that today we are at least far from
the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our
corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has
the world become infinite for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot
reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.12 In other
words, if our concepts of space and time are indeed bound up with our
intellect, the latter nonetheless remains an interpretation among other
possible ones, related to a determinate angle, and nothing consequently
forbids us from thinking that a modification of the aperture of this angle
might lead to another interpretation, that is, to another sense of time
and space. (2) What precisely are the concepts of space and time arising
from this organized error that is knowledge?
Let us start with space. On many occasions, Nietzsche criticized the
concept of an empty and infinite space: Space, an abstraction: in itself,
there is no space and above all no empty space. A lot of nonsense arises
from the belief in empty space. 13 Or again: empty space is a con-
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tradiction, just like absolute end (in Kant), thing in itself (in Kant),
infinite force, blind will14 And finally: It is necessary to deny
empty space; [necessary] to think space as determined and limited; likewise, the world as repeating itself eternally.15 What comes out of these
foregoing remarks is that the concept of infinite empty space is bound up
with everything that Nietzsche opposes. Indeed, if finite space and force
are but two ways of saying the same thing, then the concept of an infinite
empty spacea concept peculiar to Newtonian mechanicsis a concept
of a space separated from force; i.e., ultimately, from will to power. Need
we recall that the latter binds only finite forces, which, if they are to work
on each other, must be differently localized? Abstracted from the will to
power, orwhich comes to the samestemming from the will to assimilation, the concept of infinite empty space is also incompatible with the
thought of recurrence, which requires a finite and determinate space.
A concise note provides the reason for this: Finite as space: infinite as
time with indestructibility, eternity is given and the absence of beginning with determination [Bestimmtheit], a boundary on the plurality
of new forms.16 The moment the world of eternal recurrence requires
a finite space, it is no longer that of classical mechanics which, on the
contrary, presupposed the infinity of space.
But whence comes our belief in empty space, in space tout court? An
empty space is first a separated space, isolated from force because the will
to power has transformed itself into a will to assimilation, giving rise to
enduring things, which find therein one of the conditions of their constancy. An empty space is thus an emptied space, isolated from the things
that occupy it and move in it. It is a space understood as the common site
of all constancy. In other words, the belief in empty space is a modality
of the belief in being and in identical cases. And this is why Nietzsche
can say, first, that space, like matter, is a subjective form, time is not and
thereafter specify that space was only formed at first through the presupposition of empty space. There is no such thing. Everything is force. We
cannot simultaneously think the moved and the moving, but this is what
constitutes matter and space. We isolate.17 Only an empty space, ontologically separated from force, can be a subjective form, and it is because
we presuppose a mover distinct from the mobile, a subject distinct from
its action, that we [likewise] presuppose an empty space; a distinction
which, as we will see, is the condition of possibility of the subject itself.
Just before asserting that we know nothing of space, which belongs to
the eternal flow of things, Nietzsche wrote again: Space and the human
laws of space presuppose the reality of images, forms, substances, and their
durability, which is to say that our space concerns an imaginary world.18
It is by virtue of this falsifying presupposition that Nietzsche can rightly
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consider mechanics, that is, mathematical physics, to be an application

of logic. He notes, for example: If mechanics is but logic, it then follows, for mechanics, what goes for all logic: it is a kind of spinal cord for
vertebrates, nothing true-in-itself.19 After having asserted the indestructible unity of space and force, he adds: Mechanics is fundamentally a
logic.20 And another note provides the reason for this: Mathematics
and mechanics have, for a long time, been considered to be sciences
endowed with absolute validity, and it is only now that we dare suspect
that they are no more and no less than logic, applied to the determinate hypothesiswhich remains to be provedthat there are identical
cases. 21 If mechanics is a logic applied to space and to time,22 then
the infinite and empty space of Newtonian mechanics, which pertains
to knowledge as organized error, is indeed a fiction as falsifying as logic
itself is.
But can we say the same of time, and above all, of what time can
we say this? Indeed, contrary to space, which, when dissociated from the
force, is but a subjective form, Nietzsche allows for a real or absolute
time, distinct from our representation of time. What are the characteristics of the real time that we cannot qualify as false, since it is the time
peculiar to becoming, and how do we reach it? The only possible starting
point is the becoming of the world itself. If the world of finite forces is
always becoming, it is because the real time of this becoming is infinite
and continuous. Indeed, only the infinity or eternity of time allows us
to account for the impossibility of a global equilibrium between finite
forces, and only the continuity of this same time allows justification of
the continuity of becoming, i.e., the continuity of global disequilibrium.
Real time is thus infinite, eternal, continuous, and as Nietzsche adds, no
doubt inexpressibly slower than the time that we, humans, experience.23
What then is erroneous in our representation of time? As it cannot concern the time aimed at by representation (since that time is absolute, real
time)this question therefore necessarily concerns the subjective representation itself, whose conditions of possibility we must now determine.
Observing that the subjectivity of time and space is not a proof for
their nonexistence,24 and by claiming that the fact that we have a time
instinct, a space instinct, a foundations instinct, has nothing to do with
time, space, causality25or again, that our derivation of the feeling
of time, etc. presupposes time, ever and again, as absolute,26 Nietzsche
clearly distinguishes a subjective time from an effective, absolute one.
But how legitimate is this distinction? How to be sure that our feeling of
time presupposes absolute, effective time? Or better, how can we reach
the difference between subjective and real time, that is, move past our
own time toward real time? For the subject, and from its point of view, to
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move past the subjective form of time amounts to suspending or reducing time, itself. During the period of the thought of recurrence, Nietzsche indeed described such an experience: There is a part of the night,
about which I say: Here time stops! After each nights watch, especially
after nightly journeys and wanderings, one has in regard to this space
of time [Zeitraum] a wondrous feeling: it was always much too short or
much too long, our time sensibility feels the anomaly. It might be that
we have also to atone for it while awake, [and] that habitually we spent
this time in the time-chaos of a dream! enough, at night between one
and three oclock, we no longer have time in mind. It seems to me that
this is precisely what the Ancients expressed as well by intempesta nocte
and (Aeschylus) the moment in the night, where there is
no time. 27
The experience of the heart of the night is thus one of a slowing
down, or a suspension of time, even of an absence of it. What time is
at stake here, and above all, what does the anomaly of our nocturnal
sensation of time signify? In a general fashion, anomaly denotes something irregular, disunited, uneven. But here, how could an unevenness
of sensation, and a sensation of unevenness, undermine subjective time,
or conversely, how are evenness, equality essential to subjective time? If
equality and inequality, evenness and unevenness, mark relations, then
the only equality required by humanized subjective time is that of the
moments composing it. Unequal, these could never relate regularly to
one another, nor give rise to a sequence, i.e., to a series and a succession. By understanding the now as a numberand recall that Nietzsche
considers the number, space, and time as perspectivesdid Aristotle not
already presuppose the common measure and equality of these nows?
Breaking up the regular succession of nows, this inequality cannot
but disrupt the normal course of time by revealing in it the nocturnal
standstill as a modification of its tempo. But thenand if there is no
time where we have none in mindthis is because time is understood as
a succession of hours and days, and as
[arithmos kineseos kata to proteron kai husteron], the number
of motion in respect of before and after. 28 This strange experience
shows that timewhich, through its very absence, is revealed to me in
the depths of the nightis subjective and successive. It shows that the
leveling off of sensations is the condition of possibility of their succession. Recall, too, that when he retraced the existential genesis of the
common concept of time, Heidegger also spoke of the leveled-off sequence of nows. 29 By contrast with real time, to which we can only accede as to something atemporal, this succession of equalized sensations
is what is proper to the ontological time that is human, all too human.
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Yet, if succession alone produces the representation of time,30

this is because time is a succession of representations. How is this succession itself possible? To pose this question is to raise two questions
at the same time: (1) How is it possible to distinguish, the ones from
the others, those representations that succeed each other? (2) The moment that no succession could appear without permanencewithout
something persisting, there would be no mirror in which succession and
juxtaposition could appear: the mirror already presupposes something
persistent31what is the permanent specular instance in which the succession of representations comes to be shown? If the first question concerns the identity of representations, the second concerns the identity
of the I that accompanies each representation. And there is no other way
possible to attempt to respond to the one or the other than to start from
representation itself.
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Representation
Under the influence of the most powerful thought, Nietzsche penned

the following note: The antinomy: The elements in given reality that are
foreign to the true essence of things, could not be due to this [essence]
and must therefore be added to itbut from whence? Since there is nothing outside true essenceconsequently an explanation of the world is
as necessary as it is impossible. I solve the antinomy in this way: the true
essence of things is a fabulation [Erdichtung] of the representing being,
without which it is unable to represent. These elements in given reality,
which are foreign to this fabulated true essence, are properties of the
existent, [they] are not added. But the representing being, whose existence is bound up with this erroneous belief, must also have originated [entstanden sein] if these qualities (of change, relativity) are to be proper to
its esse: representation and belief in what is self-identical and persistent
must have been simultaneously formed.I mean, that already everything
organic presupposes representation.1
To begin, whence comes the antinomy that Nietzsche is here attempting to solve? Its formulation is borrowed from a work by African
Spir, which Nietzsche read and quoted on several occasions between
1873 and 1885, and to whose epistemological theses he continually referred, from a stance of opposition. The work was entitled Denken und
Wirklichkeit [Thought and Reality].2 Spirs entire enterprise aimed at reviving critical philosophy. It was founded on the opposition between the
unconditioned (assimilated to substance) and the thing in itself, being
and the conditioned (assimilated to the empirical world, to becoming).
That is, it rested on the opposition between the unconditioned as expressed by the identity principle, and the objects of experience, which
never satisfy that principle.3 With what antinomy are we thus confronted?
Spir formulates it this way: The fundamental antinomy consists in that
the unconditioned itself can never be thought as a condition or a cause;
that a cause or a condition can never itself be thought as unconditioned,
and that the conditioned simultaneously requires and forbids foundation or explanation.4 In other words, if the unconditioned alone possesses being proper, is normal, then the things offered to experience
have no proper being; they are abnormal. But how then to understand
the elements of given reality, which, foreign to the normal essence of
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things, could not come from it? Spir continues: As foreign, they should
have to be added to it. But since, outside the unconditioned and the
essence of things in themselves, there is nothing from which anything
could derive or come to be, it follows that it is simply impossible to conceive the foundation of presence of these foreign, abnormal elements.
We have here reached, as it were, the antinomy inhabiting the essence
of the conditioned, of the abnormal. Thesis and antithesis there have
their sole common foundation. It is precisely because the conditioned
empirical constitution of things is foreign to their unconditioned normal
essence, that this constitution must have an external condition. However,
since this constitution is precisely foreign to the essence of things in
themselves, it could have neither an external nor any other condition,
because outside the essence of things, there is nothing that can serve as
condition. It is thus for the same reason that an explanation of the world
is [both] necessary and impossible.5 Nietzsche thus solves the antinomy
by destroying the hypothesis on which it rests. If there is no true essence
of things, or if the belief in such an essence is a fabulation necessary to
the preservation of organisms, then the antinomy disappears by itself.
But this neither explains how such a fabulation opens the dimension of
representationin which a representing being relates to something
representednor does it clarify the claim that states that there is no
organism without representation.
What should we understand, here, by representation? Unlike sensation, which, according to Spir, is a content present in consciousness
that has no intrinsic relation to things outside of consciousness and that
contains no claims about them, representation is a content present in
consciousness that contains the assertion of external things, that is, the
belief in objective existence or in the past existence of what is represented in it [consciousness].6 Representation thus denotes the relationship of the thinking subject to the external world, which is objective and
reala relationship mediated by contents of consciousness. But how is
representation possible amidst becoming, if it presupposes the double
constancy of the subject and the object, and contradicts becoming? In
any case, representation has first a verbal meaning and, here more than
elsewhere, it is important from the outset not to separate the agent and
the act. The representing activity has for its primary characteristic that of
being certain: The representing being is CERTAIN, even our sole certainty: that which it represents and the way in which it must represent, that
is the problem.7 As our sole certainty, the representing being is nevertheless not a subject in the sense of the ego cogito. Indeed, representing
activity is in-becoming [en devenir]; it never ceases changing, without ever
being in movement, strictly speaking, for all movement presupposes the
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constancy of the thing that moves. What then is this representing being,
which, being certain, must furnish its point of departure and guiding
thread to the knowledge of all that is? It is obviously the body, which,
organized by will to power, never ceases thinking and representing. Need
we repeat here what we have continuously argued in a host of ways: The
whole organism thinks, all organic formations participate in thinking,
feeling, willing?8 Despite the absence of the word, the long note of 1881,
entitled Fundamental Certainty, is clearly about the body, as cardinal
structure of the will to power. Against any form of distinction between
the certain existence of the acts of representation and the uncertain existence of their contents, Nietzsche there writes: I represent, therefore
there is a being, cogito ergo EST.That I might be this representing being,
that to represent might be an activity of the I, is no longer certain: no more
than is all that I represent.The only existent we know is the representing
being. If we describe it rightly, then the predicates of beings in general must
be in it. (But in taking representing itself for the object of representing,
does it not become saturated by the laws of representing, is it not falsified
and made uncertain?) It is change and not movement that is proper to
representing: wholly passing away and emerging, and in representing
itself all persistence is lacking.9
As the random product of a chaotic becoming, the body can disappear as soon as it appears. That such is not the case and that the organism manages to keep itself enduringly alive can only be due to the fact
that it represents and likewise to the way it represents, since everything
organic presupposes representation and representation belongs to will
to power. What then is the distinctive feature of representation in its
conservative mode? After having asserted that representing knows no
persistence, Nietzsche continues: On the other hand, it posits two persistent things, it believes in the persistence 1) of an I; 2) of a content: this
belief in the persistent, [i.e.,] the substance, that is, this belief in the
sames remaining-equal to itself, is contrary to the process of representation itself. (The moment I speak in a general manner about representing
activity, as I am doing here, I make it into a persistent thing.) But it is
clear in itself that representing is never at rest, nor something unchanging,
[nor] equal to itself: thus the only being that is assured us is changing,
non-identical with itself, [it] has relations (conditioned, thought must have a
content in order for it to be a thought).Such is the fundamental certainty
of being. Now the act of representing asserts precisely the contrary! But
this need not be true for all that! Perhaps the assertion of the contrary
is but a condition of existence for this kind of being, the representing kind!
That means: thought would be impossible if it were not fundamentally
unaware of the essence of esse: it must assert substance and equality, for a
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knowledge of what is completely fluid is impossible; it must fabulate [andichten] the properties of being to be able to exist. There is no need for a subject and an object for representing to be possible, but representing must no
doubt believe in both.In short: what thought grasps as reality, [what it]
must grasp, may well be the contrary of the existent!10
What is the sense of this note, in which Nietzsche designatesusing the words Being, esse, existentsthe absolute flux of becoming
amidst which nothing is ever equal or identical to itself? It answers the
question of knowing what representation is, the moment that representing makes persistence possible; that is to say, persistence as the preservation of the representing being. Considered in its unceasing change,
in the verbal sense of the term, representation is none other than the
relationship of a force to another. Consequently, it is a constitutive moment of the will to power, or of life itself. Thus understood, representingwhose meaning is partly merged with that of the preposition in the
expression will to powernever stops changing and implies neither
subject nor object. But the bodythe representing beingcould not
preserve itself without the will to power turning into a will to assimilation
and equalization. What then is the representational form of such a reversal? It must obviously satisfy this condition for lasting existence that is the
belief in being, in identical cases, in short, in the ontological. Aligned
with preservation, representing in its verbal sense turns into representation in a nominal or substantive sense. But why does this reversal give rise
to an ego and a content, to a subject and an object? The question does
not concern the constancy of the subject and the object of representation. Rather, it concerns the constancy of the division of representation
between subject and object. In order that representation be capable of
continually referring subjects and objects to each other, it is essential that
the act of representing possess this possibility. And it must initially be the
site of a relationship other than that of the subject and the object. This
is in fact the case, since representing, inherent to the will, is a moment of
the will to power through which forces come into relation, the ones with
the others. Now, if will to power only binds and relates unequal forces,
in such a way that the ones depend on the others, then every object, in
essenceand continuouslyis relative to, and dependent on, a subject.
The dissymmetrical division of representation between subjects and objects draws its origin from the hierarchical character of will to power and
from the representing activity that constitutes it. This explanation of the
schism of representation into subject and object means that the object
is ultimately but a subjected force, a subject reduced to obedience. Is
this conceivable? Without the slightest doubt, for if the will to power is
the command that a subject exerts on another subject, then any force,
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whether dominating or dominated, is a subject. After having asserted

that representing is our only certainty, Nietzsche can then write that the
subject alone is demonstrable; HYPOTHESIS, that only subjects existthat
object is but a kind of effect produced by a subject on a subject . . . a
modus of the subject.11 The object is but a subject durably settled in a position of weakness. And this duration assumes the self-identity of a relationship of forces. If, as Husserl said following Brentano, every experience of
consciousness is a representation, or rests on a representation, then the
intentionality of consciousness is founded on the will to power qua will
to equalization, assimilation, falsification, and the constitutive transcendental phenomenology is but a figure of the onto-logic.12 What is more,
the falsification of the verb into a noun, of the representing into representationa falsification from which intentionality is derivedis as old
as the grammatical interpretation of language itself. By emphasizing that
the mere fact of speaking about representing as such suffices to make
it a persisting thing, Nietzsche echoes Aristotles remark according to
which pronouncing a verb comes down to creating a noun, a substantive,
which immobilizes thought. But to stop the incessant flow of thought is
quite simply to think and perhaps, to think too simply. In any event, ignorance about becoming is the very condition of all logical knowledge
and thoughtthat is, human, all too human knowledge.
It is, however, not yet possible to explain the succession of representations, and with it, the representation of time. No doubt we accounted
for the identity of objects of representation, as well as the hierarchically
superior identity of the subject of representation. Yet this in no way explains the reasons why the subject refers to its own contents of representation, according to the mode of succession. To attempt this, let us return
to the subject itself, to the cogito. What separates me most from metaphysicians, writes Nietzsche, is that I do not grant them that the ego is
that which thinks: conversely, I hold the I itself to be a construction of thought,
having the same rank as matter, thing, substance, individual, end,
number: thus, as a mere regulative fiction, whereby a sort of constancy,
and consequently of knowableness [cognoscibilit] is introduced into,
and poetically imposed on, a world of becoming. The belief in grammar, in
the linguistic subject and object, in verbs, has up to now subjugated the
metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. Thought posits
first the I: but up to now, and following the example of the common
people, one believed that the I think included something of immediate
certainty, and that this I was the given cause of thinking, a cause thanks
to which we understood by analogy all the other relations of causality.
As usual and indispensable as this fiction might well be, it proves nothing concerning its poetic character: something can be a vital condition
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and despite this false.13 To say that the I, like matter, substance, or number, is a thought constructionwhich evidently does not exclude that
the I be an effect of the play of the drives, since there is no drive devoid
of thoughtor to say (which comes to the same) that representing qua
constitutive moment of the will to power gives rise to the subject and
the object of representation, this is above all to assert that the I pertains
to the falsifying system of identical cases, whose function is to make the
world knowable, enduringly livable, dominatable. But it is then, and especially, to posit a certain perspective in vision as the cause of vision itself ; whereupon Nietzsche immediately adds: that was the legerdemain
in the invention of the subject, the I. 14 What then is, in the midst of
the system of identical cases, the distinctive feature of the I ? It is double.
On the one hand, it grounds the certainty of knowledge and, on the
other, as the cause of its own representations, it is at the source of all causality, that is, of the universality of the knowledge of the world.
Let us examine these two features. The fundamental certainty
that we mentioned previously should not be misunderstood. Indeed, if,
in a functional and systematic fashion, we entitle fundamental certainty
the ultimate fact to which it is possible to accede, then becoming is liable
to receive this title. However, if, following Descartes, we understand certainty as something firm and constant, a fixed and immovable point, an
unshakable foundation, then becoming is a fundamental certainty only
in an ironic sense. In that case, what should the position of a subject certain of itself mean, if not the fictitious and false stabilization of becoming? Nevertheless, if poetically establishing [conster potiquement] becoming through the ego cogito makes the world knowable by turning it into
a representation, or an object for a subject, then this implies in return
that the will to certainty that grounds knowledge is as servile and reactive
as that knowledge, which stems from fear, as we have seen. The will to
truth and certainty arises from the fear of uncertainty.15 In other words,
a subject, apodictically certain of itself, and the knowledge it thereby
grounds, will never be sovereign but always gregariousand the sort of
privilege granted to the cogito is none other than the sign of the weakness of the ego.
How can the ego be the cause of its own representations and, at
the same time, stand at the ground of all causality? If the I is a thought
construct, whence comes the plan that this construct follows? Let us return to the cogito. In this famous cogito, there is: 1) it thinks, 2) and I
think that I am that, which thinks, 3) yet, even admitting that this second
point remains in abeyance, being a matter of belief, the first, it thinks,
likewise and once again contains a belief; namely, that to think is an activity for which a subjectthough it were but an itmust be thought;
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and the ergo sum signifies nothing less than this! But that is a belief in
grammar. One is already positing things and their activities, and we
are far from immediate certainty.16 The construction of the subject thus
depends on grammar. Yet, what should we understand by that? Nothing
other than the distinction between the agent and the action, the noun
or pronoun, and the verb. In a note dedicated precisely to causalism,
Nietzsche writes: The separation of the deed from the doer, of the
event from something that brings it about, of the process from a something that is not a process but is enduring: substance, thing, body, soul,
etc.the attempt to conceive the coming about as a sort of displacement
and change of position of the existent, of something constant: this ancient mythology established the belief in cause and effect after it had
found a fixed form in the grammatical functions of language.17 Why is
the grammatical subject liable to be assimilated to a cause, and the action
to an effect? To separate the subject from the verb is to distinguish the
agent from the action. However, an agent distinct from its acts remains
an agent, even when it abstains or refrains from acting. Free to act, such
a subject alone can take the initiative of performing them, or of being
their cause. This evidently holds for those acts that are representations,
and the ego is indeed the cause of its cogitationes. In this sense, the ego
precedes the cogitationes, and these follow the ego. But that does not yet
mean that representations follow each other in succession. Yet, it is that
succession which constitutes time. In order for representations to follow
each other, it would necessary that each one of them be at once cause
and effectalbeit variously related. Is this the case? Only by pursuing
the analysis of representation will we be able to decide. If representation is an act of the ego, what is represented is not limited to the object
but extends to the ego that represents itself. Every ego cogito, said Heidegger, is a cogito me cogitare; every I represent something by the same
token represents me as representing.18 If, on the one hand, the I precedes its representations as their cause and, on the other hand, this I is
represented in the representation whose cause it is, then it is likewise the
effect of that cause. As representing, the I therefore never ceases following itself, and its representations may succeed each other. No doubt, beyond the distinction between representing and represented, this analysis
presupposes the grammatical difference between active and passive. No
doubt, it implies that causality is constitutive of time. But the nocturnal
experience of the absence of time, which is also the experience of an
absence of causality, is there to attest that the one never goes without
the other: nox intempesta where cause and effect seem to be out of joint
and where, at each instant, something can arise suddenly from nothingness.19 Nietzsche had himself led causalitywhich never goes without
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successionand the representation of the ego back to the opposition

between active and passive. It changes, no change without reason
always already presupposes a something that stands and remains behind
that change. Cause and effect: psychological reconsidered, it is belief
that is expressed in the verb, in the active and the passive, in doing and
undergoing. That means: the separation of the event into doing and undergoing, the presupposition of an agent, have come before. The belief
in the agent hides behind [this]: as though, once all the deeds were deducted
from the agent, this latter would still subsist. It is always the I-representation
whispering here: each event has been interpreted as a doing: with the mythology of a being that corresponds to the I20
From whence comes this authority of grammar and the grammatical interpretation of language? Is it absolute or does it rest upon determinate evaluations? It is not absolute, and Nietzsche never ceased questioning it. Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less
than the predicate and the object? Shouldnt philosophers be permitted
to rise above faith in grammar? All due respect for governessesbut
hasnt the time come for philosophy to renounce the faith of governesses?21 This injunction would nevertheless be devoid of meaning if the
subjection of thought to the order of grammarby virtue of which the
categories of thought could pass for mere copies of the categories of languagewere not made possible by certain value judgments. The spell of
certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological
valuations and racial conditions.22 In other words, it is because the system of identical cases is necessary to the preservation of the body that the
thought of the latterthere is no other, for only the body thinkscame
to be subject to grammar. The ontological body is a grammatical body
and grammar, like judgment, is a bodily matter. Nietzsche suggested this
incidentally when, after having asserted that we shall in the end be free
of that oldest ground of metaphysics, he specified: this ground that
was incorporated into language and grammatical categories, and had
become so indispensable that it might seem that we would be unable
to think if we gave up this metaphysics.23 How indeed could this old
ground of metaphysicsand by metaphysics we must here understand
onto-logic or the system of identical caseshow could this ground have
been incorporated in language and grammatical categories, if these did
not already belong to the body, to allow its preservation and thereby to
find in it their reason for being?
Contrary to absolute time, which is not a succession of instants,
human time is thus subjective and successive, and the one because of
the other. This not only implies the identity of time and the I think, but
above all their common belonging to the ontology of identical cases.
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The ontological character of the subject, of time, and of subjective time

allows us to understandwe note in passingthe strange Nietzschean
statement according to which time [is] a property of space.24 In effect, we cannot conceive of space as void, homogenous, and undifferentiated without having previously separated it from force; a separation
that presupposes the separation of forces themselves, and that forces be
abstracted from the hierarchical relationship that constitutes them. If
this abstraction is the initial form taken by the reversal of will to power
into a will to assimilationa reversal whose consequence is first empty
space and then the system of identical cases to which time pertains
then Nietzsche can say, elliptically, that time in the subjective sense is a
property of space.
Onto-logic not only comprises being qua constancy, but also time as
a numerable succession of nows. Indeed, the series of representations
which, abstracting from the represented content, can be reduced to pure
now momentsis a succession of identical cases apt to be enumerated
since they are, at once, equal to themselves and equal among themselves.
Time, as metaphysics had conceived it since Aristotle, is thus indeed an
abbreviator and a structure for regulating and dominating chaos. Is it possible then to assert, as Heidegger does, that Nietzsches reflections on
time and space are as a whole insufficient, and sporadic his rare thoughts
on time that hardly move beyond the tradition? In making it possible to
explain the formation of our representation of time, Nietzsche at least
brought out the solidarity between Aristotles determination of time and
the understanding of being as constancy. In his own way, he articulated
being and time. Can Heidegger then take, as the infallible proof of
this insufficiency, the fact that Nietzsche never posed the question of
time with a view to unfolding the guiding question of metaphysics? To
be sure, Nietzsche does not explicitly raise the fundamental question of
metaphysics: what is Being? But, in a language and horizon proper to
himwhich amounts to saying, in ones different from Heideggerhe
never ceased asking and re-asking metaphysics guiding question: what
is an existent? This, just as he never ceased highlighting, in his way, the
temporal meaning of constancy starting from what was never an existent at all, but rather chaos. This is the same chaos whose initial sense,
according to Heidegger, is inseparable from the meaning of
[ale theia] itself.25
If, as Descartes says, earlier and later in any duration are known to
me by the earlier and later of the successive duration which I detect in
my own thought, with which the other things co-exist,26 then does not
the causal succession of acts of representation imply that the objects of
these actsthe other thingsare themselves subject to the causality
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from which succession precisely derives? Is this possible, and how does
causality contribute to the construction of the true world? After having
determined the way in which the identical subject relates to those identical cases that it represents to itself, it is now a question of determining
the relationship of the represented identical cases with each other.
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Coordination and Necessity
Reduced to its chaotic becoming alone, the world is a continuum of force.

Lacking causes, effects, and time, it is clear that we would never experience distinctly any sensation, but only a feeling of chaos. Time, space,
and the sensation of causality, wrote Nietzsche in 187273, seem to be
given with the first sensation.1 To be sure, but on condition that we specify that, here, to-be-given-with signifies to-be-constructed-beforehand. As
belonging to the system of identical cases, time, space, and causality constitute each sensation as such, since, by differentiating chaos, they articulate a continuum, which, as transitive and transitory, excludes all identity
and difference. A paragraph from The Gay Science, from the note of summer 1881 [Fundamental Certainty], highlights very clearly the isolating and discriminating character of causality: Cause and effect: such a
duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum
out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion
only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it.
The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually,
it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause
and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an
arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of
cause and effect and deny all conditionality.2 However, to free the chaotic world and becoming from causality in general, is this not by the same
token to relieve them of necessity? Is that possible, when chaos does not
designate the absence of necessity but only the absence of order, articulation, laws?3 Can we dissociate necessity from causality, or is it possible
that the flux of the event does not obey what Kant called the principle
of productionaccording to which everything that happens (begins to
be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule?4
The dissociation of necessity and causality, or conversely, the association of chance and necessity, is not without precedent since when the
ancients speak of necessity: [anangke], they think of a kingdom
in which everything comes to pass in an arbitrary fashion (by chance), in
which from each cause an effect may not follow.5 But what then is the
necessity governing the world if, following its dehumanization, there is
no longer a set of identical cases, but only a play of forces? Lacking an
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answer to this question, it will clearly be impossible to determine the

value of causality, and above all, that of the knowledge of the world,
since this knowledge depends on setting causality to work. Yet, if it is indispensable to set down the ultimate value of knowledge and truth, this
is because it became progressively obvious that knowledge and truth had
never been but falsification and error, or again, that this falsifying knowledge and this erroneous truth merged with the technological domination of the world. Science must more and more establish the succession
of things in their course, in such a way that the processes become practicable for us (e.g., such as they are practicable in the machine). Cause
and effect are nevertheless not understood thereby, but a power over nature
is thus obtained.6 The mastery of nature and the very concept of nature
result from an initial falsification, and nothing is more false than the essence of technology. Thus, in order to determine the quality of will to
power required by this technological domination of the worldwhich,
when misunderstood, can dispense with truth, and for which the ontological body is but a servile agentis it not fitting to come to the world
as it is, restored to its own necessity because relieved of all forms of causality; which is to say, of all forms of humanization?
The world is a world of finite forces and, since the plural is essential
here, each force is either dominant or dominated. It is important nevertheless not to misunderstand the meaning of the concept of force. Force
should not be conceived as a possibility distinct from some effectuation,
or even as a reserve of energy apt to be used or not. That would amount
to positing a subject apart from its activity, and dissociating force from
its exercise. Outside the subject and dehumanized, force is its event or
its very exercise. And nothing else. The reduction of force to its exertion
means that every force is always at its limit [au bout delle-mme], or again,
that every power draws its ultimate consequences at every instant.7
However, if every force is always at its limit and therein possesses itself
( ), then, on the one hand, it is really and, on the
other hand, relations of power cannot fail to have a quality of absolute
instantaneousness. Consequently, the becoming of the chaotic world of
forces is unrelated to any form of causality, that is, to any ordered succession. And, contrary to Kant, for whom force derives from causality,
causality falsifies the relations between forces.8
How to think the interdependence of the worlds forces once their
relationship is no longer causal? After having asserted that there is neither matter nor space, Nietzsche went on to say: There is also neither
cause nor effect. Rather: when here a tension arises, then a release must
occur throughout the rest of the world. (That a tension comes to pass
is, once again, the consequence of a release elsewhere.) It is neverthe-
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less impossible that there be succession here: rather, it is simultaneously

that tension increases here and decreases there. Processes effectively tied
together must take place in an absolutely simultaneous fashion. From a
process, we sample a particular point as effect, for example, a mans
fall following a gunshot. But it is an extraordinary chain of interrelated
effects. If time were necessary for the effect, there would be a more
WITHOUT the less that belongs to it, if for only an instant: that is to say,
the force would be now greater, now smaller.9
Comparable to forces, and because it is made up of them, the world
is similarly finite. On the one hand, this means that the measure of the
force of the whole is determined and not infinite. On the other hand, it
means that the number of situations, modifications, combinations, and
developments of this force is no doubt extremely large and virtually immeasurable; yet, in every case, also determined and not infinite,10 since
the global quantum of force is itself not infinite. If the quantity of force
constitutive of the world is determined and finite, then not only what
diminishes here must increase over there, but also this redistribution
must be realized in constant aggregates. The in-stability of the force,
something wavelike, as Nietzsche further says with the same intent, is
completely unthinkable to us.11 This is the reason why time does not intervene in the production of effects for, if the redistribution of an invariable quantum of force were effected in time and according to it, we
would then have to admit its quantitative variation. Thus, supposing that
the world disposed of a certain quantum of force, it is obvious that any
displacement of power [Macht-verschiebung] at any point would affect the
entire systemtherefore, along with the causality of the one after the
other [sequential], there would be a dependency of the ones among and
with the others.12 The interdependence of the forces of the world understood as chaos therefore does not arise from causality, but exclusively
from a general coordination. Instead of cause and effect, coordination,13
that is the principle of Nietzsches entire critique of causality.
Is this instantaneous coordination compatible with becoming? And
how can we maintain that the correlative distribution of forces never
ceases changing? By considering the distribution of forces at this instant,
first, and in light of the infinity of time that preceded it. In the first
note devoted to the world of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche wrote: The
world of the forces allows no diminution: for, otherwise, it would have
been weakened and would have disappeared in the infinity of time. The
world of forces suffers not interruption: for, otherwise, this would have already been reached and the pendulum of existence would have stopped.
The world of forces thus never reaches equilibrium, never has an instants rest; its force and movement are at all times of equal magnitude.
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Whatever state the world might reach, it must have already reached it,
not once but an innumerable number of times. Thus, this instant: it has
already been here once, many times, and will likewise return, with all the
forces distributed exactly as they are now: and this goes for the instant
that produced it, as also for the one to which the present instant will give
birth.14 As we have already seen, the activity of representing is our only
certainty. Yet, since change belongs to representing activity, and since
the latter is relative to the world, the changing character of representing activity implies the changing character of the world. If the world
were capable of persistence and fixity and were there, in its course, but
one instant of being, strictly speaking, then there could no longer be
any becoming, and also no thinking, nor observation of becoming.15
Reconsidering this note four years later, Nietzsche added: The fact of
spirit as a becoming proves that the world has neither goal, nor final
state, and that it is incapable of being.16 At this instant, forces are not
in equilibrium; and if this really is the case, then forces were never in
a state of equilibrium because an infinite time has already elapsed. But
how should I think such a retro-infinity of time? To this question, Nietzsche once answered in a note against the hypothesis of a creation or
beginning to the world. On a number of occasions, one has recently
sought to find a contradiction in the concept of a backwards temporal
infinity of the world [nach hinten]: one has even found it, though at the
cost of confusing the head with the tail. Counting backwards from this
instant, nothing can prevent me from saying I shall never thereby reach
an end: just as, from the same instant, I can count forward to infinity.
Only if I made the mistakeI shall guard against doing soof equating
this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable
concept of an infinite PRO-gressus up to now, only if I posit the direction
(forwards or backwards) as logically indifferent, would I have to conceive the headthis instantas the tail.17 Why is direction not indifferent but, on the contrary, essential? To move backward from this instant
toward the infinity of elapsed time is to start from the fundamental certainty, whereas moving from an initial state toward this same instant is
admitting a beginning, which, because inaccessible, is as uncertain as it
is arbitrary. According to the direction taken, becoming changes meaning. To go toward the instant is not only to advancein one way or the
otherthe hypothesis of a created worldand the concept creation
is today completely indefinable, unrealizableit is also to understand
becoming with moral and theological ulterior motives.18 Contrariwise,
to start from the instant by unfolding its vaguely intentional reverberations is to understand becoming as it becomes in itself, outside of any
humanization.
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That the distribution of forces at this instant demonstrates the impossibility of their equilibrium does not exclude the possibility that an
identical distribution already occurred. Quite the contrary. If, on the
one hand, the energy of all becoming [Energie des Gesammt-werdens] remains constant19 and if, on the other hand, at this instant an infinity
has already elapsed, during which time only a finite number of combinations of forces could have occurred, then all possible configurations
must already have been produced, not only once but an infinity of times.
Moreover, once this instant has already occurred, the same goes for the
moment that generated it as for the one it will generate. Not only has this
moment occurred and will occur an infinity of times, but everything has
been here innumerable times to the degree that the integral situation of
all the forces always returns. It is quite indemonstrable that something
equal was already there, abstracting from this recurrence.20 Thus, not only
is the ring of recurrence the very thinghood of thingsa thinghood independent of any humanizationbut also, it is because forces return
eternally that the world is always this same world, identical to itself. If
such were not the case, eternally the case, then clearly no philosophy
qua thought of the world would be possible. This obviously does not
mean that up to now, philosophy had truly measured itself according to
its proper possibilities, and to its most intimate ones.
Signifying that all of becoming moves in the repetition of a determinate number of perfectly equal states21 (equal indeed because of this
iteration), eternal recurrence describes the movement to which forces
are necessarily subject. And forces are instantaneously coordinated with
each other by virtue of the constancy of their total sum. As the law of becoming, eternal recurrence has not itself become. Nietzsche warns: Let
us be wary of thinking the law of this circle as something that has become, according to the false analogy of circular movement within the ring: there
was not first chaos and then, progressively, a more harmonious movement, and finally, the definitively circular movement of all forces: on the
contrary, the whole is eternal, not something that has become: if there
were a chaos of forces, then the chaos too would be eternal and would
have recurred in each ring. The circular course is not becoming, it is the
originary law, just as the quantity of force is an originary law, with neither
exception nor transgression. All becoming is within the circular course
and the quantity of force; therefore, one should not use, to characterize the eternal circular course, the false analogy of circular courses that
become and pass, as for example the stars, the movement of the tides,
day and night, the seasons.22 The doctrine of eternal recurrence is thus
not cosmological: it concerns the movement of chaos, not that of the
cosmos. The eternal ring encloses and precedes all cosmic movement as
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its possibility. That is why it should not be understood relative to what it

circumscribes, relative to stellar orbits, or to the alternation of day and
night. Eternal recurrence is the originary law (Gesetz) of the world, in
the sense that, in making all position (Setzung) in general possible, it
is what makes the world possible, or in non-Nietzschean terms, eternal
recurrence is the universal a priori of all identity, of any constitution of
the world. In this respect, eternal recurrence makes intentionality itself
possible.
Nevertheless, this originary law does not go without a twofold presupposition: the finite character of force and the infinity of effective time.
The second presupposition is explained and justified through circularity
itself. When Zarathustra asked the dwarf whether the two eternities, the
two infinities, that start from the instant are contradictory or not, the
latter said: All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.23 What then of
the first presupposition? The finite character of force implies its plurality qua the relation of the more to the less. Yet this relation, which as we
have seen defines the simplest state, is will to power itself. Neither a
being, nor a becoming, but a pathoswill to power is thus the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge24 If
the will to power is the simplest state, the most elemental fact, the
primordial fact,25 this is because it is the very origin of the movement
whose form is fixed by eternal recurrence. A note devoted to the critique
of the concept of cause thus begins: I require the starting point of will to
power as the origin of motion. Hence motion may not be conditioned
from outsidenor caused . . .26 Will to power is thus none other than
mobility itself, the true content of fundamental certainty, movement in
its pure state. By making the will to power the origin of movement, Nietzsche completes the task of divesting the world of causality. No doubt that
does not yet allow us to clarify the meaning and value of the will to power
qua fundamental structure of knowledge, nor again the quality of the
will to power at work in the world known according to causality. However,
by determining the necessity proper to the world as such, the ground is
reached starting from which this clarification may be made.
To conceive the essence of movement is, at least since Aristotle, to
conceive the essence of [phusis], of nature. Nietzsche is aware of
this, as he notes that to conceive a state that is + and is the problem
of physics [physikalisches Problem].27 This is to say that it is the fundamental problem of nature. To interpret mobility thus outside of causality
amounts, ever and again, to dehumanizing nature. But this dehumanization in no way amounts to some return to a natural state, since it aims
at a nature that our technological knowledge prevented us from reaching. This is the same knowledge that was based only on the values of
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preservation, which were for that reason falsifying values, and created
a counter-world, a counter-nature. Not return to naturefor there
has never yet been a natural humanity. The scholasticism of un- and
anti-natural values is the rule, is initial; man reaches nature only after a
long strugglehe never re-turns to it . . . Nature: that is, daring to be immoral like nature.28 Thus understood, the dehumanization of nature is
a prelude to the creation of the overman. And Nietzsche understood this
clearly when, upon having the thought of recurrence, he defined his task
in this way: Dehumanization of nature and thereupon naturalization
of man, once the pure concept of nature is acquired.29 To preserve
nature as counter-nature is thus to defend the last man and, understood
on the horizon of will to power, nature is not mans immemorial past, but
the future of the overman, who alone shall know how to restore nature
to itself. Was it not in the same spirit that Heidegger once confided: I
often ask myself (this has long since become a great question for me)
what nature would be without manshould it not quiver in him to recover its own power?30
We may henceforth specify the relationship between eternal recurrence and the will to power. Like eternal recurrence, the will to power
has not become. It is not a becoming, but rather that from which all
becoming emerges. Nietzsche stated this as clearly as possible: It is not
by way of research into evolution that we can discover that thing [das],
that x, whose cause it is, that there is evolution in general; one should
not wish to grasp it as becoming, and even less as having become . . .
the will to power cannot have become.31 The will to power is thus tied
to eternal recurrence as the mobility of the circle to the circularity of
movement. In other words, will to power explains the existence but also
the essence of becoming, since the innermost essence of being is will to
power.32 And, in its turn, eternal recurrence explains the way in which
the will to power unfolds, as both essence and existence.
As the essence and existence of becoming, the will to power nevertheless cannot be related to eternal recurrence as essentia is to existentia.
Yet, as we pointed out at the beginning of this study, such was clearly the
fundamental claim of Heideggers interpretation of Nietzsche. For example, Heidegger writes: Will to power says what [was] the being is.
The being is that which (as power) it empowers [machtet]. Eternal recurrence of the same designates the how [wie] in which the being that
processes such a what character is. It designates its factualness as a
whole, its that it is [sein Dass es ist]. Because Being, as eternal recurrence of the same, constitutes the permanentizing of presence [Anwesenheit], it is most permanent; it is the unconditioned that [Dass].33 Or even:
Will to power says what a being as such is, namely, what it is in its
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constitution. Eternal recurrence of the same says how being is as a whole

when it is so constituted. The how of the Being of all beings is determined in tandem with the what. The how affirms from the outset that
every being at every moment receives the character of its that (its factuality) from its how. 34
These exemplary statements both say that if the will to power defines what a being is, i.e., its quid, then eternal recurrence not only determines how this being is, but also that it is, i.e., its quomodo and its quod.
Heidegger, who does not speak of becoming but of the Being of beings,
thus attributes the existence of beings to eternal recurrence and not
to will to power. Why? What is the horizon of such an attribution? The
constancy of presence is, and can only be, the being that is supremely
constant in metaphysics understood as onto-theo-logy. In other words,
to attribute the existence of becoming to eternal recurrence is to interpret eternal recurrence against the horizon of the history of Being and
its truth. Conversely, to acknowledge that the essence and existence of
becoming depend solely upon will to power, not only amounts to coming back to what Nietzsche said. It is also to be able to gaugesince we
have ceased considering Nietzsches thought as the ultimate, fundamental metaphysical position35 or as a negative onto-theo-logythe death of
God otherwise than as an originary event in metaphysics or as having a
Greek origin.
The solidarity of will to power and eternal recurrence no doubt has
never been as magnificently brought to light as in the resplendent note
from the summer of 1885. There, Nietzsche describes in a single stroke,
that is, in one sentence, the Dionysian world of the eternally-self-creating,
the eternally-self-destroying, the world of will to power. He performs
this by gathering under the ring of the return: the conjoined finitude
of space and force, the eternity of movement and of time, the instantaneousness of the configurations of forces, the indefatigable play of the
simple and the multiple, and the natural innocence of becoming beyond
good and evil. And do you know what the world is to me? Shall I show it
to you in my mirror? This world: a giant of force without beginning, without end; a quantity of immutable implacable force, which neither grows
nor diminishes, and which does not expend itself but transforms itself; a
whole of invariable magnitude, an economy without expenditure or loss,
but also without increase, without income, enclosed by nothingness as
by its limit; nothing confused or wasted, nothing unendingly-extended,
yet as determinate force inserted in a determinate space and not in a
space that, somewhere, would be empty, on the contrary as force everywhere, as play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and many,
accumulating here and at the same time diminishing there, a sea in
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itself of tempestuous flowing forces, eternally changing, eternally flowing back, with enormous years of return, with an ebb and flow of its
forms, thrusting forth from the simplest to the most manifold, from the
calmest, most fixed and coldest, forth into the most incandescent, wildest, most self-contradictory, and then out of abundance returning home
to the simple, out of the play the play of contradictories back toward
the pleasure of accord, affirming itself as self again in this equality of its
paths and years, blessing itself as that, which must forever return, as a
becoming that knows neither satiety, nor tedium, nor fatigue36
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The Subject of Causality
Having thus analyzed thoroughly the a-causal necessity that reigns in the
world, let us return directly to causality without which there is no knowledge. If we have undertaken the analysis of knowledge, it was first because knowledge makes possible life and the preservation of the body
in a counter-world (or world counter-nature), which it institutes to that
effect. It was thereafter in order to determine the foundations of knowledge before risking modifying it. In other words, the moment we consider knowledge as the being-in-the-world of the ontological body, it becomes necessary to recast it, in order to raise that bodyfor only the
modification of the foundation of world-creating knowledge is liable to
transform that world in such a way that a higher bodyas sur-logical as
it is sur-Christiancould live therein. This clearly requires that all structures of knowledge have one and the same foundation, that they form
one and the same system. Now, while sensation and concept, space and
time, indeed belong to the onto-logical, we cannot yet include causality
therein. Indeed, in order that causalitywhich, for Kant, means that
something follows something else according to a rule or a lawarise
wholly from the system of identical cases, it is not enough that temporal successivity, the self-equality of what precedes and what follows, be
integrated therein. It is also necessary that the rule or law as such be inscribed therein. Is this the case, and does Nietzsche have the right to assert that there is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks?1
At the end of the second section of the Deduction of the Pure
Concepts of the Understanding, and to establish that the latter have no
simple, empirical origin, Kant considers the example of the concept of
cause. The concept of cause implies a quality of necessity that recourse
to experience does not allow us to grasp. To be sure, we know from experience that one phenomenon usually follows another, but what is empirically consecutive need not be a necessary consequence. Now, in saying that every phenomenon presupposes another which it followsand
there is no causality without thiswe are attributing universal scope to
the empirical rule of association. But by what right, and how is this possible? If we call affinity of the manifold that which in the object makes its
association possible, then it is a matter of making this universal affinity
of phenomena intelligible, thanks to which they can and must be subject
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to constant laws, i.e., to the universal laws of nature. On my principles it

is easily comprehensible. All possible appearances belong, as representations, to the whole possible self-consciousness. But from this, as a transcendental representation, numerical identity is inseparable, and certain
a priori, because nothing can come into cognition except by means of
this original apperception. Now, since this identity must necessarily enter
into the synthesis of all the manifold of appearances insofar as they are to
become empirical cognition, the appearances are thus subject to a priori
conditions with which their synthesis (of apprehension) must be in thoroughgoing accord. Now, however, the representation of a universal condition in accordance with which a certain manifold (of whatever kind)
can be posited is called a rule, and, if it must be so posited, a law. All appearances therefore stand in a thoroughgoing connection according to
necessary laws, and hence in a transcendental affinity, of which the empirical
affinity is the mere consequence.2 The universal affinity of phenomena
is thus due to their standardization through rules. What does this mean?
Every phenomenon is a representation and, as such, belongs to transcendental self-consciousness, which is a priori certain and numerically
identical to itself. If knowledge is inseparable from this transcendental
consciousness (or original apperception), and if the I think accompanies
all representations, then the identity of the latter governs all knowledge
and thus also the synthesis of the manifold of phenomena. However, for
original apperception to govern this synthesis, it is evidently necessary
that the phenomena themselves be apprehended or positedand this,
in such a way as to make possiblethat is, to establish conformity with
the originally synthetic unity of transcendental apperception. Now, to be
liable to be apprehended or posited only under a sine qua non condition
means to have to satisfy a rule or a law, whose exclusive source is the understanding. If understanding is the faculty of rulessensibility gives
us forms (of intuition), but the understanding gives us rules3and if
by nature we mean the object of all possible experience,4 then we must
conclude that the understanding is itself the lawgiver for nature, i.e.,
without understanding there would not be any nature at all, i.e., synthetic
unity of the manifold of appearances in accordance with rules.5 Subject
to laws, outside of which it is impossible, nature is in this way formally
subject to the originally synthetic unity of apperception, of which Kant
will say, in the second version of the transcendental deduction: it is the
highest point to which one must affix all use of the understanding, even
the whole of logic and, after it, transcendental philosophy; indeed, this
faculty is the understanding itself.6
From this brief explanation of Kantian concepts of rule and law
of nature, it becomes clear that causality pertains fully to the human, all
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too human system of identical cases, to onto-logic. This is true for three
reasons. First, because rules and laws unify the manifold by reducing multiple differences to identity. Thereafter, because rules and laws humanize
nature by subjecting it to the unity of apperception, to understanding.
Kant acknowledges this: Thus we ourselves bring into the appearances
that order and regularity in them that we call nature.7 To be sure, the
subject of knowledge who organizes phenomena by prescribing its laws
to nature is not the empirical man; instead, humanization is logicization,
and the identity of the transcendental subject is a logical one.8 Finally,
and this is the most important reason, because there is no causality without subject. That is, without the fiction of an agent distinct from its acts,
remaining equal to itself no matter what it does, without the fiction of
a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking . . . has its origin.9
As subsuming the manifold under a rule, by virtue of which something
follows something else, causality implies that the I would be at the source
of all these rules. Kants posthumous note from 1775 states this clearly:
When something is apprehended, it is received in the function of apperception. I am, I think, thoughts are in me. In sum, it is here a matter
of relationships, which certainly do not provide the rules of the phenomenon, but which allow each of them to be represented as contained
within rules. The I constitutes the substratum of a rule in general, and
apprehension brings every phenomenon to it.10 There is thus a myth
of the concept of the subject just as there is a myth of the concept of
causality.11 The one is as inseparable from the system of identical cases
as the other is.
However, if the concepts of subject and causality are each as mythological as the other, or if, more generally speaking, the natural sciences
have let themselves be intimidated by discourse on the world of phenomena, in which reigns a completely mythic concept of pure knowledge against which the world is measured,12 it nevertheless remains the
case that belief in causality is the fact of a subject. What then is the relationship between causality and the positing of a subject? And to begin,
from whence does causality take its origin? To this question, Nietzsche
invariably had but one response. In an initial version of paragraph 127
of The Gay Science, he writes: We all firmly believe in cause and effect;
and many philosophers call this belief a priori knowledge because of its
rigidity and firmness . . . The origin of this invincible belief seems quite
transparent to me, and even an object of derision rather than an object
of pride. Man thinks, when he accomplishes something, like hitting for
example, that he is the one doing it and that he has done it because he
wanted to do so, in short, that his will is the cause. He sees no problem
in this; rather, the feeling of the will is enough to make intelligible for
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him the relationship between cause and effect. Of the mechanism of the
event, and the work a hundred times more subtle, that had to be accomplished in order to reach this act, he knows nothing; just as he knows
nothing of the incapacity of the will in itself to accomplish the slightest
part of this task. The will is for him a magical operating force: belief in
the will, as in the cause of effects, is the belief in forces operating magically, the belief in the immediate influence of thoughts on moving or
unmoving matter.13 This is first to say that belief in causality is based on
the belief in the will. It is then to say that natural causality is founded on
the causality of freedom, since all causality in general is founded on the
original causality of the free will. The popular belief in cause and effect
is built upon the presupposition that free will is the cause of all effects: it is
only from this that we derive the feeling of causality.14 This is finally to
say that the modus operandi of this will is obscure to the point of passing
for magical. But wherein lies the obscurity of the modus operandi of free
will that founds causality? If believing in the will as cause is believing in
the immediate influence of thought upon matter, then the obscurity of
the modus operandi of the will resides precisely in this influence. But is
this influence possible, and could the will exert itself on something radically foreign to it? Schopenhauer never doubted it; notably, when, setting
forth the hypothesis that willing is everywhere, he enthroned a primeval
mythology and when, believing, as most everyone did, that the will was
as simple as it was immediate, he failed to understand that willing is actually a mechanism so well ordered that it all but escapes the observing
eye.15 Moreover, he failed to understand that a will could only act on
another will. In short, no will exists in the sense in which he understood
it, but we may speak of a will to power as complex as it is protean.16 The
obscurity of the modus operandi of the will is thus due to the very concept
of will, itself. Willto me a hypothesis that no longer explains anything.
For the knower, there is no willing.17
Nietzsche would repeat indefatigably that there was neither will,
nor freedom in the traditional sense of these terms. I laugh about
your free will, but also about your servile will: there is no will. Pain and
thoughts have given rise to an illusionwhich we call will. 18 But to assert that the will is but a simplifying conception of the understanding,
a fabulation, or a superfluous hypothesis19 is to say that it arises from
the falsifying system of identical cases, and that the willing subject [le
sujet volontaire] is its foundation. A contrario, questioning the onto-logic
requires that we reject the concept of the will and, when he defined his
task as the fulfillment of fatalism, Nietzsche specified that this would be
effectuated through 1) the eternal recurrence and preexistence, 2) the
elimination of the concept of will. 20
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What is the scope of this elimination of the will? They remove Nietzsches thought from the age of the determination of Being qua will.
In recapitulating the history of Being through its guiding names or leitmotifs, from [ale theia] to Gestell, Heidegger noted the following concerning modern philosophy: certitudores cogitans vismonas
(perceptioappetitus), exigentiae essentiae objectivity freedom willrepresentability practical reason willas absolute knowledge: Hegel as will
to love: Schelling will to powereternal recurrence: Nietzsche.21 After
leaving a blank, Heidegger continued: Action and organizationpragmatism the will to will machinery (Ge-stell).22 This is to argue, first, that
the thought of the will to power completes and perfects [parachve] the
history of the determination of Being as will, initiated by Leibniz and
Kant, and second, that this history is but a gradual preparation of the
unfolding of the essence of technology. Thus, there is no break, according to Heidegger, between Kant, Hegel, or Schelling on the one hand,
and Nietzsche on the other. But does this not contradict Nietzsches own
understanding of himself and his relationship to the metaphysics of the
will? After having brought out the resignation and compromise peculiar
to Hegel and Schopenhauers ways of thinking, Nietzsche added: One
sees so little will here that the word becomes free to designate something
else.23 Is he not thereby marking a break, and does the nihilism of the
willwhose simplest exemplification was Schopenhauernot have, as
its consequence, the evacuation of all meaning from the word will?
But is it not nihilism to void words of their meaning to reduce them to
signs or data abbreviation devices?24 No doubt, and if the word will is
divested of meaning, then, on the one hand, it can open to any sort of
meaning, or even to another system of meanings and, on the other hand,
it becomes impossible to take the will to power as a figure of the metaphysical will. That is, it becomes impossible, for example, to conceive
will to power on the basis of Kants determination of the willa kind of
causality belonging to living beings insofar as they are rationaland to
take freedom to be Kants property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any determination by alien causes.25
This clearly does not keep the will in its metaphysical sense from
being a special case of the will to power. Yet, if the metaphysical will is
not a species of will to power, then the inverse also should not hold. In
the same manner as truth, which is but a special case of its inverse, or
errorthe [metaphysical] will, as causality, is but a special case of will
to power, which shows the vacuity and derivative character of [the metaphysical will]. Formerly man was presented with free will as a dowry
from a higher order: today we have taken even will away from him, in the
sense that will may no longer be understood as a faculty. The old word
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will only serves to designate a resultant, a kind of individual reaction

which necessarily follows a host of partly contradictory, partly congruous
stimulithe will no longer effects anything, no longer moves anything . . .26 Understood starting from the subtle mechanism of will to
power which connects feeling, willing and thinking, whereby it becomes
possible to make the entire mechanical or material27 world intelligible,
the will is no longer a cause but a resultant, no longer a faculty or power
to act but an impotency, a reaction. Against the horizon of the will to
power, the old will should be conceived the way truth itself was, as a reactive will to power, a will to impotency, and an impotency of the will to
power; in short, as a modality of that great fatigue that is nihilism.
The ruin of the will not only entails that of causalityto the proposition there is no will at all responds the proposition: there is no such
thing as cause and effect.28 It also entails the ruin of the single subject
and its identity to self. Nietzsche often emphasized that the positing of
a unique subject correlates with the belief in the unity of the will and in
causality. In a long note wherein he criticizes the concept of cause, he
writes, for example: We have absolutely no experience of a cause: considered psychologically, the entire concept comes to us from the subjective conviction that we are causes, namely, that the arm moves itself . . .
But that is an error: we separate ourselves, we doers, from the deed, and
we everywhere make use of this patternwe seek a doer for every event.
What have we done? We have misunderstood a feeling of strength, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling that is already the beginning of the
act, understanding it as a cause: or we have understood as cause the will
to do this or that because action followed upon it . . . Cause there is
no such thing: in the few cases wherein it seemed to be given, and from
which we have projected it to understand an event, the self-illusion has
been proved. Our understanding of the event consisted in our inventing a subject which became responsible for the fact that something happened and for the way in which it happened. In the concept of cause we
have assembled our feeling of will, our feeling of freedom, our feeling
of responsibility and our intention to act: fundamentally the concepts
of causa efficiens and causa finalis are but one. . . . The thing, the subject, will, intentionall these are inherent in the concept of cause. 29
This inherence means first that the concepts of thing, subject, will, intention, and causality are linked to each other in such a way that they
form a single system, that of identical cases or onto-logic, and which is
no doubt the system Nietzsche claimed to have avoided.30 But the attachment of causality to a single will, of which we are the subjects, thereupon and above all implies identity to self and the constancy of self. Yet,
as we have sufficiently shown, the hypothesis of a single subject is perhaps
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unnecessary, and it is just as permissible to assume a plurality of subjects, whose interaction and struggle are at the foundation of our thought
and our consciousness in general.31 Consequently, and if our body is a
domination formation whose unity is that of an organization or community of drives, then the single subject, that is, the subject of causality, the
logical subject of knowledge, must be led back to this body as to one of
its possibilities.
What then is the meaning of the determination of the body as subject, in the traditional sense of the term; how can a plurality of subjects
give rise to a unique subject? The moment the plurality of the body is a
plurality of forces and its unity, as variable as the dominant force may be,
there could not be a subject constantly identical to self without the equalization of the forces constituting the body. The single subject is a leveled
subject; a subject whose forces are reduced to the weakest among them; a
subject that can no longer bear the pain inherent in commands and hierarchy; a democratic subject lined up with the mere requirements of its
own preservation; a subject as identical to self as it is constant. Subject,
writes Nietzsche, this is the terminology for our belief in a unity among
all the diverse moments of the highest feeling of reality: we understand
this belief as the effect of one causewe believe so firmly in our belief
that for its sake we imagine truth, reality, substantiality in general.
The subject is the fiction that many similar states [gleiche Zustnde] in
us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the similarity of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact,
and not their similarity (this ought rather to be denied).32
Leading the subject back to the ontological body thus means
(1) that causality constitutes the subject, and that the subject is fundamentally that of the principle of reason; (2) that the unity of reality
and recall that reality resides in the constant return of related, familiar, equal things in their logicized character 33correlates with the unity,
equal to self, of the subject; (3) that the world real, effective, and
substantial, the world of knowledge, is that of a subject identical to self;
(4) that this subject, continuously identical to self, and which Kant calls
the standing and abiding self, the vehicle of all concepts whatever,
the I Think, which even makes possible all transcendental concepts,34
is, as arch-category, an arch-fiction and the product of an originary falsification. To state this in different terms: a priori knowledge is not
knowledge, but an arch-mythology made flesh since the age of the deepest
non-knowledge.35 And the most strongly believed a priori truths . . . as
for example the law of causality are . . . very well acquired habits of belief,
so much a part of us that to refrain from believing in them would destroy
the race.36 (5) Finally, it means that the subject of pure understanding
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and the technological world aligned with itthe ontological body and
worldare as false as they are, the ones like the others, governed by
values of preservation and reactive values.
Considered in its most general structures, ontological knowledge
thus not only consists in creating a true counter-world, by subjecting
chaos to falsifying rules whose paradigm is causality; it likewise implies
the denaturalization of the plural body (or domination formation) into a
single subject. While this dual falsification is required by the necessity of
preserving oneself, and while it depends on essentially preserving conservative values, it is also the mark of the essentially technological character
of knowledge. This is the same knowledge that creates the world in the
very process through which it comes to know the world. The technological or poietic, formative dimension of knowledgehere, they mean the
same thingis nevertheless subject to variation. Knowledge can be commanded by values of preservation, by reactive ones, but nothing keeps us
from thinking that it might take another form, apart from onto-logic and
aligned with values of intensification, active values. What would then be
the first consequence of such a revaluation? Ontological and preserving
knowledge is fundamentally false, since it denies becoming and presupposes being. Conversely, when commanded by values of intensification,
knowledge would have truth as its foundation, since it would have to
conform to becoming, without which intensification is impossible. But
can we, and above all how can we, conform to becoming; how to found
knowledge on the adequation to becoming? Or is it forever true that the
ultimate truth of flux permits no incorporation? Without judging our
answer in advance, let us attempt to evaluate the stakes of this question.
Supposing that the body that we are might be doomed ineluctably to
error, the ontological falseness of man would be definitive. And ontological knowledgethat is, technologyhaving finished extending its
dominion over the entire earth, the last manthe most contemptible
man37would be our perpetual present.
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Part 6
From Eternal Recurrence to the

Resurrection of Body
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Memory
To trace logic back to the structure of a body organized in view of selfpreservation; to trace knowledge back as the creation of a world that
allowed for the preservation of the organism; finally, to trace the subject back to a domination-formation in a mode that allowed for its own
preservationthese inquiries, tracing logic, knowledge, and the subject
back to the system of identical cases, have not yet allowed us fully to understand the identity of these cases.1 Moreover, while we have explained
their development, our explanation presupposed identity without inquiring further into its origin and constitution. But as long as we fail to explain identity itself and clarify the possibility of what metaphysics calls the
identity principlelogic, knowledge, and the subject will be deprived of
their ultimate foundations. Moreover, it will also be clearly impossible to
conceive of their modification. Failing that, how should we determine
whether truth is apt to incorporation (and to what extent); how should
it be possible to expose truth to the body and body to the truth?
As we have already seen, though without fully investigating it, the
principle of identity has, as its background, the appearance [Augenschein] that there are equal things [gleiche Dinge].2 This principle, denoting the self-equality of each thing, is wholly ontological. In Thought
and Reality, African Spir gave to the logical principle of identity the
following form: each thing is equal to itself.3 This dual scope of the
identity principle means first that identity, or self-equality, is a characteristic of any constant being as such; thereafter, it means that logic is
absolutely constitutive of being, contraposed to becoming. The identity
principle is therefore at the foundation of falsifying knowledge. It is the
very principle of falsification, since, in a chaotic world of forces in becoming, there is no identity, which is to say, equality and constancy. And
what holds for the identity principle likewise holds for the principle of
contradiction, insofar as the latter presupposes the former. If A cannot
be at the same time, and in the same mode, A and not-A, then A should
be equal to A. After having noted that, according to Kant, the basic laws
of logic, the law of identity and that of contradiction, are forms of pure
knowledge, because they precede all experience, Nietzsche immediately
added: But these are not forms of knowledge at all! They are regulative
articles of faith [regulative Glaubensartikel]4
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It is therefore no longer a matter of explaining the formation of

identical cases, but rather of accounting for the identity of cases. This
identity is the ultimate foundation of logic and ontological knowledge
and, as such, it makes possible the preservation of the body. Our preceding analyses of the system of identical cases were nevertheless insufficient
for such an explanation. Having focused exclusively on identical cases and
their formation, we relegated identity itself to the shadows. The preceding interpretation of knowledge was thus incomplete. But where should
we look for what is lacking, and what path can we take to reach identity
itself? On several occasions, we postponed the analysis of consciousness
and left the analysis of memory in suspense. Should we not then attempt
to reach identity starting from what we deliberately held aside in our
analysis of identical cases? Are memory and consciousness not precisely
two instances inseparable from any knowledge, and whichthe one and
the other, or even the one like the otherwere often taken as the very
site of subjective identity, even objective identity?
Let us begin with memory. And, to reach it while exposing its corporeal character, let us proceed from the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. What differentiates them when there is but one
kind of force, as we have shown? Does the world contain more inorganic beings than organic ones, and is the difference exclusively quantitative between what is living and what is not? In The Gay Science, Nietzsche
warned: Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living
is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.5 This is to emphasize the quantitative rarity of the organic relative to the inorganic, and to
maintain that the difference between the one and the other is not due
to the nature of their constituent forces: The inorganic conditions us absolutely: water, air, soil, form of soil, electricity, etc. We are plants under
such conditions.6 Let us note in passing that the relationship of the
organic to the inorganic is not the only reason why Nietzsche frequently
speaks of the plant man or qualifies the philosopher as a rare plant.7
Man can be taken for a plant because his relationship to the world resembles that of a plant. The one and the other presuppose equalization. For plants, says Nietzsche, all things are habitually at rest, eternal,
each thing equal to itself. From the period of the lower organisms up to
now man has received as inherited the belief that there are equal things
[gleiche Dinge giebt] (only the highest scientifically developed experience contradicts this principle).8
But if the living arises from the dead, if the organic comes from
the inorganic, it nevertheless remains the case that the inorganic always
returns to the organic. In a note slightly prior to the emergence of the
thought of thoughts, which announces it and without which that thought
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would be unintelligible, Nietzsche wrote: Our entire world is the ash of

innumerable living beings: and, as rare as is the living, by comparison
with the whole, it remains that everything has already once been converted
into life, and so on. Let us suppose eternal duration, and consequently
eternal change of matter9 How to understand this? In an infinite
time, the finite quantum of inorganic forces cannot fail to give rise to an
infinite number of organic bodies, since the random coming together
of inorganic forces, necessary to the formation of such bodies, would
occur an infinite number of times. It is thus as fair to assert that in the
present state of the world, life is the exception and the living, a mode of
that which is deadas fair as it is to insist, contrariwise, on the ash-like
character of what is dead. For, by virtue of the eternal recurrence that
constitutes the present state of the world, all that is inorganic has already
and necessarily been organic once, and therefore organic an infinite
number of times. Thus, there is no contradiction in holding the organic
as a mode of the inorganic and simultaneously, the inorganic as the ash
of the organic. There is moreover no contradiction in asserting simultaneously the priority of the dead over the living, and of the living over the
dead, when we take eternal recurrence into consideration.10
The difference between organic and inorganic is therefore not
fundamentally quantitative. Does it converge, then, with the difference
between what is eternal and what is not? That our present world would
be the dead ash of innumerable living beings meansstill taking eternal recurrence into accountthat organic life itself has never really begun, strictly speaking: I do not see why the organic in general had to
be born.11 That is to say, consequently, that there have always been organic beings. The powerful organic principle impresses me with the
facility with which it incorporates inorganic matter, confides Nietzsche,
just before adding: I would not know how to explain finality with intensification alone. I would rather believe there have been organic beings
throughout eternity.12 The organic and the inorganic are thus equally
eternal, the one as the other.
Wherein, then, lies their difference? From eternal recurrence, and
from the principle whereby the organic is but a particular case of the
inorganic, Nietzsche draws the following conclusion: Inorganic matter,
though it may most often have been organic, has learned nothing, and is
still without a past! If it were otherwise, there could never be repetition
for, from matter something would be born always with new qualities, with
a new past.13 The repetition that ensures the constancy of the world and
the bodies living in it thus presupposes, as its condition of possibility, that
inorganic forces be essentially deprived of past and memory. If this were
not the case, then the organic combinations to which these forces give
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rise could never come back as identical, and eternal recurrence would
be purely and simply impossible. Every body, as Leibniz already said
concerning physical bodies, that is, inorganic bodies, is a momentary
mind, or one lacking recollection [recordatio].14 If inorganic forces had
a memory, then the constancy of the world and of bodies would not be
guaranteed. But that inorganic forces be radically amnesic means in turn
that memory is what distinguishes the organic from the inorganic. Everything organic is differentiated from the inorganic through the fact that it
collects experiences: and that, in this process, it is never equal to itself.To
understand the essence of the organic, one should not consider its smallest form to be the most primitive: on the contrary, each of the smallest cells is
NOW the heir of the entire organic past.15 Less than one year later, and
more clearly still, Nietzsche will make memory the very essence of the
organic; and this, whether by declaring: I presuppose memory and a kind
of mind in every organic being; or again by inquiring into the conditions of
possibility of memory immediately upon noting that the birth of memory is the problem of the organic.16
How is memory possible? In a note almost immediately preceding
the first formulation of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche answered: Our
memory rests on seeing as equal and taking for equal: thus on imprecise
vision; it is originally of the greatest crudeness and it regards almost everything as equal.That our representations act as triggering excitations
comes from the fact that we always represent and experience many representations as the same (das Gleiche), thus from our crude memory
that sees as equal, and our fantasy that out of laziness fabulates as EQUAL
what in truth is different.The movement of the foot as representation
could not be more different from the actual movement that follows it!17
Memory thus draws its possibility from equalization, and this in a twofold sense. On the one hand, to remember is always to remember something, and that toward which memory turns and returns must remain,
at least to a certain extent, identical to itself. Without the self-identity of
its intentional correlate, anamnesis would retain nothing. On the other
hand, memory is an event whose activation itself presupposes a kind of
resemblance and equalization between the recollecting representation
and the representation recalled. A memory always rests upon a present
which, one way or another, resembles the past to which it provides access. Every memory is a comparison, that is to say, an equalization,18
noted Nietzsche as early as 1873, before saying the same thing, years
later, of judgment.19 Without the crude, lazy, and fictitious equalization
of representations, without an originary falsification, anamnesis would
take place. But the most important lies elsewhere; it resides in the logical character of memory and the memorial character of logic. Nietzsche
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never ceased describing and explaining memory using the very terms by
which he described and explained intellect and knowledge. Enjoining us
to rethink memory, he specifies: it is the host of all lived experiences of
all organic life, living, ordering each other, reciprocally forming, struggling with each other, simplifying, concentrating and transforming into
many unities. There must be an inner process that behaves similarly to the
process of the formation of concepts from several singular cases: a reiterated emphasis and stress on the fundamental scheme, leaving behind
accessory traits.20 The constitution of identical cases is thus indeed at
work in memory; better still, the constitution of identical cases is memory
itself. That is the reason why Nietzsche can say of memory what he says
of knowledge; namely, that it makes experience possible. If the logical
mode of thought simplifies experience in such a way as to make it distinct and communicable, then memory, qua logical structure and moment of knowledge, opens the possibility of experience as experience of
a constant being. Experience is possible only with the help of memory;
memory is possible only by abbreviating a mental process by means of
a sign. Knowledge: this is the expression for a new thing through the
signs of things already known and experienced.21
Thus understood, memory is clearly the distinctive characteristic of
the organic. A long note presents and explains this as clearly as possible.
Our memory, whatever it is, writes Nietzsche, can serve us as term
of comparison by which to characterize something more important: in
the development of every organic being a prodigious memory is manifested concerning the entirety of its prehistory, inasmuch as organic beings have a prehistoryand this memory is reproductive; it reproduces
the initial and oldest incorporated forms in preference to those more
recently experienced: it is thus that memory goes back and not, as we
might suppose, step by step, according to a regressive movement proceeding from the last lived experience to the most remote one; conversely,
memory first leaves aside all fresh and recent impressions. There is here
something astonishingly arbitrary:even the soul, habitually called up
for help in every philosophical quandary, can be of no help here: at
least, not the individual soul, but rather a continuum of souls governing
the entire process of an organic series. Once again: since everything is
not reproduced, but only fundamental forms [Grundformen], there must
constantly be in this memory a subsuming thinking [subsumirendes Denken], simplification, reduction: in brief, something analogous to what we
qualify, from the point of view of our consciousness, as logic. 22
We can already draw several consequences from Nietzsches leading memory back to life. (1) Like logic, memory is a moral phenomenon
aligned with preserving values. To preserve the past is simply to preserve
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oneself; and, if memory is a reactive faculty, conversely, oblivion, as necessary for the intensification of life, is not a force of inertia but an active
power.23 (2) As the distinctive trait of the organic, memory is related
to no particular organ. There is no organ proper to memory: all the
nerves, in the leg for example, remember prior experiences.24 As a result, the life of memory is fully corporeal. Memory: everything we lived
through, lives: is worked, ordered, incorporated.25 (3) If memory is the
living archive of incorporation, then the principle of this archiving is
none other than will to power itself qua principle of incorporation and
organization. Memorywhich is always memory of the will 26 and memory
of the body, in the dual sense of the genitivederives from will to power.
The so-called knowledge drive must be led back to a drive to appropriate and
to conquer: the senses, the memory, the instincts, etc. have developed as
a consequence of this drive . . .27 (4) As to its very possibility, memory
depends on the will to assimilation qua preserving and reactive modality
of the will to power. After having shown that the fundamental will, from
which logic proceeds, consists in simplifying and passing highly complex spiritual processes through the filter of a fictitious and regulative
scheme, Nietzsche added: Where there is memory, this fundamental
will has dominated.28 By presupposing identical cases, memory would
therefore not permit the elucidation of identity itself.
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Consciousness
Since memory is not the source of the identity of cases, should we then
consider consciousness as such? However that may be, consciousness
could be vested with this eminent function only as a structure of the
body. For identical cases could not derive from a domination formation
unless that formation implied and contained, in one way or another, the
very principle of their identity. Yet the drive life of the body is unconscious. Whoever has formed the slightest representation of the body,
writes Nietzsche, of how many systems thereby work together in it, of
how much they do for and against each other, of the subtlety of compensations, etc.: he will judge that consciousness is something comparatively
poor and narrow: that no spirit even closely suffices for what is here to
be borne [zu leisten wre], and that even the wisest of moralists and legislators might, in the midst of this gear-works of war between rights and
duties, feel as clumsy as a beginner. Of how little are we conscious! How
readily this little leads to error and confusion! Consciousness is but an
instrument: and considering the number and greatness of what is produced without consciousness, it is neither the most necessary, nor the
most admirable of instruments. On the contrary: there is perhaps no
organ as badly developed as consciousness, as multiply defective, botching its work. Consciousness is the last-born of the organs, and thus still
a childlet us forgive it its infantilisms! To these belong among others,
morality, as the sum of value judgments uttered up to now about mans
actions and ways of thinking. We must thus reverse the hierarchy: everything conscious is of secondary importance: what is closer and more intimate
to us is not a reason, at least not a moral reason, to assess it differently. To
take the closest for the most important, that is precisely the old prejudice.
Thus, change our way of thinking! as to the principal evaluation! The spiritual must be taken for the semiotics of the body [als Zeichensprache des
Leibes]!1
Compared to the body, consciousness is thus a derived and superficial phenomenon. It is a phenomenon under which drives unceasingly
make war and form alliances.2 As Leibniz already saw, consciousness
is merely an accident of experience and not its necessary and essential attribute.3 The thoughts of the body, i.e., representations, which
never cease interfering in the play of drives, are unconscious; and the
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unconsciousness of this game is a sign of health and perfection. Not only

does the outstanding cohesion and tremendous synthesis of the drives
constituting the body not pertain to consciousness but, conversely, consciousness arises from a weakening of the body. We have thought better
of this too: becoming-conscious, spirit, is to us precisely a symptom of
a relative imperfection of the organism.4 Of what imperfection is Nietzsche thinking here, and what necessity does the formation of consciousness obey?
Having posited as heuristic principle that social organisms, whose
formation we can observe, must serve to teach us about the formation
of our own organism, Nietzsche continued: The I-consciousness [Das
Ich-Bewusstsein] is what comes to be added last when a completed organism functions, [it is] something almost superfluous: the consciousness of
unity, in any event something extremely incomplete and which is often
mistaken in comparison with the effective, inborn, incorporated, and laborious unity of all the functions. The great vital activity is unconscious.
Consciousness usually only appears when the whole wants to subject itself
anew to a higher wholefirstly, qua consciousness of this higher whole,
of the outside-of-self [des Ausser-sich]. Consciousness arises in relation to
the being [das Wesen] of which we could be a functionit is the means by
which we incorporate ourselves [into the higher whole]. As long as it is
a matter of self-preservation, consciousness of the I is unnecessary.
Likewise already for the lowest organisms. What is foreign greater stronger is first represented as such.Our judgments about our I limp along
behind it [hinken nach], and are completed only after the introduction
of the outside-us, of the power that reigns over us. We signify to ourselves
what we are worth in the HIGHER organism [im HHEREN Organismus]
universal law.5
Pertaining to the body, consciousness must thus be understood
starting from the hierarchy of drives and the will to power. We nevertheless could not explain its event and advent without beginning by discerning its essential character. Consciousness, which is always consciousness
of self and what is outside-of-self, is intentional and reflective. But what
can be external to a force if not another force, superior and for that
reason, imperious? From the exclusive horizon of the forces, the only
exteriority possible is an excess of power. But how is the hierarchy of
forces, or the drives, at the source of consciousness, and why is there in
man, and at every moment of his existence, as many consciousnesses
[Bewusstseins] as there are beings constituting his body?6
To pose the question in this way is to lead the problem of consciousness back to the problem of becoming-conscious, since the
drive-life from which consciousness derives is unconscious. How and
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why can a drive become conscious, or by what right do we assimilate

the multiplicity of bodily drives to a multiplicity of consciousnesses?
As we have seen, there is no isolated drive, and every drive is caught
up in numerous hierarchical relations, whose terms are in communication. But if to obey is to understand, and to command is to make oneself understood, then misunderstanding is always possible and through
misunderstandingin the event of a new configuration of forces, for
examplethe drive-life is disturbed and weakened. The awakening of
consciousness, which aims to reestablish communication, comes as a
response to this malaise in the body. In all becoming-conscious a malaise in the organism is expressed: something new must be attempted,
nothing suffices here, there is toil, tension, strainsuch is precisely
becoming-conscious . . .7 This dysfunction has nothing exceptional to
it; for each of the drives constituting a body (subject to the unceasing
novelty of becoming) must find itself, at some moment and relative to
the others, in a situation of incomprehension, whether it be the impossibility of understanding and obeying, or that of making oneself understood and obeyed. However, the life span of the body is enough to attest that the malaise can be constantly overcome and consequently, that
every drive can become conscious, whether as an object or as a subject.
And if it is fair to speak here of consciousness, and to assimilate the
multiple drives constituting the body to as many consciousnesses, it is
first because a drive, inhibited by incomprehension, finds itself diverted
from what it was aiming at, and turned back onto the very tension that
propelled it. It is fair, then, because turning back on oneself and reflection characterize consciousness in general. After having noted that the
most habitual form of knowledge is that without consciousness, Nietzsche added: consciousness is knowledge of a knowledge [Bewusstheit
ist Wissen um ein Wissen].8 Drawing its origins from inhibition, or even
from the paralysis of the relation of command, the consciousness of a
drive is always consciousness of another drive. And the original object
from which consciousness is inseparable is always another subject. Consciousness is thus simultaneously intentional and inter-subjective. Once
again, the object is but a kind of effect produced by a subject on a subject . . . a modus of the subject,9 and the intentionality of consciousness is
founded on will to power. However, occurring on the occasion of some
incomprehension between drives organized in a body, the ones incorporated into the others, consciousness is bound up with a disorganization of the body and the will to power, since the hierarchical tie, which
constitutes the organ as such, is thereby broken. That is the reason why
the privilege granted to consciousness has always been carried out at the
expense of the body.
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Consciousness is thus essentially related to communication and sociality. Consciousness, writes Nietzsche, has developed only under the pressure of the need for communicationthat from the start it was needed and
useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed), it also developed only in proportion to
the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beingsit is only as such that it had to develop:
a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have
needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter
our own consciousnessat least a part of themthat is the result of a
must that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he
had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood
and for all of this he needed consciousness first of all, he needed to
know himself what distressed him, he needed to know how he felt, he
needed to know what he thought. For, to say it once more: like every
living being, man thinks continually without knowing it, the thinking
that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all thisthe most
superficial and worst partfor only this conscious thinking takes the form
of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the
origin of consciousness.10 The moment it is legitimate to reason backward from recently formed organisms to more ancient ones, this analysis
confirms primarily that consciousness is a structure of communication,
and that consciousness and language have a common structure and origin. According to its origin, consciousness is thus never individual, but
always common and gregarious. This analysis then provides indirectly
an indication about the nature of the difference between the conscious
and the unconscious. Arising from the incomprehension among drives,
consciousness will be as vivid as communication between the drives is
difficult and slow. Intensity of consciousness stands in an inverse ratio to
the ease and rapidity of cerebral transmission.11 This is to say that the
difference between the conscious and unconscious characteristics of intellectual processes is reducible to a difference of speed. Another note
confirms this with an example. We know, Nietzsche reports, from the
consumption of hashish, and from dreams, that the speed of spiritual processes is tremendous. Apparently, we are spared the largest part of these
processes, which do not become conscious. There must be a multitude
of consciousnesses and wills in every complex organic being: our highest
consciousness usually holds the others under key. The simplest organic
creature must have consciousness and will.12
Yet how do we pass from the innumerable drive-consciousnesses
constituting the body, to that unique consciousness that seems to distin-
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guish itself from them, even to oppose them? The answer is simple. Since
the body is a society of drives or consciousnesses, consciousness in the traditional Cartesian sense is simply that of the dominant drive or drives. We
have already seen this without pausing to consider it, what distinguishes
the conscious, usually thought of as unique, as intellect, is precisely that
it remains protected and isolated from the innumerable multiplicity included in the lived experiences of those multiple consciousnesses and, as
a consciousness of higher rank, as a ruling and aristocratic plurality, only
a selection of lived experiences is presented to it; what is more, [this will
be] a selection that has been simplified, made clear and comprehensible,
thus falsifiedso that on its side, what is conscious prolongs this simplification and clarification, and thus this falsification, and prepares what
one commonly calls a Will. 13 The privilege of consciousness therefore
does not come from its nature as consciousnesswhether understood as
its immanence, as the absoluteness of its being-given, or as its ideality
but rather from the hierarchical position of the drives to which it pertains. As a domination formation, the body is always political. However,
there cannot be a political body without a governing organ, without an
executive, and this holds evidently for the body that we are. If it is appropriate to take the body as our guiding thread, this is because it allows
us to accede to our subjective unity, namely as regents at the head of
a community, and as regents dependent on those they govern. It is appropriate because the conditions of the hierarchy and the division of
labor make possible as much the individual members as the whole. What
is more, the very life of the body is political, since it is but a combat pursued in which the combatants never cease trading roles. Consequently,
and in the interest of preserving the whole, it is necessary that the executive remain unaware of the details of these innumerable subordinate
polemics. De minimis non curat praetor. This unawareness nevertheless
does not go without simplification and myopiawithout falsification.
A certain unawareness in which the regent is held concerning individual
operations and even collective disturbances of the common-essence [des
Gemeinwesens], belongs to the conditions under which rule is possible.
In short, we thereby gain a value for non-knowing, for seeing things on
a broad scale, for simplification and falsification, for the perspectival.14
As a structure of the body, consciousness is thus essentially political and,
being political, it is fundamentally unaware. Political consciousness is in
every respect a tautology, since the nature of consciousness depends on
its status as executive organ. Nietzsche would often insist on this. The
simplification to which consciousness proceeds, and the unawareness
in which it stands are inherent to governmental practice. Unawareness:
Just as a commander in chief should not and wants not to experience
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anything, so as not to lose his total overview, so too there must be above all
in our conscious minds an impulse to exclusion and driving away, a selective drivewhich only allows itself to be shown certain facts. Consciousness is the hand with which the organism reaches farthest around itself:
it must be a firm hand.15 Simplification: The development of consciousness as governmental organ: only accessible for generalizations. What the
eyes show reaches consciousness already generalized and prepared.16
It is now possible to specify the status of consciousness. Like the
hand or the stomach, it is an organ of the body qua domination formation; an organ of the sovereign.17 Thus, there is consciousness only
to the extent of its utilityconsciousness is present only to the extent that
consciousness is useful.18 Moreover, this utility presupposes an evaluation.
Like the body to which it belongs, consciousness is a moral phenomenon, and what we call moral conscience (Gewissen), in the older sense of
the adjective, is but a modality of consciousness (Bewusstsein) qua moral
phenomenon in the more recent sense of the term. Nietzsche moreover
defined the old moral conscience as the feeling under which the hierarchy of our drives reaches the consciousness.19 Not only is consciousness indissociable from an evaluation that grounds its very possibility,
but to become conscious is to take and leave, to choose according to
a table of goods and ills, to evaluate. What, in effect, comes to pass in
the process of becoming conscious? In becoming-conscious, I sample,
I simplify, I attempt to give form: such is becoming-conscious: an entirely
ACTIVE preparation.20 From what experiences does this description gain
its relevance? From the fact, for example, that behind every clear and
distinct thought rustles the murmur of innumerable arrire-penses. Or
again, from the fact that alone the right word distinguishes a thought,
which because confused (i.e., because still merged with other thoughts,
as far as consciousness is concerned) is not yet a thought. A clear and
distinct thought is one clarified and distinguishedinterpretedby
consciousness. This means, conversely, that an unconscious thought can
be perfectly clear in itself, and that obscurity is a consequence of the
optics-of-consciousness [Bewusstseins-Optik] and not something necessarily inherent to the obscure. It is therefore consciousness that makes
things obscure and if becoming-obscure is a matter of consciousnesss perspective,21 then the light of consciousness can only cast a shadow over the
great unconscious activity of the body.
If becoming-conscious is to choose and simplify, to abstract and
evaluate, then every such act is a kind of conceptualization, of falsification, and it is utterly vain to oppose consciousness to the concept in order
to found a doctrine of science, since this amounts to the same thing; that
is, to error.22 On the other hand, there are no immediate data of con-
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sciousness, whether these be facts, feelings, volitions or thoughts, and

self-consciousness, which is never immediately given to itself andin the
subjective sense of the genitivean organ of the body. Now, every organ
is at once the edifice of some domination and the document of some interpretation of will to power qua principle of organization for the body.
From whence does the body draw the meaning of this interpretation that
is consciousness? We should keep in mind that this is an interpretation
that could not be original, since consciousness is the last-born among
the organs, an organ that, moreover, comes to be added onto the functioning organism. After having noted that everything of which we become
conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and
through, and that the actual process of inner perception, the causal
connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object are absolutely hidden from usand are perhaps purely imaginary,
Nietzsche adds: This apparent inner world is treated according to the
same forms and procedures as the outer world.23 Adjusted according
to those in the outer world, the simplification, schematization, and interpretation of the inner world make use of identical cases. And the
meaning of consciousness originates in knowledge as the creation of a
counter-world, allowing the preservation of the organism.
Likened to a hand that grasps [greift], and thus comprehends [begreifen], as far as possible, consciousness is essentially turned toward the
outer world. It is essential, Nietzsche cautions, that one make no mistake [vergreift] about the role of consciousness: it is our relation with the
outer world that developed it. On the other hand, the direction or protection
and care in respect to the combined play of the bodily functions does
not enter our consciousness; no more than spiritual accumulation: that a
higher instance rules over these things cannot be doubteda kind of directing committee [leitendes Comit] in which the various chief desires make
their votes and power felt. Pleasure, displeasure are hints [Winke] from
this sphere: . . . as are the acts of will. As are ideas. In summa: that which
becomes conscious is subject to causal relations that are entirely withheld
from usthe sequence of thoughts, feelings, ideas in consciousness expresses nothing to indicate that this sequence is a causal one: but apparently it is so, to the highest degree. On this appearance we have founded our
entire representation of spirit, reason, logic, etc. (none of these exist: they are
fictitious syntheses and unities) . . . and these have been projected into
things, behind things! Usually, one takes consciousness itself as the general
sensorium and supreme instance: it is, nonetheless, but a means of communicability [Mittel der Mittheilbarkeit]: it has evolved through social relations and in the interests of social relations . . . Relations here include
the effects produced by the outside world and the necessary reactions
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they provoke in us; [but] just as much our effect upon the outer world. It
is not the direction, but rather an organ of direction.24
What is the meaning of this determination of consciousness as organ of direction in the body, responsible for its external relations and
for communication? From the moment the meaning of consciousness is
borrowed from the world that appears to it, the worldliness of consciousness is not, as Husserl thought, a contresens, but rather the possibility of
consciousness itself. Transcendental psychologism, which takes inner
experience for worldly experience, is thus not a falsifying dislocation,
a falsification,25 verified alone by transcendental phenomenology. On
the contrary, it is this phenomenology that rests on a falsification. Do we
need proof of this? Seeking to trace the path which constituting analysis
should take, Husserl assigns it the regional idea of the physical thing as
transcendental clue. He justifies this assignation in the following way:
The regional idea of the physical thing, its identical X with its determining
sense-content, posited as existing, prescribes rules governing the multiplicities of appearances.26 If constituting consciousness is accessible only from
identical things, whose identity is indifferent to the reduction, since for
Husserl identity implies no existential positing; if the synthesis of lived
experiences conforms to the identity of things, then there is no pure
consciousness without falsification. Relative to any identical X, the very
concept of constituting consciousness is contradictory, since consciousness is an organ of the body, and the body the very site of identity. Supposing this were unavoidable, the only way to preserve meaning for the
concept of constitution would consist in recognizing it as the work of the
drive-body [corps pulsionnel] and not that of intentional consciousness.
The determination of consciousness as an organ of direction of
the body then means that my unity as a bodyand the body is my very
beingis not the work of my consciousness, since the latter is but an
organ in service to the body. If I have in me something of a unity, it
certainly does not reside in the conscious I, or in feeling, willing, thinking [Fhlen Wollen Denken], but elsewhere: in the preserving, appropriating, eliminating, regulating intelligence of my entire organism, of which
my conscious I is but an instrument.27 Consciousness, which governs
without ruling, is not the center of the body. But this clearly does not
exclude that, in the long run, it might not approach what Nietzsche calls
the physiological core or biological center of the individual.28 To define consciousness as an organ of communication, that is, as an organ of
simplification, schematization, etc., then signifies that the inner world,
which is intuitively offered to consciousness, is just as false as the outer
worldand this, for precisely the same reasons. To become-conscious
of lived experiences means to constitute them as identical cases. This is
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so much the case that reflection falsifies everything, because it logicizes

everything. Each lived experience is already, and through itself alone, an
eidetics. The critique of reason and of logic, proceeding from a return
to the life of consciousness, can thus only raise the constitutive falsification of phenomena to a superior power. And if phenomenality is itself an
error, then phenomenology has no right to the title of rigorous science.
Phenomeno-Mania,29 notes Nietzsche dryly.
Let us give an example of consciousnesss extraordinary capacity for error.30 Analyzing the logic of dreams, Nietzsche points out that
we all know from experience how quickly the dreamer entwines with
his dream a sound that strongly impinges upon him from without, the
ringing of bells or the firing of cannon, for example; that is to say, he
accounts for the sound in terms of the dream, so that he believes he experiences the cause of the sound first, then the sound itself. What does
this observation imply? It attests that, in dreams, the detonation of a
cannon could not be heard without having first been explained and led
back to a cause as its very own. Thus, oneiric consciousness does not perceive the sound of the cannon in real time, but only after a tiny phase
shift, through which it fabulates with extraordinary rapidity31 a causal
explanation, which enables it to perceive the cannon shot. As long as
oneiric consciousness has not inserted the sound that surprises it into
a causal chain, it fails to hear it. And oneiric perception draws its possibility from an inversion of time.32 But is the inversion of sequential time
solely the act of a sleepy, oneiric consciousness? Nothing is less certain.
On the one hand, we have already observed the same phenomenon in
the analysis of pain that is felt only after having been interpreted and,
on the other hand, this inversion of time is required by the schematization of chaos and the formation of identical cases. A note entitled The
Inverted Order of Time [Die umgekehrte Zeitordnung] allows us to
understand this. Nietzsche there writes: The outer world has an effect
on us: the effect is telegraphed to the brain, there it is prepared, given
form, and led back to its cause: the latter is then projected and it is only
then that the fact reaches CONSCIOUSNESS. That is to say, the phenomenal
world appears to us as a cause only after this cause has had an effect, and
after the effect has been elaborated. That is, we continually reverse the order
of events.While I see, it already sees something else. It is likewise for
pain.33 The outer world is here the chaos to which the body that we are
never ceases being exposed, since it strives to live in it. And the forces
of this chaotic world never cease producing their effects on other forces
of the same nature, whose organization constitutes our body. The latter
could not preserve itself were it not able to predict, that is, to identify the
events that happen to it. Commanded by self-preserving values, the body
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must stabilize the flux of those innumerable effects that the world has
on it by making them recognizable and predictable. Yet, how to make
them foreseeable without constituting them as the effects of a cause? And
how could this operation be accomplished if the effect of the chaotic
worldan effect, itself, chaoticwere not telegraphed beforehand to
the central intelligence, which gives it form and makes it predictable by
ascribing it a cause; [i.e.,] which makes it intelligible and perceptible
before it presents itself to consciousness and in order that it come to do so.
In the phenomenalism of the inner world we invert the chronological
order of cause and effect. The fundamental fact of inner experience
is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place.34 In other
words, if after having been inscribed in a causal chain, the identified case
is telegraphed back [zurcktelegraphirt]35 to consciousness, then all object consciousness, and therefore all intentionality is preceded, de jure as
de facto, by an immense intellectual labor that makes it possible, through
the formation of identical cases, through knowledge as the creation or
confabulation of a world allowing for the preservation of the body. Intentionality rests on self-preserving and reactive values, and consciousness is
essentially false. Thus implying an inversion of sequential time, which is
already itself a falsification, intentional consciousness is but a consciousness contretemps, off the beat. It could not be the originary site of truth,
in any case.
From this analysis of consciousness and becoming-conscious, we
must draw three conclusions. First, it goes without saying that what was
said of consciousness is also true for those innumerable consciousnesses
under lock and key. This is because the drives constituting the body
must all be able to communicate with each other. That is also why, after
recalling that the organs are formed starting from the hierarchy of the
drives, Nietzsche could point out that the separate parts of the body are
telegraphically linked [telegraphisch verbunden]that means, drive.36 The
drive-body is thus integrally a system of communication or telecommunication. Second, consciousness always lags behind the unconscious or,
conversely, the great unconscious intellectual activity of the body is always
ahead of consciousness. The difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is therefore one of speed, and thus one of power;37 and
that is the meaning of the expression: While I see, it already sees something else. Contrary to Freud, the it in question here is not a chaos but a
logic, indeed logic itself. In contrast to the I or the ego, Freud indeed acknowledges a chaotic character to the it or the id, which we picture . . .
as being open at its end to somatic influences. We approach the id with
analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.38 And
it is by virtue of this chaotic determination of the corporeal, drive-based
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id that Freud can require that psychoanalytic therapy reinforce the ego,
such that the latter could make parts of the id its own, according to the
following practical maxim: Where id was, there ego shall be.39 This
maxim nevertheless restsand with it, psychoanalysis itselfon a misunderstanding, if not an ignorance of the logic of the drive-body. Speaking
of the id as of a chaos, Freud stops precisely at the threshold of the great
reason of the body. Yet, relative to the body, becoming-conscious is the
effect of a malaise, and conversely, unconsciousness is the sign of health
and perfection. Every perfect act is precisely unconscious and no longer willed; consciousness expresses an imperfect and often morbid state.
Personal perfection as conditioned by the will, as being-conscious [Bewusstheit],
as reason and dialectic, is a caricature, a sort of self-contradiction. . . .
The degree of consciousness makes perfection itself impossible . . .40 To
be sure, the unconscious in question here is one reached at the end of a
long process,41 and not a chaotic unconscious. But the problem is knowing whether that which Freud takes for chaos is not precisely that drive
body, of whose great logic he remains unaware. To assign to psychoanalytic therapy the goal of substituting the I for the it is to make the body
less powerful, and thus more reactive and sickly. Thus, psychoanalysis
in its domain fulfills the victory of reactive values. As for our third and
last conclusion, it is both obvious and responds to our initial question.
By assuming identical cases, consciousness could not permit us to explain their identity. Hence, since the identity of cases depends neither on
memory nor on consciousness, is it possible to account for it and, in so
doing, to found logic, knowledge, but also incorporation on something
other than falsification, on something other than some taking-for-true,
on something other than the belief in constancy and in being, in the
constancy of beingon values other than self-preserving and reactive
ones alone?
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The Decisive Instant
To explain the identity of cases with no recourse to the belief in being,

[which] is the foundation of all science, and all life,1 is to begin to answer those questions we have been pursuing throughout. Let us recapitulate. First, we progressively brought to light the system of constitutive
errors on which both the drive-life of the body and knowledge rest. At
the same time, we showed the falseness of the ontological or technological world to which that knowledge gave rise; this, in order to trace back
both the false world and its knowledge to conserving and reactive values.
In doing this we invariably exposed the body, if indirectly, to the sole,
ultimate truth of becoming. But what does that mean? To ask whether,
and to what extent, truth is liable to be incorporated is ultimately to ask
whether and how incorporationwhich always goes together with constancy and preservationis compatible with the ultimate truth of flux
and becoming, which appears to ruin all constancy and forbid preservation. Insofar as becoming is the necessary condition of intensification in
any form; insofar as the intensification of body drives is a kind of becoming [est un devenir], the question of the incorporation of the ultimate
truth of becoming is also that of the possibility of a higher body. It is the
question of an active body. This necessary condition is nevertheless not
sufficient. An active drive-body could not be governed by reactive and
preserving values. Indeed, it is a matter of knowing whether the truth of
the flux can constitute a principle of incorporation. That is, a principle
apt to satisfy the requirements of preservation, giving rise to a sort of constancyalbeit in such a way that this constancy would be but a function
of intensification. The moment that valueswhich is to say, the a priori
of incorporation in generalcan be first conditions of preservation and
thereafter conditions of intensification (reactive values), or again of intensification first and thereafter preservation (active values), the creation
of a new body requires in addition the revaluation of reactive values. It
requires the revaluation of all reactive values, but especially the most
reactive of all. Now, there are two kinds of reactive values: ontological
values and Judeo-Christian values, whose common reactivitywhich is
not to say equal reactivityallows their conjunctiona conjunction that
defines Europe, or again, nihilism. The creation of a truthful and active
body never goes without a transformation of the world from which that
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body is essentially inseparable. After all, it lives in the world and takes
possession of it through knowledge. Consequently, such a creation necessitates the overcoming of onto-logic or the essence of technological
knowledgeit requires this, even as it develops a power higher than the
one God exerted hitherto by justifying and resurrecting bodies. In other
words, without the renewal of the truth to which ontological values are
bound, and the justice to which Judeo-Christian values are attached, no
body higher than the Judeo-Christian and the ontological one would be
possible. Now, the creation of such a body arises from the new Enlightenment, whose task consists of ROOTING OUT THE UNCONSCIOUS
TARTUFFERY OF THE BODY OF EUROPEAN MAN.2 The task is thus
to explain the identity of cases and all constancy without presupposing
being, without believing in being, and starting from becoming alone with
a view to liberating its power. This task amounts not only to assigning
another foundation to the system of identical cases and knowledge. It is
not simply to elucidate the identity principle, according to which equality to self is the constitutive trait of any constant existent as such. It is
also and above all to extract man from this falsification, this myopia and
crass intellectualityfrom that baseness which remains more than ever
his condition of possibility and more and more determines his being, as
technological domination extends its rule. When the thought of eternal
recurrence came to him, Nietzsche noted: My philosophyto pull man
out of appearance, no matter what the danger! Also no fear before the collapse of life [Zugrundegehen des Lebens]!3 And, contrary to what may be
the case elsewhere in his work, appearance here means lie, falsification, show, and baseness.4 It is because the empire of false appearance
is on its way to becoming absolute, and again because this appearance
has been almost absolutely incorporated, that Nietzsche could say, somewhat later: I realized that it was impossible to teach the truth where
the way of thinking is base.5 Yet, does any place remain, where the way
of thinking is not base? To put it more precisely: has the university, in its
principle, really pondered Nietzsches thought, and is it not for essential
reasons, relative to his philosophical task, that Nietzsche one day wrote:
In principlenot to live in Germany, because European mission.not
among universities?6
Where to look for this new Aufklrung, apt to bring us out of our
human minority toward a sur-human majority by founding the identity
of cases on something other than the belief in being? Do we not already
have at our disposal two indications liable to set us on our way? On the
one hand, the general movement of Nietzsches thought aims to dehumanize nature in order to naturalize man, once we have reached the
pure concept of nature qua will to power and eternal recurrence. On
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the other hand, the natural identity and constancy of the world arise
from eternal recurrence. This is, moreover, the reason why the reality
and the calculability of an event are not founded on causality, but on
the recurrence of cases. Eternal recurrence thus suffices to explain the
identity of cases independent of any substantialization, any subjectivation, and any ontologization. If we set recurrence aside, then no identity
in the worldto be sure, the world of identical cases is the true world,
the world as existentcan be strictly demonstrated. The real world,
however one has conceived it up to nowthis has always been the apparent world once again.7 The world of identical cases, true being, thus
arise from repetition. Moreover, eternal recurrence so truly confers on
becoming the false constancy believed of Being that, when placed at the
summit of contemplation, Nietzsche can say, That everything recurs is
the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.8 But as
the veritable foundation of the world, can eternal recurrence also constitute the veritable foundation of logic qua preserving structure of the
body? Can eternal recurrence be the unique demonstrable foundation of
ontologico-technological knowledge, through which the body relates to
the world? In short, is eternal recurrence the true and ultimate foundation of the constancy of the body, of the subject, and, consequently, of
all constancy in general? Yet, is raising this question not to suppose that
what holds for the identity of the world and its events might also hold for
the identity of the knowing body, which, from within the world, relates
to the world? Could eternal recurrence then be profitably substituted for
the originally synthetic unity of transcendental apperception? In principle, nothing should prevent this for, if the body is in the world, it is
also of the world, since the forces constituting it are of the same nature
as those surrounding it. Once again, there is but one kind of force. At
a time when he did not yet have at his disposal the concept of body
qua domination formation, but after the rise of his thought of thoughts,
Nietzsche once defined man as a group of atoms completely dependent
in its movements on all the distributions and transformations of forces
in the wholeand on the other hand, like every atom, incalculable, an
in-and-for-itself.9 Should we nevertheless not distinguish organic forces
from inorganic ones, especially when it is a matter of determining anew
the identity and constancy of the knowing body, by establishing a new
principle of incorporation liable to make the body at once truthful and
more powerful? We should make such distinction. For there is no body
without the organic and the inorganic (each of them, equally eternal)
being in relation to each other. Thus, the question is not so much one of
knowing whether the body is inscribed (or not) within the ring of rings,
than it is of determining the way or ways in which the body might relate
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to eternal recurrence, even as it comes under it. It is likewise a matter of

knowing to what this relationship obliges that body.
It was in starting from the instant,10 with a view to explaining its
transitivity, that we reached the circular eternity of timeeternal recurrence. Let us recall: Counting backwards from this instant, nothing can
prevent me from saying I shall never thereby reach an end: just as,
from the same instant, I can count forward to infinity. Only if I made the
mistakeand I shall guard against doing soof equating this correct
concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of
an infinite PRO-gressus up to now, only if I posit the direction (forward or
backwards) as logically indifferent, would I have to conceive the head
this instantas the tail.11 But if the direction according to which the
enumeration of instants is not logically a matter of indifference, this is
because the one who holds the and comes to think eternal recurrence, counts starting from himself, i.e., from the instant at which he
stands, from the instant that he is. In short, to reach the ring of recurrence is to come back to it by instantaneously coming back to oneself.
And we would not know how to determine the ways in which the body
can be concerned by eternal recurrence without explaining whynotwithstanding the circularity of time that the indistinction of beginnings
and ends impliesthe instant is a head and not a tail.
If eternal recurrence is the fundamental conception of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, it is only at the beginning and the end of the third part,
in the pages entitled Of the Vision and the Riddle and The Convalescent, that recurrence is explicitly discussed. What vision and what
riddle are at stake here? When addressing the bold venturers and adventurers and whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon dreadful
seas,12 Zarathustra made his abysmal thought known for the first time,
he claims to have first proposed to a dwarf, squatting on a rock before a
gateway, the following enigma: Behold this gateway, dwarf! . . . It has two
aspects. Two paths come together here: no one has ever reached their
end. This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long
lane ahead of usthat is another eternity. They are in opposition to one
another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above
it: Instant. But if one were to follow them further and ever further and
further: do you think, dwarf, that these paths would be in eternal opposition? Questioned this way, and ever according to Zarathustras story,
Everything straight lies, murmured the dwarf disdainfully. All truth is
crooked, time itself is a circle.13
Though he easily found the key to the enigma, and easily understood
that, far from contradicting each other, the two paths formed but one; in
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other words, that time is a circle, the dwarf promptly brought Zarathustras wrath on himself, when Zarathustra answered: Spirit of Gravity! . . .
do not treat this too lightly! Or I shall leave you squatting where you are,
Lamefootand I have carried you high! Behold this instant! . . . From
this gateway Instant a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind
us. Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane?
Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done,
run past? And if all things have been here before: what do you think of
this instant, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been herebefore?
And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this instant
draws after it all future things? Thereforedraws itself too? For all things
that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane. And
this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight
itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of
eternal thingsmust we not all have been here before?and must we
not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long,
terrible lanemust we not return eternally?14
What is the incomprehension that provokes and justifies Zarathustras wrath? If, in the second formulation of the enigma, Zarathustra
insists on the instant and adds that eternal recurrence is also ours, it is
clearly because by simply answering that time is a circleall of whose
points are indifferently beginnings and ends, ends and beginningsthe
dwarf, contemplating the circle from without as a free spectator, has not
heeded the ipseity of the instant. This negligence forbids him access to
another dimension of the thought of return. Conversely and positively,
only the determination of our relation to the instant is liable to make us
understand eternal recurrence; that is, to make us understand in what
sense we are comprised in it.
Let us again take up the course of our story. No longer awaiting
any response from the dwarf, and frightened by his thoughts, conscious
and unconscious, Zarathustra suddenly hears a dog howling. This howl,
which evokes his childhood, at the same time provokes a vision that,
though coming after the enigma, indirectly constitutes its solution. But
there a man was lying! And there! The dog, leaping, bristling, whining;
then it saw me comingthen it howled again, then it cried outhad I
ever heard a dog cry so for help? And truly, I had never seen the like of
what I then saw. I saw a young shepherd writhing, choking, convulsed, his
face distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of his mouth.
Had I ever seen so much disgust and pallid horror on a face? Had he,
perhaps, been asleep? Then the snake had crawled into his throatand
there it had bitten itself fast. My hand tugged and tugged at the snake
in vain! it could not tug the snake out of the shepherds throat. Then
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a voice cried from me: Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!thus a voice cried
from me, my horror, my hate, my disgust, my pity, all my good and evil
cried out of me with a single cry.15
Zarathustra then interrupts his story and, inviting his listeners to
guess the enigma, to interpret the vision, he asks them the following four
questions: What did I see in images [Gleichnis]? And who is it that must
come one day? Who is the shepherd into whose mouth the snake thus
crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest, blackest
will thus crawl? After that, without awaiting any response, Zarathustra
continues, to bring his story to an end: The shepherd, however, bit as my
cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat far away the snakes
headand sprang up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a mana transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had
any man laughed as he laughed! Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that
was no human laughter and now a thirst consumes me, a longing
that is never stilled.16
Let us begin with the third question. Who is the young shepherd
laying on the ground? It is Zarathustra himself. On the one hand, the
howl of the dog plunges him into his earliest childhood. On the other
hand, it returns him to the animals who, later on, after having sat up with
him for seven days, will tell him: Being begins in every instant; the ball
There rolls around every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of
eternity is crooked. To these animals, Zarathustra will answer, laughing:
Oh you buffoons and barrel-organs! . . . how well you know what had to
be fulfilled in seven days: and how that monster crept into my throat and
choked me! But I bit its head off and spat it away. And youhave already
made a hurdy-gurdy song of it? I, however, lie here now, still weary from
this biting and spitting away, still sick with my own redemption. And you
looked on at it all?17 This dialogue with the animals not only confirms
that the young shepherd is indeed the young Zarathustra, as he who
must become what he is: the doctor of eternal recurrence announcing
the overman and denouncing the last man;18 the dialogue also teaches
something else. If the animalswho, like the dwarf, maintain that time
is a circledo not say: Being begins in every instant, but rather being
always begins now, this is because they do not distinguish the instant
from the now. And this distinction is impossible for them because the
instant never offers itself for viewing; in other words, because only the
one who stands in it or can stand in it has access to it.
Yet what does to stand in the instant mean? In the first formulation of the enigma, Zarathustra uses an expression whose uncanniness
Heidegger will underscore. The two paths that come to coincide under
the gateway affront one another.19 Such a frontal shock is possible only
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for someone who, in the instant, is able to confront the future as well
as the past, and the instant denotes the mode in which the one who
can understand and conceive eternal recurrence belongs to it. Now, to
confront or stand up to the future and the past is not to be outside the
one and the other; it is not to be an indifferent spectator of the one or
the other. To confront means to face, to affront; the instant is the site of
a confrontation, and consequently, of a decision. It thus belongs to the
very meaning of the instant to be decisive.
Is there not, however, an incompatibility between the necessity of
eternal recurrence and the decisive character of the instant? From the
sudden emergence of the thought of return, Nietzsche asked himself the
following question: If everything is necessary, in what sense do I determine my actions? To this he immediately answered: Thought and belief constitute a weight, which in comparison to all the rest, weighs more
heavily. You say that the food, the site, the air, society changes and determines you? But your opinions do so still more, since they make you decide for this food, this place, this air and this society.If you incorporate
the thought of thoughts, it will transform you. In relation to everything
you want to do, the question: is it such that I would want to do it an innumerable number of times?this question is the supreme weight.20 The
decision could therefore not modify the circular movement of forces
which, whether organic or inorganic, are subject to eternal recurrence
qua the original and necessary law of their movement. But it can modify
the thoughts or values that command the distribution of those forces. To
decide is not freely to avail oneself of forces, but to freely arrange forces.
The most powerful thought requires much force, previously dedicated
to other goals, it thus performs a reorganization [so wirkt er umbildend],
it does not create new force, but new laws for the movement of force.
Therein lies, however, the possibility for some individuals to determine
and order anew their affects.21 This redistribution of forces concerns
not only the body, which, as a domination formation and moral phenomenon, cannot but reorganize itself with a change of evaluation; it also
concerns the world in its totality. Indeed, on the one hand, the world, in
the midst of which the body lives, is constituted on the basis of the values
according to which that body livesthe world of identical cases being
correlative to a will to power given to preserving values, and independent
of the activity or reactivity of values, the world remains a product of our
evaluationsnamely, of those that remained equal to themselves.22 On
the other hand, by virtue of the finiteness of the quantum of force and
the form of space, forces are so interdependent that each instant signifies a global displacement of all the modifications.23 Nothing is then
shielded from the decision.
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Nietzsche often insisted on the tremendous implications of the instantaneous decision. Two years after having noted that each of a mans
actions exerts on everything that is to come a vast unlimited influence,
he will specify that the first question is by no means whether we are
content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all.
If we affirm a single instant, we thereby affirm not only ourselves but all
of existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in ourselves nor in
things: and if but a single time our soul like a harp string from joy has
trembled and rung out, then all eternity was needed to determine this
eventand in this single instant of affirmation all eternity was called
good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.24
The instant is thus decisive. It decides everything in sovereignty,
and this is why it must be understood to be a head. But if the instant is
always the instant of decision, then from whence does the decision draw
its criterion? Does the decision draw its rule from the instant itself, or
conversely, is a rule outside the instant imposed upon it? The importance
of this question must not be underestimated, as it ultimately concerns the
sovereignty of the instantaneous decision itself. To answer it, let us begin
with a note from the summer of 1881. My doctrine says: live in such a
way that you would desire to live anew, that is the taskyou will live anew
in any case! To the one to whom effort brings the highest feeling, let him
strive: to the one to whom rest brings the highest feeling, let him rest; to
the one to whom the fact of involving himself, of following, of obeying
brings the highest feeling, let him obey. MIGHT he but become conscious
of WHAT gives him the highest feeling and not recoil before any means!
Eternity is at stake therein!25 This doctrine sets forth two propositions,
one in the indicative mode: you will live anew in any case, the other in
the imperative: to live in such a way that you would desire to live anew.
To elucidate the decisions criterion thus comes down to understanding
how these two propositionsconjugated in two different modes (and
which might say the same thing if we could disregard this difference)
are conjoined to each other. What does the proposition in the indicative
mode mean? It establishes a necessity: whatever the instant about which I
decide, it will come back such as I have decided it. To a dying man, Zarathustra said: See! You die and pass on now and disappear: and there is
nothing that remains of you as a you, for souls are as mortal as bodies.
But this same power of causes that this time created you will return and
must create you again: you, grain of dust amidst dust, you belong to the
causes on which the return of all things depends. And when one day you
are reborn, it will not be for a new life, or a better one, or a similar one; it
will be for the same identical life as that in which you now decide on the
smallest and greatest things.26 The necessity described by the indicative
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proposition is thus indeed that of my own return and that of the world
from which I am inseparable such as I am at this instant; for, as a product
of my evaluations, this world is the correlate of my body. Belonging to
the causes on which the return of all things depends, I can decide about
them instantaneously, since, in the world of will to power, all forces are
instantaneously coordinated, and since there is strictly speaking no causal
succession. In other words, if all things are a fatum, then I am also a fatum
for all things.27 However, while it is necessary for me to decide on my
life, and while the life I decide on here, in this instant, is the life that will
eternally return, there is no necessity in deciding one way or another, i.e.,
according to certain values instead of others, or even in favor of certain
values rather than others. In short, inasmuch as there is a necessity that
I decide, there is no necessity as to what I must decide. And that is why a
criterion is required, which will have to take an imperative form since it
concerns the will. Assuming we may speak in this way here, the indicative
proposition expresses the ratio essendi of the imperative one.
What does it mean, then, to urge us to live in such a way that you
would desire to live anew? To live in such a way is to live with the highest
feeling. What feeling is at stake here? As Nietzsche attaches no object to
it here, the highest feeling could only be that which the highest life has
for itself. Now, recall that the will to power as essence of life is a feeling,
even a plurality of feelings. At the time when he began to conceptualize will to live as will to power, Nietzsche noted: To will, a pressing very
pleasant feeling! It is the phenomenon that accompanies every outburst
of force.28 The highest feeling thus designates the will to power, and to
live in such a way as to want to live anew; to live with the highest feeling
of life, is not only to live by the will to power, but also for it. How is that
possible? For this, it is necessary to BE ABLE to become conscious of WHAT
gives . . . the highest feeling and not to recoil before any means. What
is the impact of the emphasized clause? To become conscious of what
procures the highest feeling is to become conscious of the conditions of
possibility for such a feeling. Relative to will to power, these conditions
are none other than values. To become conscious of what procures the
highest feeling is thus to determine the values that allow the will to power
to be itself. But also, and by the same token, it is to identify or recognize
the values that allow the will to power not to be itself, by obliging it to
turn back against itself. In other words, eternal recurrence is an imperative, because corporeal life and the will to power that is its origin can be
commanded by different values. Wherein lies the principle of such a difference? In specifying that becoming-conscious of those values that allow
the will to power to be itself, requires not recoiling before any means,
Nietzsche gives us the answer. Not to recoil before any means is to be
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afraid of nothing. It is thus to be free from the pathic and reactive principle of humanization. To be able to become conscious of what procures
the highest feeling thus means being able to perform the revaluation of
all reactive values, without which eternal recurrence would be nothing
less than the most supreme form of nihilism.29 Nietzschewho will
subsequently show that pleasure accompanies every form of intensification of will to power, and for whom, more generally, destroying simply
meant overcoming and reconstructing on a vaster scalewrote in his
first note devoted to eternal recurrence: But now comes the weightiest
knowledge, and makes all modes of life frightfully concernful: an absolute excess of pleasure MUST be demonstrated, otherwise our choice
must be the annihilation of ourselves with regard to humanity as a means
of annihilating humanity itself.30
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The Incorporation of Truth
By opening a possibility, the doctrine of recurrence expresses a necessity, since it means that it is possible to determine the value of the instant whose return is, in any case, necessary. This is to say, first, that the
revaluation of values springs from eternal recurrence. The first time that
Nietzsche uses the expression revaluation of all values, it is as subtitle
to a book project entitled Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.1 Shortly
thereafter, he will specify that without freedom for morality, without a
revaluation of all values, the thinking of recurrence could not be borne
[ertragen].2 This is to say, furthermore, that, relative to the revaluation
of nihilist values, which is absolutely inseparable from it (and if living
in eternity is a task that lays claim to us at each instant since each instant returns eternally), the thinking of eternal recurrence provokes the
great crisis, the holy resolution, the decision.3
However, if the principal and criterion of the great decision is the
distinction between active and reactive values, how can this principial
distinction govern the instant itself? Is it possible that the criterion of the
instantaneous decision is outside the instant of decision, and can we dissociate the decisive instant from that with regard to which it decides, as
from that according to which it decides? Evidently not. The instant would
then lose its sovereignty, and with it its own decisive character; it would
no longer be more than an indifferent now, liable to be made decisive
elsewhere; the institution of new values would then constitute a separate task and the eternal recurrence could no longer be the thought of
thoughts, the great knowledge, or the heaviest weight. We must therefore
understand how the instant offers, by itself, the criterion for the decision
that it indeed is.
The instant is only accessible to him who stands fast in it, and it is
decisive only for him who stands fast therein. But how to stand fast in the
instant when the latter passes like a flash? Is the instant not that which,
par excellence, forbids any holding and positing? The moment there is
not a single instant of being in the rigorous sense,4 the only conceivable way of holding fast in the instant consists not in holding it back, but
in holding oneself, in abiding with it eternally. To abide in the decisive
instant is to decide for the eternity of its return. However, if a whole
eternity flows between two instants, if the instants cannot succeed each
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other since they are separated, the ones from the others, by a complete
revolution of the great ring, then how would eternal recurrence not destroy the abiding it is supposed precisely to ensure? Nietzsche gave an
answer to this question, which attests obliquely that eternal recurrence
must never be understood against the horizon of onto-logic. On the contrary and indefatigably, he called for a critique, a setting out of play, and
a reduction of ontology. You suppose you will have a long rest until your
rebirthbut do not be deceived! Between the last instant of consciousness and the first glimmer of the new life lies no time [keine Zeit]it
passes as quickly as a flash of lightning even though living creatures measure it in billions of years and even could not measure it. Intemporality
and succession are consistent with each other, the moment the intellect
is out of play.5
The eternal recurrence of the instant as rightly decisive is therefore not something that comes to it from without, but its very structure,
its sole conceivable identity. Does that imply a criterion of decision, an
evaluation? Yes. Indeed, from the moment that standing fast in the instant is deciding for the eternity of its return, no decision is possible if
it presupposes being and conservative or reactive values. This is because
the eternal recurrencewhich constitutes the instant as suchis that of
becoming, for which being is both its halting and its negation. However,
if the belief in being contradicts the instanteousness of the decision, this
is because every instantaneous decision as such implies values that give
free rein to becoming, only to exclude those that give rise to being. The
instant is only what it is in returning eternally. And it could not return
without all of becoming also returning, and without the decision that it is,
drawing, consequently, its rules from the only values liable to agree with
becoming by allowing it to become without fixing it in being. To decide
on the instant by abiding in it is therefore possible only on the basis of
active values, and it is impossible on that of reactive or preserving values.
This is first to say that the instant (Augenblick) is in itself revaluing; it is a
gaze [Blick] that posits values.6 This is because, by itself, it provides the
criterion for the decision that it cannot fail properly to be. In the highest
sense, which is here the only relevant one, every decision decidesbut
not according to one or another value, rather in favor of one evaluation
against another, in favor of one morality against another. This is to say,
then, that considered on the basis of the decisive instant, eternal recurrence includes, as its principle and its consequence, the revaluation of
reactive values, and finally that the imperative proposition founds, like
a ratio cognoscendi, the indicative proposition, because it alone is capable
of accounting for the decisive ipseity of the instantan ipseity without
which eternal recurrence would not concern me and could not be mine.
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This is the same ipseity without which, consequently, the indicative proposition you shall relive in any case would be devoid of sense.
Before being the site, however, of a confrontation between values
and some moral phenomenon, is the instant not that of a confrontation
between the past and the future? Is it not a temporal phenomenon; in
other words, is the revaluing character of the instant really originary?
However that may be, the instant is decisive. Yet what would it mean to
decide for the past or for the future? If I decide for the future, I also
create the past, since in making the old a function of the new I confer
on the old the meaning of the new. However, if I decide for the past and
make all novelty to come a simple function of that past, then I reproduce
identical cases without creating anything new. In the first case, intensification is possible; in the second, only preservation is possible. To decide
for the past is to decide for reactive values of preservation, and to decide
for the future is to make a decision in favor of active values of intensification. The revaluing character of the instant is thus indeed first, and the
instant is not originally a temporal form, at least not in the traditional
sense of time.
Unaware of the decisive and revaluing character of the instant, unable to understand that the instant is never a simple form, but always the
articulation of a drama,7 the dwarf, the animals, and all those who relate
to existence in the mode of spectators can assert that time is a circle of
nows, all of them equally indifferent, and that everything comes back to
the same. Of the two propositions defining the doctrine of recurrence,
they retain and grasp only the indicative one. Everything returns eternally then means that everything is equal and equally without value,
since there is no value without hierarchy and inequality. Reduced to the
sole claim that everything eternally returns equally to the same thing,
eternal recurrence is, once the belief in being is revoked, the only conceivable foundation for equality in general, the only conceivable foundation of logic, of ontological and technical knowledge, in a word, nihilism.
It is thus an essentially incomplete version of eternal recurrence that
we find at the basis of the system of identical cases and that justifies the
identity of cases. However, and we must insist on this, this foundation
could not be recognized as such, in its incompleteness, without a prior
understanding of the imperative proposition, which is the ratio cognoscendi of the everything returns. To understand that is to proceed to the
revaluation of all reactive values. If philosophy has, at least, the task of
founding knowledge, then it could not do so without destroying all reactive values, without turning back against that which it was and to which
it was tied, that is, subordinated. This destruction nevertheless assumes
that the grandeur of what it destroys would not yet have turned into in-
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significance, would not have been totally leveled down, but would remain
recognizable in its very grandeur. I have, from childhood on, pondered
the existence conditions of the wise [Existenz-Bedingungen des Weisen]; and
I do not want to silence my joyous conviction that he has now again become possible in Europeperhaps for only a short time.8 The ultimate
foundation of ontological body and of knowledge is thus accessible only
in and through its destruction, only in and through the creation of a superior body, only in and through that revaluation that bestows on eternal
recurrence its complete meaning. When he asserts that the essence of
the modern power-driven machine is one offshoot of the eternal return
of the same,9 Heidegger is saying essentially the same thing. Although
he will also add to this, that eternal recurrence does not arise completely
from the essence of technology and is therefore perhaps not the thinking
through which metaphysics comes to its end.
We can henceforth return directly to the vision and to Zarathustras
questions to interpret the former and respond to the latter. Decapitating in a single bite the heavy black serpent that threatens to strangle him
(a bite as instantaneous as a blow or as the wink of an eye [Augenblick]),
the young shepherd decides between the recumbent position and the
upright stance, between disgust and laughter. Now, here, disgust and
laughter have no object other than life itself. They are correlative with
two modes of our relationship to life itself, with two types of corporeal
life and evaluations. Disgust is the affect of a defeated life. It is that of a
will to power ordered according to reactive values, of will to power as will
to assimilation and equalization. As Zarathustra explains to his animals,
The great disgust at manit choked me and had crept into my throat:
and what the prophet prophesied: It is all one, nothing is worthwhile,
knowledge chokes.
And he continues:
A long twilight limps in front of me, a mortally weary,
death-intoxicated sadness which speaks with a yawn. The man of whom
you are weary, the little man, recurs eternallythus my sadness yawned
and dragged its feet and could not fall asleep. The human earth became to me a cave, its chest caved in, everything living became to me
human decay and bones and moldering past. My sighs sat upon all the
graves of man and could no longer rise; my sighs and questions croaked
and choked and gnawed and wailed by day and night: Alas, man recurs
eternally! The little man recurs eternally! I had seen them both naked,
the greatest man and the smallest man: all too similar to one another,
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even the greatest all too human! The greatest all too small!that was
my disgust at man! And eternal recurrence even for the smallest! that
was my disgust at all existence!10
Yet this disgust at all existence bears exclusively on the human, all
too human version of it, on the earth of little men; in short, on the
world of ontological knowledge and technology, which has, as its principle, eternal recurrence in its single, indicative mode, reduced to its
dwarf version, which is to say abstracted from every decisive revaluation.
In fact, Zarathustra is not only strangled by disgust for man, but above all
by morality, and it is the second disgust that fundamentally gives rise to
the first. A note contemporary with the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
attests this, confirming the revaluating dimension of the shepherds bite,
the decisive instant. Zarathustra: as long as your morality hung over me,
I breathed like someone asphyxiated. And so I strangled that serpent.
I wanted to live, therefore he had to die.11 The heavy black serpent,
making man into an object of disgust, is the emblem of reactive values,
whether these are Judeo-Christian or ontological values. It is the emblem
of European nihilism, which threatens the body from within because it is
its axiological principle. By deciding to cut off its head, Zarathustra gets
back up, instantaneously, and laughs with a laugh that has never yet rung
out in the world of men, of little men. Corresponding to a life victorious
over nihilism, laughter is the affect of a will to power aligned with active values, on whose basis all of existence is transfigured. By cutting off
the serpents head in a single blow, Zarathustra becomes the thinker of
eternal recurrence and of the overman, the creator of a superior body.
Goal: to reach the overman in an instant.12 To the question, What do
I see in images? we can thus answer: Zarathustra sees his own birth. Is
this possible, and is it not absurd to suppose that whosoevereven were
it Zarathustracould be the spectator of and actor in his own birth? No
doubt it is; yet the birth in question here is that of the thinker to his own
thought, that is to say, a birth for which the thinker could only be, in
principle, a resolute agent, since the serpent cannot be ripped out from
the outside.
Of the four questions that Zarathustra addresses to his listeners,
two have not yet received an answer. One of them asks, Who is it that
must come once again? And the other, Who is the man in whose throat
creeps all that is blackest and heaviest? In formulating these questions,
at the moment when he does so, Zarathustra highlights the authentically
dramatic character of his vision. What is, in fact, the order of the narrative? Zarathustra relates first that he summoned the young shepherd to
bite the serpent that strangled him, whereupon he interrupts his narra-
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tion with his four questions. He then takes it up again, describing both
the way in which the shepherd bit the serpent and the way in which he
got up after having decapitated it. The questions thus intervene before
the decision is taken, but after it has become inevitable. Yet, at that moment, if Zarathustras listeners already know that everything returns eternally, they do not yet know what it is that returns, since Zarathustra is
precisely now attempting to make them understand thison the basis
of the instant. By asking, before the decision is made, Who is it that must
once again come? Zarathustra would have those listening to him grasp
the ipseity of the instant. This means that what must return is a who and
not a what, and Zarathustra would have his audience understand that
eternal recurrence concerns the instant insofar as we are it and, above
all, such as we decide to be that instant. In short, Zarathustra calls us to
the decision. And, in asking, Who is the man in whose throat creeps all
that is heaviest and blackest? Zarathustra attempts, with this fourth and
final question, to make us understand thatwithout the decisive and instantly revaluing coup de dentthe situation of the shepherd lying on the
ground could well be eternally our own. He thereby points to the stakes
of the decision. If the shepherd in whose throat the serpent creeps is
the young Zarathustra, the one in whose throat all that is heaviest and
darkest will creep is none other than the last man. And, when Nietzsche
claims to have created him at the same time as his contrary, the overman,
he is describing the ultimate dramatic structure of the decisive instant.
As long as we take the instant for a pure, temporal form, and not for a
drama, we will not accede to eternal recurrence, which means that we
shall be included in it without being able to decide about it and, consequently, without managing to comprehend it. Immediately after having
posed that fourth and final question, Zarathustra took up the course of
his narrative by way of an adversative, decisive conjunction: the shepherd, however, bit . . . [der Hirt aber biss . . .].13
At the end of this explication of eternal recurrence, its double form
(indicative and imperative), and the revaluating character of the instant,
are we in a position to respond to the question of whether truth is liable to incorporation? Can we determine the conditions of possibility
of a body, superior to the ontological body as also to the Judeo-Christian
one? Can we establish the conditions of possibility of a veridical and active body, which is also to say the conditions of possibility of a world that
would no longer be the product of those reactive values that assure the
enduring reign of technology? Yes, but only after adding the following:
however fleeting it may beand precisely because it is fleetingthe instant is the originary and unique truth. In a note immediately following
the surfacing of the thought of recurrence, in which he endeavors to
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show that pursuing the process that constituted the essence of the species,
science works against every hierarchy and against all individualization (in
other words, onto-logic is the conservative structure of the body), Nietzsche wrote by way of concluding: The species is the more vulgar error,
the individual the subtler error, it comes later on. He struggles for his
existence, for his new taste, for his relatively unique position in regard to
all thingshe holds this as better than the general taste which he holds
in contempt. He wants to rule [herrschen]. But he then discovers that he
is, himself, a variable thing, that his taste is variable; with his subtlety he
divines the secret that there is no individual, that in the smallest instant
he is something other than in the next one, and that his conditions of
existence are those of innumerable individuals: the infinitely small instant
is the highest reality and truth, a lightning image [Blitzbild] from out of
the eternal flow. So he learns: how all knowledge that enjoys rests on the
vulgar error of the species, on the subtler errors of the individual, and
on the most subtle of errors, that of the creative instant.14
As the unique flash or sparkle of a becoming that alone is true,
the instant is the highest truth and reality, that is to say, the least vulgar
of errors, since to name it is already to bestow a minimum of being on
it, and thereby suspend its passing. Consequently, all that is founded
exclusively on this unique originary truth, qua the least error, all that
is founded on the instant will itself be instantaneously averred. And
if the instant may decide all things, everything may, conversely, depend on it. But how can the instant be creative and what can it create?
The response lies in the question itself. The instant is truly creative
when it is truly an instant, and it is truly an instant when, as revaluative, it determines [dcider de] the body and the world. If the body is a
moral phenomenon, and the world a product of our evaluations, then
every radical and instantaneous modification of values instantaneously
creates a new body and a new world. Yet we have just shown (1) that
the instant is the originary truth; (2) that eternal recurrence is the
structure of the decisive instant; (3) that the instant is decisive only
in deciding in favor of active values that, in alone allowing becoming
and its return, alone allow the instant to be truly the instant. Eternal
recurrence is thus the active, originary truth on the basis of which reactive, ontological truth can and must be understood as a falsification.
Nietzsche never recurs to the expression active truth, but he certainly
made the concept possible. If to will the truth is to will to make constant a world in becoming, then the truth is not something that would
be there, that would be to find or to discoverbut something that is
to be created and that gives its name to a process, or still more to a will to
overcome [Willen der berwltigung], which in itself has no end: to in-
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troduce truth as a process in infinitum, an active determination, not as a

becoming-conscious of something that would be firmly and definitively
in itself. It is a word for the Will to power. 15 To this, Nietzsche immediately added, Life is founded on the premise of a belief in something enduring and regularly returning; more powerful is life; vaster
still must be the world estimatable and, as it were, made thing-like
[errathbare, gleichsam seiend gemachte Welt]. Logicization, rationalization,
systematization as lifes auxiliary means.16
From truth as the adequation between logical knowledge and
things ready-made, from reactive truth that relies on beings as given and
rests on the belief in constant being, it is possible, then, to distinguish active truth, which, in willing the eternal recurrence of becoming, creates
this adequation itself by creating the terms among which it is liable to
come about. In the active sense, truth is not the establishment or the assessment of some adequation. It is rather an originary creation or legislation. It is a way of making-constant, a way of being becoming itself. Now,
this no longer proceeds from belief, but from the will to eternal recurrence, which itself does not proceed from weakness, but from strength.
In light of the distinction between reactive and active truth, it becomes
difficult to maintain, as Heidegger does, that Nietzsche modified the essence of adequation without ever ceasing to hold adequation to be the
essence of truth.17 Understood as creating adequation, the truth is no
longer adequation but freedom. No doubt, Nietzsche did not explicitly
define truth as freedom. However, when Zarathustra teaches that willing liberates, and that therein lies the true doctrine of the will and
freedom,18 he is ultimately not saying anything different, sincein the
active and originary sense of a making-consistent by way of eternal recurrencethe truth is another word for will to power. Contrary to the adequation that, as reactive truth, is founded upon fear, the active truth
with which revaluation, as the highest degree of self-determination,19
is strictly alignedis founded upon courage. Truth and courage only
among those who are free. (Truth, a sort of courage.)20 And it is because he
implicitly understands truth as freedom and courage that, after having
qualified the path of freedom as hard, Nietzsche can likewise qualify
truth as hard, and hold the service of truth to be the hardest of all
service.21
In willing my own eternal recurrence, I thereby ensure my own
constancy and that of the world; I make truth possible. The latter is no
longer a means in service to life and the body. It is rather the inverse; the
most powerful corporeal life becomes a means in service of the truth.
Nietzsche described this reversal when, under the title In media vita,
he wrote,
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No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more
desirable and mysterious every yearever since the day when the great
liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the
seeker for knowledge [Experiment der Erkennenden]and not a duty, not
a calamity, not trickery.And knowledge itself: let it be something else
for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or
a diversion, or a form of leisurefor me it is a world of dangers and
victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play.
Life as a means to knowledgewith this principle in ones heart one can
live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows
how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal
about war and victory?22
What is more, to raise life and body to the rank of assistants in

knowledgein other words, to intensify the struggle among the drives
to increase knowledgeis to live in such a way that truth is possible, and
thereby to make it possible that the truth be a task inseparable from the
positing of active values, which permit the return of the instant because
they permit the return of becoming. To will ones own eternal recurrence is thus to will to live according to the values that intensify lifes
power. It is to will that truth exist, and to will to create truth itself. Further, to will according to active values and to will active values is not to
will halfway,23 through reaction or servile adaptation to another will; it
is rather to will in the proper sense of the term: to command. The will
to active truth is thus the truth of the active will: the will to power in its
eternal recurrence. In opposing on multiple occasions the I will to the
I must, Nietzsche ultimately says nothing so very different.24
As the revaluation of reactive values into active values is essential to
the decisive instant whose structure is eternal recurrence, to stand in the
decisive instant by willing its eternal return is ipso facto to effect a revaluation. In reorganizing forces and modifying ideas or values that rule the
drives, this revaluation transforms body and world. The eternal recurrence of the revaluating instant consequently permits the incorporation
of the truth, the creation of a body actively powerful, and the transfiguration of the ontological and technological world. By standing in the
instantand doing so is ultimately to think the thought of thoughts
by thus standing in the decision, the body makes itself true and actively
powerful. True, because the instant is the originary truth, and because
its eternal recurrence cannot fail to eternalize the truth that it is. Actively
powerful, because the values that permit the return of the instant free
the becoming-of-power, while assuring it a constancy other than false and
ontological. Having become true and actively powerful, and as a creator
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of eternal truth, the body can now give rise to world other than the reactive one of ontological knowledge and technology, since, in any case, the
world is relative to our values. However, if every force that returns eternally is active, eternal recurrence must be understood, conversely, as the
very principle of the activity of forces and values. It must be understood
as the principle on whose basis the active force that creates in the midst
of what is accidental25that is, in the midst of a configuration of forces
owing to chancecan be known and recognized and, along with this
active force, the difference between activity and reactivity. Eternal recurrence is thus the ultimate foundation of the difference between values.
And if revaluation is the consequence of eternal recurrence, then this is
because the latter is the principle that institutes active values.
To incorporate the ultimate truth of the flux by willing the eternal
recurrence of the revaluating instant is to ensure ones own constancy. It
is to stand, by and thanks to oneself, without relying passively on anything
else.26 After having cut off the head of the heavy black snake, the young
shepherd who was lying on the ground gets up in a single bound. To put
it another way, the eternal recurrence of the decisive instant grants an
upright stance to that backbone that is the will to power; and if, after having defined lawsor valuesas backbones, Zarathustra sets himself
the task of abrogating morality as the law of laws, thanks to a superior
law,27 this is because eternal recurrence provides a new uprightness to
the spine. What is this new uprightness? Nothing else than a resurrection
of oneself by oneself, a resurrection of the body by and unto itself. Indeed, while eternal recurrence is the return of the decisive instant, it remains that the instants are separated from each other by a great, a long,
an immense year of becoming;28 a year during which the fortuitous,
instantaneous domination formationthe bodythat I am, will invariably become disordered and dissolve in the chaotic becoming of forces.
Consequently, and in the first place: either the great year of becoming
returns and, with it, the body that I am; or indeed it does not return and
neither do I. In other words, if I did not stand in the decisive instant
and to stand means to effect the revaluationthen I would be carried
off in the flux of becoming for having lived in a transient fashion, and
for having grasped myself as something fleeting. Conversely, if I do stand
in the revaluating instant and will its eternal recurrence, thenupright
thanks to myselfI should be eternally revived, not to another life but
to this same life and world, for which I decide in the instant. And it is this
eternal resurrection that will be my mode of life. Nietzsche says nothing
other when, under the impact of the thought of recurrence, he observes,
This doctrine is mild toward those who do not believe in it, it has no
hell and no threats. Whoever does not believe has a fleeting life in his
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consciousness.29 In light of eternal recurrence, the resurrection of the

body must not be understood in the objective sense of the genitive, but
rather in the subjective one. In fact, it is the very occasion of the uprightness and constancy of the body once these are no longer taken in an
ontological and reactive sense and when they cease resting on the belief
in being to become functions of becoming and its truth. Hence, this resurrection that is confused with the ipseity of the active body is the condition of possibility of every other form of resurrection of bodies. Does
Nietzsche himself not intimate as much when, in regard to the man of
knowledge and conscience, he writes: as awkward as a corpse, dead in
life, buried, ensconced: he can no longer stand [stehen], this cowering,
lurking one: how could he everresurrect [auferstehen]!30
Resurrection according to eternal recurrence nevertheless possesses another implication. Indeed, if the ground of constant being has
slipped away under our feet, insofar as ontological knowledge has progressively turned back on and against the vulgar errors that founded it,
the death of God has deprived us still further of any support, any holds.
Some trust in chariots and horses, but we will remember the name of the
Lord our God; they are brought down and fallen: but we are risen and
stand upright, said the Psalmist whom Saint Paul will later echo, when
he declares: thou standest by faith.31 Already in 1871, Nietzsche states,
Christianity is overcome and provides no further foothold [Halt]. And
when, in 1884, he addresses the free spirit to tell him, Whoever lost
That, which you have lost, halts nowhere [macht nirgends Halt], this is
just before giving to the independent ones the following advice: you
must teach yourselves to stand, or you fall over.32 It is clear, then, that,
as a counterweight to the death of God, eternal recurrence must allow
the overman to hold himself upright by himself, to get up and to get up
again, actively to resurrect and not to be passively revived. Nietzsche once
said of eternal recurrence that it should take the place of metaphysics
and religion33and, here, to take the place of does not mean to take
the same place. Eternal recurrence is thus victorious resurrection to the
precise degree that it allows the overman to get up again, to recover, from
the fall into which the death of God has cast man. Are we still standing
on our feet? Are we not continuously falling?34 cried the madman as he
proclaimed the death of the holiest and most powerful. Yet, this resurrection, as a victory over the death of God whose support it counterbalances,
is in no case a victory over death in general. Does that mean, for all that,
that it does not concern death? Not at all. On a number of occasions,
Nietzsche underscored the necessity of rethinking the latter. Death is to
be reinterpreted [umzudeuten],35 he noted, slightly before the emergence
of his great thought. But from whence could this reinterpretation draw
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its source if not from eternal recurrence? Under the title Noon and Eternity, Nietzsche planned a work whose penultimate part was to have been
devoted to the ring of rings, and the last part to a new dying.36 Drawing its principle from eternal recurrence, this new way of dying was to
obey the maxim whereby one must live in such a way as to desire to live
again. In the case of death, what can this imperative really mean if not
that we live in such a way as to be able to die victoriously, from the death
we shall eternally have willed? Death. We must turn the dumb physiological fact into a moral necessity. To live in such a way as to have also and at
the right moment ones will to death.37 In short, if the resurrection according to eternal recurrence is not a victory over death, it makes death into
victory, that is, into a festival of the will. To reflect on eternal recurrence
is thus to come to the point where the highest feast of humanity is procreation and death.38
This interpretation of eternal recurrence calls for one final remark,
and it raises one last problem. That Nietzsche frequently determines
eternal recurrence as a belief does not imply that it might be a belief
like the others. If, generally speaking, to believe is to hold-something-astrue, then eternal recurrenceby ensuring the possibility of every sort of
holding because it allows me to hold myself up without supportcan
and must be defined as a belief, as the belief of beliefs. But, and here
lies the difficulty: does eternal recurrence unfold a resurrectional power
greater than what God exerted on bodies by granting them justification?
Is resurrection according to eternal recurrence that sur-resurrection we
are seeking? As long as we have not examined the question of whether,
and how, eternal recurrence permits the justification of all existence;
as long as we have not determined the essence of justice on the basis of
eternal recurrence, it is clear that we will not be able to answer this final
question.
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The Priestly Revaluation
If eternal recurrence made the revaluation of certain values necessary,

and these values were reactive and preserving, it remains that there are
two kinds of reactive values: ontological values and Judeo-Christian values,
whose shared reactivity authorizes their conjunction and whose conjunction defines European nihilism. However, although it is shared, the reactivity of these different values is not necessarily an equal reactivity. The
moment that God occupies metaphysics to make it his shadow, European
morality could scarcely fail to be more Judeo-Christian than Greek. Philosophy could only become what it was called to be, that is, the servant
of Christian theology, by virtue of the superiority of the values proper to
Christianity over those proper to philosophy itself. God became master
of metaphysics because Judeo-Christian values are more powerful, which
is to say, more powerfully reactive than ontological values. Since, in all
things, only the superior degrees matter, the revaluation that shapes the
content of eternal recurrence must be fundamentally relative to JudeoChristian values.
Nietzsche clearly understood it this way, and a few simple philological considerations will suffice to confirm this. At the end of the summer of 1885, once the last part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was finished,
Nietzsche developed the project for a work entitled The Will to Power. Its
subtitles would be, in succession: Attempt at a new exposition of events [einer
neuen Auslegung alles Geschehens]1 and Attempt at a new exposition of the world
[einer neuen Welt-Auslegung].2 And starting from the summer of 1886, it becomes Attempt at a revaluation of all values [einer Umwerthung aller Werthe].3
The final outline of The Will to Power carries the date 26 August 1888.4
Starting in September of the same year, the work to come takes as its title
Revaluation of All Values.5 The two most detailed sketches6 are organized
into four books: The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity
is the title of the first book, Dionysus: Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence being the last. The middle books will change positions from one
sketch to the next, although they preserve a common content: a critique
of philosophy as nihilism and a critique of morality as the most fatal form
of ignorance. If the critique of Christianity is placed at the opening of
the work, and the philosophy of eternal recurrence at the end, this is
because the former is at the foundation of the latter, and the axiological
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conflict that revaluation implies opposes Dionysus to the Crucified, and

eternal recurrence to the Cross.
There is more to be noted. At the moment when he publishes The
Antichrist, Nietzsche modified the general organization of his project. In
fact, we find two title pages in the copy of the work intended for press.
One page reads: The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity, First
Book: the Revaluation of All Values; the later title page reads: The Antichrist: [Revaluation of All Values], Imprecation Against Christianity.7 It
is because he ultimately assimilated a part to the whole, The Antichrist to
the Revaluation . . . that Nietzsche could declare in a letter to Paul Deussen on 26 November 1888: My Revaluation of All Values, whose principal
title was THE ANTICHRIST is finished.8 Should we then consider The Antichrist as the work to which the multiple projectssuccessively entitled
The Will to Power and Revaluation of All Valuesled? Without the slightest
doubt, and Nietzsche himself attested to this. From Turin on 22 December 1888, he confided to Peter Gast: Most curious! Since four weeks, I
understand my own writingsmore, I appreciate them. Seriously, I never
knew what their range was; apart from Zarathustra, I would be lying if I
said that they mystified me. Its the mother with her child: perhaps she
loves him, but in perfect ignorance of what the child is.Now, I am absolutely convinced that everything has worked out, from the beginning,it
is all one and desires unity.9 If it was only after having assimilated The
Antichrist to the Revaluation that Nietzsche was himself able to grasp the
unity of his work in its entirety, then the destruction of Christianity must
be the cornerstone.
The title of The Antichrist refers to him who, according to Saint
Paul, is raised above all that is called God or divine worship so as to take
a place in the temple of God; and the temple of God is the body. The
work opens with a proclamation of identity: Let us look each other
in the face. We are Hyperboreans.10 Nevertheless, Nietzsche could not
claim the name of that people whom the Greek gods called happy, felicitous,11 without having himself acceded to it. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of
thousands of years.12 What is this happiness whose discovery allows us to
get out of the labyrinth? Does it not reside in the establishment of a new
table of goods and ills, in a new determination of what is good, what bad,
and finally of happiness itself? No doubt, and from the outset Nietzsche
takes care to specify this. What is good?All that heightens in man the
feeling of power, the will to power, power itself [die Macht selbst]. What is
bad?All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?The feeling that power increasesthat a resistance is overcome.13 The discovery
of the will to power thus not only renews the essence of happiness and,
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correlatively, that of man, it allows us by the same token to exit the labyrinth, that is, to understand nihilism. How and why is this so? The will to
power is life inasmuch as it posits active or reactive values. Need we recall,
however, that if active values give rise to the intensification of life, reactive
values can only give rise to its mere preservation; and from preservation
to decline the path is certain. I consider life itself instinct for growth,
for continuation, for accumulation of forces [Hufung von Krften], for
power: where will to power is lacking, there is decline [Niedergang]. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind
that these are values of decline, nihilistic values, which hold sway under
the holiest names.14 And, if the Revaluation of All Values comes ultimately
to be confused with The Antichrist, this is because nihilist values find in
Christianity their highest expression, their most radical and in that sense,
most essential, expression. It is thus not only by virtue of the violence
Nietzsche evinces therein, but by virtue of what he is attacking that The
Antichrist is indeed, as Heidegger put it, the frightful book.15
Why then is Christianity identified with nihilism, or what is this
Christianity such that the eternal recurrence of the re-valuating instant
could allow us to overcome it? To answer these questions is to pose the
problem of the origin of Christianity, a problem Nietzsche will attempt
to solve by observing two principles: Christianity is not the opposite of
Judaism but its consequence, and Christianity is founded on the falsification of the gospel proclaimed by Jesus. Let us begin by revisiting the history of Israel. Although we must first specify the nature of our task: here,
the tradition of Israel concerns us only and exclusively to the degree
that, with Christianity as its intermediary, it invested philosophy. That is,
only and exclusively insofar as the tradition of Israel can be understood,
rightly or wrongly, as the old covenant, since it is exclusively in this way
that it became philosophically relevant. The question of whether the Talmud is more germane to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible than the
New Testament is not part of the philosophical horizon of this work, and
it goes without saying that this determines neither the answer to, nor the
importance of, the question before us. As Nietzsche writes,
The Jews are the most remarkable people [Volk] of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred,
with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price: this price was
the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire
inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves counter to
all those conditions under which a people was previously able to live,
was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis to natural
conditionsthey inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history,
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psychology one after the other in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values [widerspruch zu deren Natur-Werthen]. We
encounter the same phenomenon again and in unutterably vaster proportions, although only as a copy:The Christian Church, in contrast
to the people of saints, renounces all claim to originality. For precisely
this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in world history [das verhngnissvollste Volk der Weltgeschichte]; their after-effect has falsified mankind to such an extent that today the Christian is able to feel anti-Jewish
without realizing he is the ultimate consequence of the Jews.16
What is the meaning of this double thesis according to which the

Jews constitute the most remarkable and the most fatal people of all of
universal history? The Jewish people are remarkable first by virtue of
their vitality. Starting in 1870, Nietzsche notes that the Jew hangs on to
life with prodigious tenacity; that the Jewish religion has an unspeakable horror of death, that well-being on earth is the tendency of Jewish
religion, or again: the most terrible threat known to the Jew of the Old
Testament is not eternal torment but complete annihilation. An unconditional immortality is unknown to the Old Testament. Non-being is the
supreme evil.17 Ten years later, he writes in Daybreak that the Jews form
a people firmly attached to lifelike the Greeks and more than the
Greeks and, in 1888, that the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest
vital energy.18 From whence come the vitality and tenacity of Israel if not
from its faith? For this faith, in fact, life depends entirely on the word
of God: for you the Law is not a vain word but your life.19 And death,
which makes one impure,20 is a separation from God. To hold fast to life
is thus to hold fast to God, to praise him: For Sheol does not glorify
thee, death does not celebrate thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy faithfulness. The living, the living, he shall praise thee
as I this day.21 In a unique sense, Yahweh is thus the God of life and, if
death is the most terrible of threats, this is because it separates us from
his remembrance and his hand.22
The vitality of the Jewish people is not the sole reason for its greatness, which also resides in its moral genius, in the incomparable power
of its morality. There too Nietzsche proves consistent. In 1870, he characterizes the Jewish people by an incorporated moral rigor [Sittlichkeitsrigorositt verkrpert].23 Several years later, after having denounced
the propagation of that mean-spirited literature that aims to lead the
Jews to the slaughter bench as scapegoats [als Sndenbcke aller mglichen
ffentlichen und inneren Uebelstnde zur Schlachtbank zu fhren] for all that
can go wrong in public and private affairs, he speaks of them as the
people who, among all the others, albeit not without our own fault, has
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had the most painful history and to whom we are indebted for the most
noble man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book
and the most influential morality in the world.24 Subsequently, and in
manifold ways, Nietzsche does not cease emphasizing how Jewish our
European morality is. In our schools, he notes in 187980, Jewish history is presented as holy history: Abraham is more to us than any person
out of Greek or German history: and what we experience in reading the
Psalms of David is as different from what is elicited by the songs of Pindar
or Petrarch as the native land from the foreign.25 In 1880 he confides,
I do not know how to explain how it is that the Jews, from among all
the nations, would have carried moral sublimity so high, in theory as in
practice. Only they arrived at a Jesus of Nazareth; only they at a holy god,
only they at sin against him. Together with the prophet, the redeemer
those are their inventions.26 In The Gay Science he asserts that the Jews
are the moral genius among the nations, adding shortly thereafter that
the entire moral turn of mind is Jewish. He writes, in Beyond Good and
Evil, that Europe owes to the Jews the grand style in morality.27 It is
thus clear that the guiding values of European thought, European nihilism, are not Greek but Jewish, Judeo-Christian, and consequently that
Nietzsches concept of morality did not originate exclusively from Greek
onto-logic.
The distinction of the Jewish people is also aesthetic in nature. The
grand style does not only characterize morality, but also Old Testament
poetry. It should be emphasized straightaway that Nietzsche always refused to make the Old Testament into the shadow of the future,28 the
cipher or figure of Christian revelation. What can one expect from the
effects of a religion which in the centuries of its foundation perpetrated
that unheard-of philological buffoonery [unerhrte philologische Possenspiel] concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old
Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained
nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true
people of Israel?29 That being said, let us return to the poetic grandeur
of Israel, which Nietzsche continually emphasized. In 1880, never was
wrath unfolded to the point of such a dark majesty, and with such a
wealth of sublime nuances, as with the Jews! What is an angry Zeus before
an angry Yahweh!30 Five years later, he writes: the solemnity of death and
a kind of sanctification of suffering on earth have never, up to now, been
presented in so beautiful a way as by certain Jews of the Old Testament:
even the Greeks could have gone to their school!31 Moreover, one of the
paragraphs of Beyond Good and Evil, which prepares the one devoted to
eternal recurrence, begins in this way: In the Jewish Old Testament,
the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches
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in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it, and it continues, a few lines below, asserting that the taste
for the Old Testament is a touchstone for great and small. 32
What does the superiority of Hebraic poetry over Greek poetry
mean? Evidently, the aesthetic grandeur of the Jewish people could not
be understood independently from its moral grandeur. But what do the
two have in common? The one and the other share a grand style. In the
spring of 1884, Nietzsche notes: Connection of the aesthetic and the
moral: the grand style wants to be unique, a strong fundamental Will
and, above all, dislikes dispersion.33 In other words, Israels morality and
aesthetics are in a grand style because the same concentration, the same
will to power, and the same God are expressed in the one as in the other.
Is this to say that Israels aestheticssupposing that one may speak here
of aestheticsdepends essentially on its experience of God? Without
the slightest doubt. Israel not only praised the beauty of the world and
its creatures, but above that, of God and of his revelations. If the theophanic descriptions of the Old Testament amount to the privileged site
of the Hebraic experience, or trial, of the beautiful,34 then the vitality,
morality, and beauty of Israel draw their origin and take their power from
Israels experience of God.
The singularity of this experience, from which comes ultimately the
incomparable grandeur of Israel, as well as its nobility, is as much due
to its power as to the force required to recognize and bear it. The tension between the God, thought to be ever purer and more distantand
humanity, thought to be ever more sinfulis one of humanitys great
trials-by-force [Kraftversuche der Menschheit]. Gods love for the sinner is
miraculous. Why did the Greeks know no such tension between divine
beauty and human ugliness? Or between divine knowledge and human
ignorance? The mediating bridges between two such chasms would be
new creations [Neuschpfungen], which were not yet there (angel? Revelation? Son of God?).35
If the power of Israel surpasses that of the Greeks, it is because the
Jews were able to live in and by that tension and, to measure the strength
thus required, it is enough to recall that ancient Israel never made the
resurrection of the dead into an article of faith. One year later, Nietzsche
returned to the origin of Christianity starting from the same tension and
chasm. After having noted that all in all, the morality of Europe is Jewish
and that a profound strangeness still separates us from the Greeks, he
added: But, as much as the Jews have held man in contempt, and experienced him as at once mean and contemptible, so they formed their God as
purer and more distant than any other people had done: they nourished
him with all the height and all the goodness that grew in the human
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breastand this most unusual of sacrifices progressively let a chasm arise

between God and man, which would be experienced as terrible. It was
only for the Jews that it was possible, and even necessary, that a being
[ein Wesen] should cast himself into this chasmand, what is more, it
had to be the God who did this, from whom one alone believed and expected something great: the same man who felt himself to be a mediator
had first to feel himself to be God to impose this mediating task on himself.36
Thus understoodhas it ever been otherwise?Christianity could not
fail to signify the weakening of Israel, and from this perspective every
Christian is a tired Jew.
But why is the most remarkable of peoples also the most fatal? To
this question, Nietzsche only ever gave one response, whose meaning
grew progressively more radical. In 1876, he noted: That the Jews are
the worst people of the earth agrees fully with the fact that it is precisely
from among Jews that the Christian doctrine of the complete sinfulness and abjection [Verwerflichkeit] of man arosea doctrine which they
themselves rejected.37 In Daybreak, he depicts the Jews as the best haters
there have ever been, and in The Gay Science he attributes the discovery
of sin to them.38
Nevertheless, the clearest text on this question dates from 1887,
and it is so important that we shall cite it integrally.
The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise
the most ingenious haters [geistreichsten Hasser]: other kinds of spirit
[Geist] hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit
of priestly vengefulness. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the powerless have introduced into
itlet us take at once the most notable example. All that has been
done on earth against the noble, the powerful, the masters, the
rulers, fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done
against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than
a radical revaluation of their enemies values [radicale Umwerthung von
deren Werthen], that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this
alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the
most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who, with
awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation
(good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and
to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying the wretched alone are
the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering,
deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessed-
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ness is for them aloneand you, the powerful and the noble, are on
the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless
to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed,
and damned! . . . One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation . . .
In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative
provided by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations
of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, 195)that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt
in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind
it and which we no longer see because ithas been victorious . . . 39
We now know why Nietzsche considers the Jews the most fatal of
peoples. It was they who proceeded to the radical revaluation of aristocratic values into servile ones and, unleashing the most fundamental of
wars, lie at the origin of Christianity. This assessment immediately calls
for three remarks. (1) The Jewish people is the most remarkable because
it is the most fatal, and it is the most fatal because it is the most remarkable of peoples. The two adjectives are absolutely indissociable. If the
revaluation of aristocratic values is an act of spiritual vengeance whose
inner drive is hatred, and hatred is always clear-sighted, then the Jews,
which is to say their priests, are remarkable for having introduced spirit
into history, but fatal for having founded that spirit on hatred and vengeance, on reactivity. Without the spirit which it owes to the Jews, Europe
would have remained that little peninsula protruding [out of] ancient
Asia,40 and technology would not have had the possibility of unfurling
its reign. In 1880 Nietzsche noted that thanks to its Jewish characteristics, Christianity gave to Europeans that Jewish malaise toward oneself,
the idea that inner disquiet is the human norm: whence the Europeans
flight before himself, whence that unheard-of activity; he sticks his head
and hands into everything.41
The problem that arises, then, is the following: how to inherit the
spirit without inheriting the hatred; how to bring about a new transvaluation that would not be a new vengeance? (2) If the Jewish priestly revaluation can henceforth be described, this is because it has come into our
field of vision, and because the death of God calls for other values. The
Jewish revaluation, as the origin of Christianity, is thus the target and the
condition of possibility of Nietzsches revaluation which, beyond instituting new active values, aims to substitute a new justice for that of God
revealed in Christ. (3) However essentially ambiguous as it might be, Nietzsches interpretation of the history of Israel has nothing anti-Semitic
to it. While it is often difficultalthough difficulty never signified impossibilityto dissociate a critique of Judaism from anti-Semitism, Nietzsche
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always took care to do so. We note in passing that he understood racial

struggles as a consequence of the madness of nationalities.42 He stigmatizes the baseness of the persecution of the Jews, anti-Jewish stupidity, and qualifies anti-Semites as rabble [Gesindel] belonging to the
swamp43 of European culture. Moreover, not only did Nietzsche take up
the maxim never to frequent anyone participating in the mendacious
racialist fraud, he further took him who hates or despises foreign blood
for a sort of human protoplasm that is not yet an individual.44 There is
thus no doubt that, on the one hand, anti-Semitism belongs to what Nietzsches revaluation sets about to destroyI wage a pitiless war against
anti-Semitism45and, on the other hand, once Christianity is annihilated, one will be more just [gerechter werden] toward the Jews; and this,
even as the creators of Christianity and of the highest moral pathos that
ever was.46 In other words, as long as Christianity, and the philosophy
that was subject to it, are not surmounted, it will be impossible to do
justice to the tradition of Israel such as the Jews themselves understood
it. Consequently and above all, it will be impossible to give rise, in that
event, to other possibilities.
How and why did the Jews effect the first revaluation of values?
At what moment in their historythat is, in their relationship to God
(since Israel only ever spoke of the one in the shadow of the events of
the other)did the Jews find themselves placed before the question of
being and non-being? To what situation of distress do the Jews owe
their instinct of self-preservation?47 And, how did a yes-saying Semitic religion that comes from the dominant classes, and from which arise the
oldest texts of the Old Testament, give way to a Semitic religion that
says no, comes from the oppressed classes,48 and finds its fulfillment in the
New Testament?
By distinguishing layers from significantly different epochs in the
Old Testament itself, Nietzsche is tacitly referring to the Prolegomena zur
Geschichte Israls [Prolegomena to the History of Israel] by Julius Wellhausen.49
In that workwhich marked a decisive turning point in Old Testament
studies and which Nietzsche acquired when it came out in 1883,50 only to
read it at the beginning of 1888Wellhausen proposes a reconstruction
of the history of Israel, traces of which can be clearly found in sections of
The Antichrist devoted to the Jewish people.51 Wellhausens project rests
on the hypothesis that the Pentateuch (or, more precisely, the Hexateuch, or the Pentateuch expanded to include the Book of Joshua) issues from three original documents of quite different natures. The first
document is the Jahvist, whose redaction goes back to the ninth or eighth
centuries b.c.e. The Jahvist assembles texts originating from two sources:
the Jahvist one, so named because in the story of creation recounted
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therein God is designated by the name Yahwehand from the Elohist

source, which receives its name because in the story of creation to which
it gave rise, God is denoted by the common noun Elohim. The second
document is constituted by Deuteronomy and dates from the seventh
century. Finally, the third and last document is the priestly Code, on the
basis of which the first two were recast in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah
in the fifth and fourth centuries, during and after Exile. Having thus
attained its canonic form, the Torah was promulgated and became the
cornerstone of a new phenomenon, Judaism, which, precisely by virtue
of this innovation, does not cover the entire tradition of Israel. The documentary hypothesis then led Wellhausen to divide the history of the religion of Israel into three periods. The first period, to which the Jahvist
documents bear witness, is that of the Monarchy. The kingdom of God
merges with that of David and Yahweh is a national, even a warrior god.
The second period, to which Deuteronomy corresponds, and which extends from the division of the kingdom of David to the fall of Jerusalem
in 587 b.c.e., is marked by the reign of Josiah. Attempting to restore the
royal house, the latter reformed the cult, centralizing it to the benefit
of the Jerusalemite clergy. The third and final period, whose charter, as
it were, is the priestly Code, is that of the Exile and Mosaic theocracy,
whose principle is the Law.
Whatever were the many critiques leveled against it, this reconstruction of the religious history of Israel established once and for all that the
Law is a late phenomenon, whose appearance accompanies the political
disappearance of Israel. Consequently, it is thereby established that Moses could not have been its sole author. The situation of distress that
placed the Jews before the question of being or non-beingto which
they responded by preferring being at any price, that is, by introducing
preserving or reactive values [valeurs conservatoires ou ractives]is therefore that in which Israel found itself following the destruction of the
Temple and the armed capture of Jerusalem by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. The Jewish revaluation thus coincides with the birth of Judaism.
In other words, it merges with the constitution of that Law which, according to Saint Paul, Christ came to fulfill.
To grasp how the Law became the center and principle of unity
of the Old Testament, we must clearly begin from the latter. According to the Hebraic decree or canon, the Law is the title of the Pentateuch.52 It thus becomes a question of determining the reasons why
the Pentateuch, itself presented as a narrative into which multiple laws
were inserted, could finally have been assimilated to the Law or, stated
otherwise, how a set of laws, each differing from the others in their formulation, provenance, date, and content, could end by taking on an
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absolute meaning.53 If, in a general fashion, laws always presuppose a

determinate social order, on whose basis and for the sake of which they
were established and come into force, what then is the order underlying
the totality of Vetero-testamentary laws? There can be no single answer
to this question, since the history of Israel and its laws extends across several centuries. What then is the social or sacral institution that, initially,
conferred meaning and authority on the multiplicity of laws collected in
the Old Testament?
Unlike much of the laws of the Middle East, this institution is not
the monarchy. The Vetero-testamentary laws are not promulgated by a
legislating monarch. While many of the laws effectively date from the
age of the monarchy, it remains that the Old Testament never makes the
slightest reference to a royal or sovereign legislation.54 For Israel, kingship . . . appears . . . to have been an institution not unconditioned or
based simply on itself, but essentially subject to the will of God, as this revealed itself in the prophets word, and to subsequent acknowledgement
by the elders of the clans.55
Once the Decalogue acquires force of law through being introduced by the words, I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,56 it is clear that the Old
Testament laws concern the community whose exclusive god is Yahweh.
Stated otherwise, the community to which the Vetero-testamentary laws
are relative, and which bears the name Israel, is determined by its tie to
Yahweh, its separation from the Canaanites on whose land it settled
after having received the promise and departed from Egypt.57 Now, the
only historical phenomenon that corresponds to these attributions is the
league of twelve tribes, grouped around a single cult, whose center is the
Ark of Yahweh. This sacred institution was not abolished by the royalty
which, on the contrary, presupposed it.58 If the temple David constructed
in Jerusalem became Israels central sanctuary, this was solely because the
Ark was transferred to it. The confederation of the twelve tribes is thus at
the source of the Old Testament laws. But do these not claim a divine origin, according to the tradition? To be sure, and fairly, since the relationship between Yahweh and the twelve tribes goes back to the Covenant by
which Yahweh became the god of Israel, and Israel the people of Yahweh.
The Sinaitic tradition in its entirety considers this Covenant as the historical foundation of the confederation of the tribes. This does not mean
that all the laws were promulgated at the same time, but rather that all of
them derive their meaning from the Covenant. In other words, the laws
must be understood initially as the clauses and stipulations of the Covenant (or its renewals), and only the sacred confederation of the twelve
tribesfounded on the Covenantconfers authority on those laws.59
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What then was the meaning for Israel of the events that led up to
the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem? If God is the lord of history,
then that disaster should signify nothing less than the end of the Covenant, whose dissolution the prophets had already long foretold.60 And
once the Covenant was broken, the laws became null and void, or their
authority at least could no longer be founded on a reinstated covenant,
much less on the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah and Ezekiel in
their time.61 Initially, hoping for the reconstruction of the Temple and
the return of the exiles to Jerusalem, Israel continued to observe those
of its laws that could still be kept, under the circumstances. It is for this
reason that respect for the Sabbath and circumcision took on a particular
significance, bearing the weight of the Covenant and ensuring separation from the nations.62 In other words, expectations concerning a turnabout in the situation and the reestablishment of the earlier powers supported the authority of the laws for a time.63 Later, however, it became
obvious that the old order was abolished forever. And while Cyrus, having
become the ruler of Babylon in 538 b.c.e., ordered the reconstruction
of the Temple of Jerusalem, the cult took up again on the sole basis of
the traditionwhich is to say, based on the oblivion of the origins, since
no historic event warranted any conclusions about the renewal of the
Covenant. Thus cut off from what had been the source of their authority, the laws were first prorogated [proroges] only to acquire thereafter
an unconditional validity. In fact, on the initiative of the Persian government, the priest Ezra entered the province of Jerusalem and, to ensure
enduring peace and order, proclaimed that the Jerusalemite community
would henceforth be ruled by the law of God.64
Ezras mission realized the integral disruption of the historic and
theological situation of Israel. Whereas it was originally the relationship
of God and man depicted as a covenant which had constituted the ancient sacral confederacy of the tribes, and whereas it had been the presence of this institution which had provided the necessary prerequisite
for the validation of the old laws, it was now the acknowledgement and
observance of the law by individuals which constituted the community
for whoever undertook to keep the law joined the community; and the
presence of this community appeared to be a sign that the covenant relationship between God and people still existed.65 This new evaluation,66
this reversal of values, immediately had several consequences. Emphasis
was no longer placed on the activity of God but on the behavior of men;
collective responsibility gave way all the more readily to individual responsibility as faithfulness to the Law sufficed to assemble into one and
the same community all those whom events had separated and dispersed.
In addition, on the occasion of this reversal in the founding relationship
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between laws and covenant, the fiction gained ground that, in this form
adopted by the Law, the post-exilic community with its diaspora had become the successor of ancient Israel.67 Notwithstanding the refutation
of Gods reign over history, and in spite of the pre-Exilic prophecy whose
inspiration was God himself, the Jews allowed themselves to believe that
the Covenant had not been truly broken.
In continuing to serve as the ground, albeit at the cost of fictionalization, for the perennity of the Covenantor, as Nietzsche put it,
preferring being and preservation at all costsIsrael gradually ceased
awaiting its political restoration. Henceforth, the Law became an absolute entity, valid without respect to the precedent, time, or history; based
on itself, binding simply because it existed as law, because it was of divine
origin and authority.68 Now, this absolutization of the Law, diversely attested by the later Old Testament writings,69 is at once an abstraction and
a universalization. It is an abstraction because the Law would never
have become the exclusive site for the relationship to God had the laws
not ceased, earlier on, to determine the acts that Israel could perform
within the confines of its exclusive relationship to God as instituted by
the Covenant. It is a universalization because once dissociated from the
Covenant between Yahweh and Israel, the Law no longer addressed exclusively a specific historic community. In this regard, the constitution of
the Law as an absolute magnitude implies that the god of the post-Exilic
community could by right become the god of all nations and, consequently, of all those nations under whose domination the community
lived. It is thus that Cyrus II, the Achaemenid, became the shepherd
and the anointed of Yahweh.70
The absolutization of the Law modified the nature of God more
profoundly still. As long as the Covenant remained in force, obeying its
laws meant responding to the divine initiative or origin from which the
Covenant had come. Here, God is active. However, once the Covenant
is broken, God, after having revealed the Law, really had nothing else
to do but react to the behavior of man according to the standard laid
down by the Law.71 The absolutization of the Law is thus, at the least,
the becoming-reactive of God. But what form should this divine reaction take if not that of punishment and recompense, that is, if not that
of retribution? The correlation between the Law and retribution in fact
assumes a situation entirely different from that instituted by the Covenant. Before the latter had become null and void, observance of the Law
gave rise neither to gratification nor recompense, while its transgression
always called for punishment.72
The Jewish revaluation, whose history we have briefly sketched
here, is thus completed by a radical transmutation of the meaning of
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justice. Originally, Gods justice was none other than his fidelity to the
Covenant. In the Song of Deborah, which is probably the oldest text of
the Old Testament, the victory of the tribes of Israel over the Canaanites is said to be a vindication of Yahweh.73 Justice was consequently a
function of divine power. Had it not been so, then at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, the House of Israel could never have said that
the way of the Lord is not just [Der Herr handelt nicht recht].74 And never
could Yahwehupon recounting the history of Israels apostasieshave
made, in the same period, that singular claim according to which divine
justice, no longer manifest as a power of life, had come to show itself
as a power of annihilation. I gave them statutes that were not good,
and judgments whereby they could not live.75 After Exile, following the
defeat of Israel and the end of the Covenant, Gods justice became, inversely, a function of the Law76 and, as retributive, it became as reactive
as God himself.
Let us return directly to Nietzsches interpretation of the history of
Israel, which is not founded on the work of Julius Wellhausen, but on the
unique project of revaluation. For it is in function of the latter that Nietzsche will use Wellhausens work. While appealing to a different historical
reconstruction than the one we just followed, Nietzsche arrives already
at the same conclusion in The Antichrist.
Originally, above all in the period of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in a
correct [richtigen], that is to say natural, relationship to all things. Their
Yahweh was the expression of their consciousness of power [Macht
Bewusstseins], of their delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves:
in him they anticipated victory and salvation, with him they trusted
that nature would provide what the people neededabove all rain.
Yahweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice [Gott der
Gerechtigkeit]: the logic of every nation that is in power and has a good
conscience about it.77
But if Yahweh and his justice first expressed Israels will to power,
then what happened when Israel was reduced to powerlessness and all
hope of restoration disappeared?
The old God could no longer do what he formerly could. One should
have let him go. What happened? One altered the conception [Begriff ]
of him: at this price one retained him.Yahweh the God of justice
no longer at one with Israel an expression of national self-confidence
[Volks-selbstgefhls]: Now only a God bound by conditions. The new
conception of Him becomes an instrument in the hands of priestly
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agitators, who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for sin.78
Moreover, in the margin of the last chapter of Wellhausens work,

Nietzsche noted somewhat earlier: One had the choice to give ones
old God up or to make something else out of him. This is what Elijah and Amos did, for example: they cut the tie or, more precisely,
the unity between the people and God; they not only separated but
raised one side up and thrust the other side down: they conceived a
new relationship between the two parts, a relationship of reconciliation
[Vershnungsverhltniss]. Yahweh was up until then Israels god and
consequently a god of justice: now he was first and foremost the god of
justice and secondarily the god of Israel. The Torah of Yahweh, which
originally, like all His dealings, fell under the category of divine aid,
especially in the doing of justice, of divine guidance in the solution
of difficult questions, was now conceived of as incorporating the demands on the fulfillment of which His attitude towards Israel entirely
depended.79
The inversion of the relations between Covenant, i.e., power, and
justice, implies returning against oneself ones will to power. Indeed,
if God is a culminating moment and an apex of power, the supreme
power, even the maximal state, or again a point in the development of
the will to power 80then the subordination of the latter to legal justice
forecloses any intensification. One poetic sketch from the summer of
1888 describes this situation clearly: As no new voice spoke, you made
from old words a law: where life stiffens a law towers up.81 Now, a will to
power that cannot grow because it has stiffened is a will to power that
negates itself, a will to power turned back against itself: corrupted. This
corruption of the will to power entails an entire series of reversals. Happiness and unhappiness are no longer coordinated with the growth or
decline of power, they repay or sanction obedience to and disobedience
of Gods Law, whose trustees are the priests. At this point, the natural
values that allowed for the intensification of power are inverted, and morality no longer the expression of the conditions under which a nation
lives and grows, no longer a nations deepest instinct of life, but become
abstract, [it] becomes the antithesis of life.82 The abstraction of morality, the raising of the moral law to the rank of a tribunal of life thus has
as condition of possibility a life that loses its life. Abstract, i.e., ultimately
ahistorical, morality can only oppose itself now to life qua active will to
power. Consequently (and conversely), the eternal return of the decisive
instant and of becoming will not fail to effect the revaluation of this exclusively preserving morality.
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The corruption of God and moralityand corruption should always

be understood relative to the definition of nature as will to poweris
prolonged by that of Israels history as the history of the manifestations
of God to his people.
The concept of God falsified; the concept of morality falsified:the
Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The entire history of Israel was
useless: away with it!These priests perpetrated that miracle of falsification the documentation of which lies before us in a good part of
the Bible: with unparalleled disdain of every tradition, every historical
reality, they translated their own national past [Volks-Vergangenheit] into
religious terms, that is to say they made of it a stupid salvation-mechanism
[stupiden Heils-Mechanismus] of guilt towards Yahweh and punishment,
piety towards Yahweh and reward.83
What biblical books bear the mark of this falsification? They are
those that, on the basis of the work of Martin Noth, we call the Deuteronomistic historiography.84 This work, composed after the fall of Jerusalem, seeks to understand Israels ruin, and set forth the meaning of its
history. According to its author, God was recognizably at work in this
history, continuously meeting the accelerating moral decline with warnings and punishments and, finally, when these proved fruitless, with total
annihilation. The Deuteronomist, then, perceives a just divine retribution in the history of the people, though not so much (as yet) in the fate
of the individual.85 Yet, this apostasy is always relative to the Law, and of
that Law the Deuteronomist retains above all the demand for a single
sanctuary and everything concerning the cult of the other gods. Writing after the discovery of the book of the Lawduring the restoration
work on the Temple begun under the reign of Josiahthe Deuteronomist, who tells the story of that discovery,86 has centered his history [of
Israel] on the theme of worship of God as required by the law, or defined
in a strict, rather narrow sense; for he is interested not so much in the
development of possible forms of worship of God as in the various possible forms of deviation from this worship which could be construed as
apostasy as how these were realized in history. Hence, the law is needed
not in a positive role to prescribe the forms of worship . . . but rather to
prohibit the forms of worship which were wrong; this was in fact one of
the Deuteronomists main concerns.87 Moreover, even though the Deuteronomist might not be a priest himself, he takes the Law as the norm
for relations between the people and God, or the criterion on the basis
of which the history of Israel must be understood and judged. No doubt,
the law the Deuteronomist is discussing has not yet taken on its definitive
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and ahistorical meaning. However, in considering the history of Israel as

definitively past, the Deuteronomist contributes indirectly to the Laws
absolutization, and to the qualification of justice as retribution.
This corrupting of God, morality, and history has as its consequence
the gathering of the many dimensions of life under the one law. And so
from now on all things of life are so ordered, then the priest is everywhere
indispensable.88 But why is this so and what should we understand here
by the noun priest? As trustee, guarantor, and interpreter of the Law,
the priest is first he who sets down the rules of behavior that flow from
it. But further, and above all, the priest is that type of man on whom the
corrupting of natural values confers a new power. How is this possible
and in what does the novelty of this power consist, since it is not exclusively reserved to those who perform a sacred ministry, since again in
virtually all nations, the philosopher is only the further development of
the priestly type?89 To this question Nietzsche will respond by explaining
the modus operandi of the Jewish revaluation.
For one must grasp this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, administration of justice, marriage, tending of the sick and
poor), every requirement presented by the instinct for life, in short
everything valuable in itself, becomes utterly valueless, inimical to value
through the parasitism of the priest (or the moral world-order): a
sanction is subsequently requireda value-bestowing power [werthverleihende Macht] is needed which denies the natural quality in these
things and only by doing so is able to create a value . . . The priest devalues, dissanctifies nature: it is only at the price of this that he exists at
all.Disobedience of God, that is to say of the priest, of the Law, now
acquires the name sin; the means of becoming reconciled again with
God are, as is only to be expected, means by which subjection to the
priest is only more thoroughly guaranteed.90
What does the Jewish priest do? By raising the Law over the Covenant from which Israel derived all its life and power, the priest subordinates these to the Law, which is foreign to them since, invariable and absolute, the Law knows no becoming. Once the value of life is abstracted
from life itself, the latter cannot but find itself devalued. Nevertheless,
what could such devaluation really mean, if values are the very conditions of life? It means nothing other than a life whose values are negative;
nothing other than a life that negates life. Howeverand this is the most
important pointthe priest could never devalue or contravene a life
[that evaluates] through us when we establish values91 unless he created
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another value, or established a new law or a new sanction.92 Such is his

grandeur; the Jewish priest is thus the first creator of value qua value,
and that is why the Jews present the classic example of the invention
of new tables of value.93
But how shall we characterize these new Jewish values and what was
the upshot of this creation? In a note that echoes the preceding passage
from The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes:
We should reflect on the damage done to all human institutions in the
case where a higher sphere both divine and beyond is posited and alone
sanctions those institutions. In becoming habituated to seeing value
in this sanction (in marriage, for example), one has reduced its natural
dignity, and in certain circumstances one has denied it . . . nature is
spitefully judged to the degree that one has honored the anti-nature
of a god. Nature henceforth amounts to something contemptible,
bad. . . . The fatality of a belief in the reality of the highest moral
qualities as GOD: thereby all real values were denied and understood
fundamentally as non-values [Unwerthe]. Thus it was that the antinatural ascended to the throne. With an inexorable logic, one arrived at
the absolute requirement of the negation of nature.94
The new Jewish values are thus anti-nature values, that is to say, the
values of will to power turned back against itself. Yet the will to assimilation or equalization on which ontological knowledge and technology rest
is itself a will to power turned back against itself. The common reactivity
of Jewish values and Greek, or ontological, values, is nevertheless not a
commonality of equal degrees, since European morality is more JudeoChristian than Greek. And if that is the case, it is because the Jewish
priest was the first to create values, to make values an object of creation
and thus of power. It is thus the creation of reactive or priestly values that
constitutes Europes authentic moment of birth. The destiny of Europe
merges with nihilism not only because the onto-logico-technical knowledge and world are mendacious, but again because the Jewish priestly
revaluation, inherited by the Christians, initiates a negation of nature,
i.e., of the will to power.
What was the upshot of this extraordinary revaluation at the end
of which the Law had become the condition of the Covenant, whereas
the Covenant had been the condition of the laws; justice had become a
function of the Law, whereas justice had been a function of power, and
the God of Israel had become that of all the nations? In a long reading
note devoted to Wellhausens text, we can read the following:
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The holy constitution of Judaism [heilige Verfassung des Judenthums]:

the artificial product . . . Israel reduced to being a kingdom of priests
and a holy people. Earlier, the natural order of society found support
in the belief in God; henceforth, the State of Dieu had to be made visible in an artificial sphere, in any event in the daily life of the people.
The idea that hitherto had pervaded nature now had to have a holy
body proper to it. A superficial opposition of the holy and the profane
arose, and one demarcated the natural sphere, thrusting it always farther
away . . . (active ressentiment). Holiness, empty, antithetical, becomes
the directing concept: at the origin = divine, now equal to the priestly,
the spiritualas though the divine were opposed to the worldly, to the natural
through external markingsHierocracy . . . an artificial product imposed
in unfavorable circumstances with an energy eternally worthy of admiration, apolitical: the Mosaic theocracy, residue of a disappeared Stateit
has foreign domination as its presupposition. Closely related to the oldcatholic churches [altkatholischen Kirche], in fact its mother . . . 95
Barring two minor modifications, Nietzsches text copies that of

Wellhausen, abbreviating sentences and underscoring certain words. The
first modification consists in inserting, parenthetically, the words active
ressentiment [Ressentiment thtig]. The second makes foreign domination the presupposition of Mosaic theocracy, whereas Wellhausen saw
this merely as its necessary complement. Nietzsche thus sets ressentiment
and enslavement, subservience, at the source of priestly values. What
then is the relationship between ressentiment and subservience? Ressentiment is servile because it responds to something on which it thereby
depends, as it is reactive and since this reactivity takes the form of a negation. Opposing aristocratic morality to that of slaves, whose greatest
tutors were the Jewish priests, Nietzsche writes:
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of
itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is outside, what is
different, what is not itself; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eyethis need to direct ones view outward
instead of back to oneselfis of the essence of ressentiment: in order to
exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs,
physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at allits action is fundamentally reaction.96
In order that servile morality be a product of ressentiment, a product of reactivity, however, it is essential that ressentiment be active and that
reactivity itself be a sort of will to power. If not, whence would come that
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energy eternally worthy of admiration, whose fruit is hierocracy? Life

is will to power, that is, will to surmount that which, in life, resists life.
However, when life can no longer be victoriouswhen, for example,
the Temple is destroyed and the Covenant brokenlife remains life for
all that, and is still will to power. Yet, to a will to power that can no longer surmount that which in life resists life, there remains, for its selfpreservation, only to triumph over life itself, as well as over its conditions
of possibility; in other words, to employ force to block up the sources of
force.97 The negation of will to power is thus the motor of the revaluation and the creation of priestly values; and if Nietzsche counted active
force among his innovations,98 the Jewish priest, as the true initiator
of Christianity, is himself the inventor of reactive force. To employ force
to block up the sources of forcesuch is the law and formula for this
priestly logic by virtue of which ontological values could be associated
with Judeo-Christian morality, through which God invested philosophy,
and from which technology received a power whose quality was adequate to it and intimately connected with it. Only a will to power turned
back against itselfand deriving a surplus of power against nature from
this reversalcan, in fact, confer upon ontologico-technical knowledge
(founded on preserving values and on a will to power likewise turned
against itself) the possibility of an expansion or a dynamism that it does
not itself possess. But this turning back of will to power is a negation of
will to power by itself. It must therefore be understood as a modality of
its own action, as the activity of ressentiment.
The priestly revaluation is thus clearly the greatest example of spiritual vengeance.99 In fact, to reduce the gods of nations that won out
against Israel to the rank of nothings,100 while elevating the god of a vanquished Israel to that of the god of all nationsor again, to make the god
of the vanquished into a god upon whom the victors likewise dependis
to obtain reparation, for the vanquished, from the victors. Goodness is,
then, and quite naturally, no longer that which intensifies power, but the
converse: that to which all power in general is counter-naturally subjected
and which, consequently, weakens it. The same instinct, writes Nietzsche, which makes the subjugated people reduce its God to the Good
in itself makes them expunge the good qualities from the God of their
conqueror; they revenge themselves on their masters by changing their
masters God into a devil.101 However, in thereby corrupting the concept
of god, the Jewish priests simultaneously modified the essence of justice.
Meted out by a god absolutely unique and equally good for all nations,
for all humanity, justice could no longer be a function of powerwhich
is always hierarchicalbut rather one of powerlessness, which invariably
levels down. If, in a general sense, we understand justice as lifes highest
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representative, then the universal and retributive justice that represents a

life turned against itself could not be other than the highest form of that
ressentiment and vengeance by which the Jewish people came to preserve
themselves. In observing that the instinct of vengeance and ressentiment
is an instinct of self-preservation,102 Nietzsche meant first that all vengeance aims to reestablish a balance, is compensation or reparation.103
But he also meant that retributive justice ultimately represents a life that,
in order to preserve itself, must turn back against life and thereby assert
the preserving and reactive character of the retributive justice of God.
Yet, if vengeance, ressentiment, and justice are tied to preserving and reactive values, then the eternal return of the re-valuating instant, the eternal
recurrence of becoming, will necessarily liberate us from vengeance and
give rise to a wholly other justice.
8/31/11 3:12:40 PM
The New Justice
It is time, now, to come to terms directly with Christianity. If its first premise is the history of Israel, as reconstructed in the previous chapter, it
remains to be seen in what sense Christianity can be identified with nihilism. What is the relationship between Christianity and the Jewish hierocracy? Christianity comes out of the priestly counter-nature and fulfills
its logic.
On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality
had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose
Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed. The
holy people, which had retained only priestly values, priestly words,
for all things, and with a consistency capable of inspiring fear had separated itself from everything else powerful on earth, calling it unholy,
world, sinthis people produced for its instinct a formula which
was logical to the point of self-negation: as Christianity it negated the
last remaining form of reality, the holy people, the chosen people,
the Jewish reality itself. The case is of the first rank: the little rebellious
movement which is baptized with the name of Jesus of Nazareth is the
Jewish instinct once morein other words the priestly instinct which can
no longer endure the priest as a reality, the invention of an even more
abstract form of existence [einer noch abgezogneren Daseinsform], an
even more unreal vision of the world than one conditioned by an organized Church. Christianity negates the Church . . .1
Arising against the priestly hierarchy as trustees of the Law, that

is, against the last form of Jewish political existence, the protest movement claiming to represent Jesus thus finished turning life, or will to
power, back against its own conditions of possibility. In fact, coming up
against the Jewish priestly authorities, the synagogue, the movement
simultaneously attacked the toughest will to life of a people [zhesten
Volks-Lebens-Willen] which has ever existed on earth.2 It did so by turning
against this people the very means and logic that, in a situation of distress, the people had implemented in order to save itself. The movement
thus intensified the reactivity of those means and that logic.
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Was the predication of Jesus not meant, however, to free us from

all that ressentiment and reactivity? Perhaps, but the question at hand
is whether the gospel proclaimed by Jesus did not rapidly give way to
priestly logic, and whether Christianity, contrariwise, does not rest on
the falsification of the message of him who, understood or misunderstood 3 as Nietzsche writes, passes as the instigator of the uprising against
the Jewish priestly hierarchy. Having shown that Christianity is not the
opposite of Judaism but its most logical consequence, it is now appropriate to examine the second principle whose implementation is necessary
to the solution of the problem of the origin of Christianity. This is the
principle according to which the psychological type of the saviorthat
is to say, the possibility of life represented by Jesuswas altered, even
falsified.
How can we proceed to reach the pure psychological type, that
prior to every falsification? We may start from the yawning contradiction4 that, in the synoptic Gospels, separates him who proclaims the
good news from him who, arguing with the Jewish priests, could hardly
be other than a creation of the first Christian community. The good
news signifies that true life, eternal life, is foundit is not promised, it
is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or
exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of GodJesus definitely
claims nothing for himself aloneas a child of God everyone is equal
to everyone else.5
The message of Jesus, which Nietzsche more than once compares
with that of Saint Francis of Assisi,6 is that we are in the kingdom of God;
there are no longer oppositions or negations (denial is precisely what is
totally impossible for him),7 no longer sin nor retribution, the separation between man and God is reduced, and blessedness is hereafter the
sole reality.8 This proclamation, which makes Jesus a Buddha on a soil
very little like that of India, an anti-realist, and a great symbolist,9 implies that evangelical practice alone leads to God, it is God. 10 The good
news is thus the end of the great penal machine,11 and the abolition of
the salvific mechanism whereby sin calls for punishment and obedience,
for recompense. The good news is a new way of living and not a new belief . . .12 Nietzsche insists on this. The sole content of his message is the
way of living, and dying, of the messenger himself. Not only is the Jewish conceptual framework to which Jesus recurs an indifferent semiotics.
Among Indians he would have made use of Sankhyam concepts, among
Chinese those of Lao-Tsuand would not have felt the difference.13
But further, only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the
Cross lived, is Christian. . . . Even today, such a life is possible, for certain
men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all
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times. . . . Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things
[ein Vieles-nicht-thun], a different being . . .14
In short, while life according to Jesuswhich is none other than
the life of Jesusshould be understood as a Buddhistic pacifism, and
the latter as a passive nihilism,15 it must absolutely not be confused with
life according to the Christ as Paul understood him. And it should be
grasped independently of the historic reconstruction to which Paul proceeds; in Nietzsches eyes, that is the essential point.
But how did it happen that Christianity was built up against the evangel of Jesus? To understand Christianity as a practice is ipso facto to take
the death of Jesus as the demonstration of his doctrine. Again Nietzsche
emphasizes, This joyous messenger died as he lived, as he taughtnot
to redeem humanity but to demonstrate how one ought to live.16 His
death on the cross is the justification of the evangel itself and, in allowing himself to die as he did, Jesus provided the example and the sternest
proof of that freedom from and superiority over every feeling of ressentiment,17 which is what is essential in his preaching. Consequently, and if it
is the case that the crucifixion harbors the meaning of the Gospel, then
it was by reinterpreting the former that the good news was falsified.
The death of Jesus placed his disciples before an enigma: who was
he to die in that way? Far from holding his death to be the abolition of
ressentiment and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, the
disciples demanded, Who killed him? That is, they asked whose fault
it was, and why. To pose these questions amounted to reimplanting revenge where it had been extirpated, by calling for a judgment and sentence. Jewish priests being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus (who
must not be confused, here above all, with the Son of God), it will be
the latter, the crucifixion, that becomes the instrument of revenge used
against them. Indeed, it was only when the death of Jesus was attributed
to the Jewish clergy that the former came to be understood as the Son of
Godand made into the judge of that clergy.18 The revenge of Jesuss
disciples then consisted in exalting him in an extravagant fashion, in
severing him from themselves: just as the Jews in revenge of their earlier
enemies, had previously separated their God from themselves, and raised
him on high. The one God and the one Son of God: both products of
ressentiment . . .19 Proceeding in this way, the followers of Jesus raised to a
higher powerturning it against the other Jews, their neighborsthat
vengeful conservative logic through which, from the time of Exile, the
entire Jewish people had sustained itself.
After the post-Exilic community had separated the god of justice
from the god of Israel, and set the first above the second, the JudeoChristians severed the priestly Lawthe ultimate condition of their
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existence as Jewsfrom God himself; thereby denying all that was still
Jewish in him. But this negation, as idealizing as it was universalizing,
still came out of the same priestly logic, whose extension and victory it
consummated. Nietzsche recapitulated this interpretation of Christianity
in a striking page whose tone, marked by love and hatred, gratitude and
revenge, responds to its content to the point of fusing with it.
That, however, is what has happened: from the trunk of that tree of
vengefulness and hatred, Jewish hatredthe profoundest and sublimest kind of hatred, capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the
like of which has never existed on earth beforethere grew something
equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind
of loveand from what other trunk could it have grown? One should
not imagine it grew up as the denial of that thirst for revenge, as the
opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! That love grew out of
it as its crown, as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight, driven as it were into the
domain of light and the heights in pursuit of the goals of that hatred
victory, spoil, and seductionby the same impulse that drove the roots
of that hatred deeper and deeper and more and more covetously into
all that was profound and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate
gospel of love, this Redeemer who brought blessedness and victory
to the poor, the sick, and the sinnerswas he not this seduction in its
most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely
those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate
goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this
Redeemer, this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was
it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a
farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge,
that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before
all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that all the
world, namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow
just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous
bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the holy cross, that
ghastly paradox of a God on the cross, that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?
What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengefulness
and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again
over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals. 20
We are now in a position to understand why and how Christianity

is identified with nihilism. If Jewish priests were the first to create values,
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turning the will to power back against itself, and denying the life within
life itself, it was the Christians who, thereupon and according to the same
logic, raised priestly reactivity to the SECOND POWER.21 Once Greek
philosophy let itself be invested with the God revealed in Christ, and because, for any phenomenon, only the higher degrees matter, Christianity
can and must then be assimilated to nihilism, since it was the supreme
form of the reversal of will to power against itself. To overcome nihilism
thus necessarily amounts to effecting the revaluation of Christian values,
and only eternal recurrence allows us to do so, as it is incompatible with
all reactive and preserving values.
However, if Christianity marks the high point of priestly reactivity,
what then is the summit of Christianity? Where in it does revenge culminate, and on what Christian article of faith must the revaluation be
brought to bear, if it is to be as radical as possible? In other words, where
had priestly logic most falsified the evangel of Jesus, and how was it able
to make of God the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes ?22 Let us return to the death of Jesus. In asking,
Whose fault is it, and why? the disciples posed a vindictive question that
called for a response, itself vindictive. God, they said, gave his Son for
the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. Whereupon Nietzsche continues, as
by way of commentary:
All at once it was all over with the Gospel! The guilt sacrifice [Schuldopfer], and that in its most repulsive, barbaric form, the sacrifice of the
innocent man for the sins of the guilty! What atrocious paganism!For
Jesus had done away with the concept guilt itselfhe had denied any
chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his
glad tidings . . .23
In thus understanding the death of Jesus, his disciples falsified its

meaning according to the logic most familiar to them, the priestly logic.
Jesus was no longer he whose death destroyed all ressentiment but, established as the Son of God through his resurrection, he was made judge
of the world. The doctrines of judgment, of death as propitiatory and
vicarious, and above all the later doctrine of individual resurrection,
then contributed toward substituting the type of the Crucified for that
of Jesusand the teaching of the second was falsified by the resurrection of the first. Paul, with that rabbinical insolence which characterizes
him in every respect, rationalized this interpretation, this abomination of
an interpretation, thus: If Christ is not resurrected from the dead, then
our faith is vain. 24
What is the meaning, for Nietzsche, of the resurrection that Saint
Paulthat genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred, of the inexorable
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logic of hatred25proclaims as reward or recompense? In Pauls predication,

The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the
meaning of the death, even the sequel to the deathnothing was left
untouched, nothing was left bearing even the remotest resemblance to
reality. Paul simply shifted the center of gravity of that entire existence
beyond this existencein the lie of the resurrected Jesus. In fact he
could make no use at all of the redeemers lifehe needed the death
on the Cross and something in addition. . . . To regard as honest a Paul
whose home was the principle centre of Stoic enlightenment when he
makes of a hallucination the proof that the redeemer is still living, or
even to believe his story that he had this hallucination, would be a real
niaiserie on the part of a psychologist: Paul willed the end, consequently
he willed the means . . .26
Whatever the violence of this accusation, it is not without foundation. Saint Paul does not know Jesuss own message, and the two remarks
he cites from Jesus concern divorce and priestly life, which is to say, rules
of ecclesiastical life.27 In Saint Pauls eyes it matters only that Jesus be
born Jewish, have lived under the Law, and be crucified and resurrected.
Moreover, if the vision at Damascus is indeed the de jure source of Pauls
kerygma, it is, as such, incommunicable and, in principle, as little probative as the eyewitnesses to the resurrection to which Saint Paul will at one
point appeal.28 Once again, then, what does the displacement of lifes
center of gravity outside of life, and as a retribution of life, mean for
Nietzsche? If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the
beyondinto nothingness [ins Nichts]one has deprived life as such
of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys
all rationality, all naturalness of instinctall that is salutary, all that is
life-furthering, all that holds a guarantee of the future in the instincts
henceforth excites mistrust.29 The moment that body and life are will
to powerand nothing else30transferring the weight of life outside
of life, or beyond life, is withdrawing all its weight from life. This withdrawal is nevertheless the work of life itself which, thus, withdraws from
itself, exhausts itself, and for eternity wears itself out. The resurrection to
eternal life is thereby resurrection to the nothingness made life; it signs
the eternal triumph of life over itself, against itself, marking the summit
of reactivity. Opening to a life eternally, and thus absolutely, reactive,
resurrection gives rise to a life obedient to values that make it radically
impossible. A life impossible and the impossibility of lifethese are, ultimately, the Christian hope and the meaning of that resurrection which,
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according to Saint Paul, rewards our justification. Thinking of that God

wholly defined by the resurrection of the dead, Nietzsche once wrote
that nothing is more dangerous than a desirability that contradicts the
essence of life.31
The resurrection on which all of Saint Pauls predication is founded
is thus the last stage of the Jewish revaluation, the final consequence of
priestly logic. The resurrection of the dead, in the metaphysical sense
that Saint Paul conferred on it, thus constitutes the highest expression of
nihilism because it is, of all its expressions, the one that most powerfully
manifests the reactivity of power at work in the counter-nature discussed
earlier. In this regard, the resurrection of bodies perfectly reveals the
nature of power deployed by technology32 and marks the triumph (that
is, the divinization) of reactive and preserving values. Consequently, it is
very clearly against the resurrectional power of God that the power unfolded by eternal recurrence must be measured. Nietzsche did not fail to
point this out. Indeed, when aligned with the resurrection and Christian
values, life has as its maxim, So to live [So zu leben] that there is no longer any meaning in living: that now becomes the meaning of life . . .33
This formula is literally and rigorously opposed to that which, a few years
earlier, characterized eternal recurrence, and which said: Live in such a
way [so leben] that you would desire to live anew, that is the taskyou will
live again in any case!34 To a life founded on the hope for eternal resurrection is thus opposed a life founded upon the eternal recurrence of the
revaluating instant, and if the Christian God who resurrects the dead is
the highest form of negationdeus qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio35
then conversely, the thought of eternal recurrence, which makes the resurrection of self by self into the very activity of the true body, is the
highest expression of affirmation that could be reached.36
Let me specify in passing that this does not mean that eternal recurrence is opposed to resurrection in Christ as one religious doctrine to another. No doubt, eternal recurrence is placed under the sign of Dionysus
and, to the question, Have I been understood? with which opens each
of the last three paragraphs of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche answers by way of
ending: Dionysus versus the Crucified . . .37 But if the Crucified is indeed
he whose apostle Saint Paul intends to be, then what kind of god is Dionysus? It is certainly not the Greek god. On the one hand, it was by taking a certain liberty and unaware of the true name of the Antichrist
that Nietzsche baptized . . . by the name of a Greek god38 his antiChristian doctrine. On the other hand, Nietzsches Dionysus is a philosopher god. Even that Dionysus is a philosopher and that gods, too, thus
do philosophy, seems to me to be a novelty.39 Now, if Dionysus teaches
eternal recurrence and practices a divine way of philosophizing,40
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he is a god whoin doing what no other god, Greek, Jewish, or Christian, ever didis comparable to no other. Eternal recurrence is therefore not a religious doctrine, but the philosophical doctrine that frees
philosophy from all theological tutelage.
Saint Paul is certainly not Nietzsches only adversary, but he is undeniably the greatest. And when the Antichrist declares that Paul was
the greatest of all the apostles of revenge, that Christianity has been up
till now mankinds greatest misfortune, or again that nihilist and Christian [Nihilist und Christ]: they rime, and do not merely rime . . .41 he is
saying nothing, absolutely nothing other than that. It is therefore on the
resurrection of the body that Nietzsches revaluation, whose principle is
eternal recurrence, must be effected. Now, while we have already shown
that eternal recurrence thoroughly modifies the meaning of Christian
resurrection, making it into the true ipseity of the active body, we still do
not know whether eternal recurrence allows for the concomitant modification of justice, from which resurrection in Christ is indissociable. As
long as we have not come to understand in what sense eternal recurrence
is a new justice, superior to the one proclaimed by Saint Paul, in what
sense Nietzsche can assert that Dionysus is a judge42we will not have
definitively established that the resurrection according to eternal recurrence is indeed the sur-resurrection we are seeking.
Once the revaluation concerns the justice of God revealed in Christ,
it clearly matters that the latter, justice, not be misunderstood. Is this the
case, and does the figure of the Crucified really mark, as Nietzsche asserts, the summit of revenge? Is the Christ not, for us, justice, sanctification, and redemption?43 Is there even any sense in taking the justice of
God revealed in Christ as the highest form of revenge? However violent
his remarks with regard to Saint Paul may be, Nietzsche in no way misunderstood the meaning of this purest of Gospels. Two years before writing
The Antichrist, he noted: Irony toward those who believe Christianity to
be overcome by modern natural science. Christian value judgments are
thus absolutely not overcome. Christ on the Cross is the most sublime
symbolever yet.44 Nietzsche is not speaking here of Jesus but of the
Crucified; he could not see in the latter the most sublime symbol without
having previously recognized the justice of God in the Crucified. What
then can Nietzsches rejection of Saint Pauls preaching mean, and on
what does it depend?
By opposing the Crucified to Jesus, Nietzsche is opposing two
modes of redemption. Jesus denies sin and abolishes the abyss between
man and God; the Crucified, or Son of God, redeems our sins through
his death. The difference between the first and the second thus lies solely
in the ways of being freed from sin. Yet, while Nietzsche considers the way
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in which Jesus abolishes sin as a message to which it is and will always be

possible to respond, he will invariably take Pauls predication (and with
it, all of Christianity) as something extreme. In 1884 he writes, the
Romans are responsible for Europes greatest misfortune, the people of immoderation they brought extremes to power, and extreme paradoxes like
the God on the cross. 45 In 1885, having asserted that the Christian is
shown to be the exaggerated form of self-mastery, since to control his desires he seems to need to annihilate them or to crucify them, Nietzsche
declares Christianity superfluous where no extreme means are necessary
any longer!46 Two years later, in a text devoted to European nihilism, he
notes that God is much too extreme a hypothesis.47 And, finally, he
will emphasize all that is extreme in the resurrection.48
How is it that Christian life is always extreme, always a life that goes
to extremes? Let us return more directly to Saint Paul who, in the first
Epistle to the Corinthians, writes the following: Since by man came
death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.49 What does the opposition of Adam and the Christ mean, and how does it mark Christian
life? Christ released us from Adams sin by opening for us the possibility
of a future of reconciliation. Consequently, the Christian lives at every
moment between Adam and Christ, between a past time of death and a
future of life. According to Luthers expression, the Christian is always
simul justus, simul peccator, simultaneously just and sinful, and if Christian
life is extreme, this is because it draws its meaning from the universality
of sin and from the superabundance of grace; that is, it is because it is
a life in Christ as dead and resurrected. That it could only be the crucifixion of the Son of God that delivers us from the Law and vindicates
us before universal sin, is precisely what the classical taste invariably
experienced as the gruesome superlative.50 That is, then, the all too
extreme hypothesis; and when Saint Paul proclaims the crucified Christ
as the scandal for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks,51 he is himself
bearing witness to the extreme character of his teaching. In pointing out
that the advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so
far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth,52 Nietzsche is himself not saying anything so different
and, by the same token, he shows clearly that he never misunderstood
the meaning of the Pauline doctrine, whereby the mystery of Christ
can alone respond to the mystery of iniquity.53
Once the extreme character of Christian life is recognized, the
question becomes the following: for whom, for what type of man,
were such extreme measures necessary? For the weakest, insofar as it is
true that the strongest are always the most moderate, those for whom
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extreme articles of faith are not necessary.54 However, strength and weakness are, here as elsewhere, always relative to each other, and the overman could not triumph over the reactive man without triumphing over
Christianity itself. If the essence of Saint Pauls predication resides in
the justice of God that releases us from Adams sin, then Christianity
will never be overcome unless a new justice could release us more radically from his sin by annihilating its meaning and its possibility. And if
sin . . . has been the greatest event so far in history of the sick soul,55
that is, of the European soul, then the new justice will thereby also complete the reduction of nihilism.
A few months before conceiving eternal recurrence, and during
what he called at the time his constant inner struggle with Christianity,56
Nietzsche noted the following: Formerly, to save [someone] from [his]
sins, one recommended faith in Jesus Christ. Yet now I say, the way is: do
not believe in sin! This cure is more radical. The former one wanted to
make an illusion bearable by way of another illusion.57 And, in August
1881, in the wake of his great thought [eternal recurrence], he wrote:
It would be terrifying still to believe in sin: moreover, all that which we
can do in innumerable repetitions is innocent.58 It would seem, then, that
eternal recurrence provides Nietzsche the means no longer to believe in
sin, whose weight he never underestimated, and consequently to be radically released from itwhich is to say, justified. Yet, is this really the case
and above all, how is it possible?
If, for me, Adams sin is inherited sin, then there is a past of which
my will can change nothing. That sin is thus my wills limit, the past qua
contrary to my will. However, this contrariety, this opposition is not something outside my will, since Adams sin is always mine. Under the reign of
Adam, my will is thus always intrinsically opposed by its past. But is it not
always this way and, in a general sense, is the past not the stumbling block
of my will? Was Zarathustra not obliged to recognize this when, having
taught that the will is as liberating as it is joyful, he immediately specified:
But now learn this as well: The will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates: but what is it that fastens in fetters even the liberator? It was: that
is what the wills teeth-gnashing and most lonely tribulation is called.
Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot
break time and times desirethat is the wills most lonely tribulation.
Willing liberates: what does willing itself devise to free itself from its
tribulation and to mock at its dungeon? Alas, every prisoner becomes
a fool! The imprisoned will, too, releases itself in a foolish way. It is sullenly wrathful that time does not run back; That which wasthat is
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what the stone which it cannot roll away is called. And so, out of wrath
and ill-temper, the will rolls stones about and takes revenge upon him
who does not, like it, feel wrath and ill-temper. Thus the will, the liberator, becomes a malefactor: and upon all that can suffer it takes revenge
for its inability to go backwards. This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the
wills counter-willing against time and its It was [des Willens Widerwille
gegen die Zeit].59
Zarathustra is here describing not only the destiny and structure of

the will such as Schopenhauer understood it, but moreover the destiny
and structure of the sinners will. What authorizes such an assertion?
First, Schopenhauer took the opposition of Adam and Christ, sin and
grace, as the symbol of his own metaphysics. Further, some of the expressions Zarathustra employs in this speech, wherein he redefines redemption as the transformation of every It was into a Thus, I willed it, 60
refer directly to sin. According to the Gospel of Matthew, the weeping
and gnashing of teeth characterize the darkness of damnation,61 and for
Saint Paul tribulation is, together with anguish, peculiar to the soul of
man that doeth evil.62 Finally, a note dating from the period when Zarathustra was drafted suggests that the fool is none other than the sinner:
Fool I would say, but not sinner. 63
However, if revenge is indeed a counter-willing inherent in the will
itself whenever that will is sinful, i.e., burdened with a past as proper to
it as it is properly impossible to redeem voluntarily, then is the Christ not
the only one able to free us from it? Is he not the only one able to put
an end to this opposition of the will to itself, which is ultimately but the
opposition between our will and Gods? Is the Crucified, then, not the
only one who can ensure our redemption by delivering us once and for
all from revenge? And is Nietzsches claim that Paul was the greatest of
all apostles of revenge64 (with all that this implies) not devoid of sense?
Nothing could be less certain. In effect, Saint Paul can oppose vindication in Christ to the sin inherited from Adam only by admitting that
the will cannot return to the past, that it is impossible to will backward.
Yet, in light of eternal recurrence, that is no longer the case. To will the
eternal return of the decisive instant is to will the eternal recurrence of
all becoming and, consequently, its eternal passing and becoming past.
Commenting upon Nietzsches characterization of revenge, Heidegger
explained clearly,
The will becomes free from its revulsion [Widerwille] against time,
against times mere past, when it steadily wills the going and coming,
this going and coming back, of everything. The will becomes free from
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what is revolting in the It was when it wills the constant recurrence

of every It was. The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the
constant recurrence of the same. Then the will wills the eternity of what
is willed. The will wills its own eternity.65
If it is possible, however, to will backward, then Adams sin no

longer has meaning or weight, and eternal recurrence so radically discharges us of it that the acquittal at least amounts to justification. All
that which we can do in innumerable repetitions is innocent.66 It is then
possible to assert that the thought of recurrence overcomes the justice
of God revealed in Christ and, for those who stand in the decisive instant
by willing its eternal recurrence, Pauls theology cannot fail to appear as
the high point of revenge and as a hypothesis far too extreme, by which
the weak alone can be satisfied. It appears as the high point of revenge
and Zarathustra does not omit saying so, the spirit of revenge: my friends,
that has been up to now mankinds best reflection67because it makes
the impossibility of willing backward into the presupposition of a divine
drama and of the economy of salvation. It appears as a hypothesis far too
extremei.e., far too external to our willbecause Christ fulfills that of
which the will of the sons of Adam was, by itself, incapable: redeeming its
past and thus willing anew. It appears as a hypothesis to which the weak
alone can recur, since the highest force consists in willing backward, by
willing the eternal recurrence of will to power.
In order that eternal recurrence give rise to a justification more
radical than the Christian one, it is necessary that eternal recurrence
confer a higher power on justice itself. Is this possible and, if so, how?
Nietzsche repeated indefatigably that justice is will to power.68 But in
what respect is it will to power? A note from the spring of 1884 provides
the answer: Justice as a constructive eliminating annihilating mode of
thinking, proceeding from evaluations: highest representative of life itself.69
This definition of justice amounts to making it the condition of all life,
in accordance with the biblical tradition. Indeed, justice could not be a
mode of thinking as constructive as it is destructive, if it did not found
values which made the distinction between just and unjust possible. Now,
values are the very conditions of life and, if founding values amounts to
making life possible, then justice is certainly the highest representative of
a life that, as will to power, never ceases evaluating. This initial determination of justice, qua ultimate condition of life, is nevertheless indifferent
to the distinction between active and reactive values. It is axiologically
neutral. This will no longer be the case when Nietzsche defines justice a
second time. During the summer of 1884, he notes, in effect, the following: Justice, as a function of a vastly circumspective power, which sees
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past little perspectives on good and evil, which thus has a vaster horizon
of advantagethe intention to preserve something that is greater than
this or that person.70 What should we understand here by advantage
[Vorteil]? According to its first sense, the word denotes what is prior (Vor)
to any distinction or sharing out (Teil).71 But the only thing that can be
prior to a distinction is the principle according to which it was effected,
that is to say, the values that govern it. If we begin with justice as that
from which we determine what is just and what is not, that which favors
life or disfavors it, that which intensifies life or weakens it, then justice is
always relative to a determinate type of life, to a system of values, or to a
morality whose supreme representative it invariably is. By opposing the
little perspectives on good and evil to a vaster horizon, characterized
by the intention to preserve something that is greater than this or that
person, Nietzsche thus opposes the ancient values advocating love of
the neighbor to new values advocating love of the distant one, that is, of
the overman.72 This opposition, between life according to good and evil
(reactive life) and life beyond good and evil (active life), is an opposition of two justices, of a reactive or passive justice and an active justice in
Nietzsches new sense of active. But if the first justice finds its principle
in God and his commandments, from whence comes the second justice? It comes from eternal recurrence itself, since, as we showed earlier,
eternal recurrence is also the principle that founds active values, which
alone make possible a superhuman life and body in a world in becoming. In thus revaluing all preserving and reactive values (of which JudeoChristian values are exemplary), it is eternal recurrence that confers on
justice a higher power; and to will the eternal return of the decisive and
revaluing instant, to hold oneself to it, is thus actively to justify all becoming by bringing about a revaluation that is no longer revenge, but gratitude, since it acquiesces eternally to all becoming. Do we require further
confirmation? Under the title The Great Trial, Nietzsche posed us two
questions. The first asks, Are you ready to JUSTIFY life? Or death for you?
The second, Who bears the thought of eternal recurrence?He who is annihilated by the proposition, There is no redemption, he must die.73 If
eternal recurrence were not a new way of justifying lifeand an unjustified life is deaththen these two questions would clearly not constitute
a single, even a great trial.
***
Resurrection according to eternal recurrence is thus indeed a veritable
sur-resurrection, since it is also a justification. However, it is a justification of itself, by itself, extended to all of becoming. The eternal return
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of the decisive and revaluative instant permits the incorporation of truth

and the justification of the active body, whose resurrection constitutes
ipseity. It thereby marks the end of the reign of reactive values that Christianity raised to their apogee; the end, then, of nihilism. In certifying
that an atheist understanding of the resurrection and the justification
of the body is not devoid of meaningall to the contraryNietzsche
employs that irony that consists in continuously translating the most
atheist and least holy form of modern thought back into the language
of the world gone-by, which signifies a secret triumph over the difficulty defeated and the ostensible impossibility of such an undertaking.74
Nietzsche thus offers, to the body and to philosophy, new possibilities, as
henceforth der Leib philosophirt; 75 it is the body and the body alone that
philosophizes.
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Notes
Introduction
1. Martin Heidegger, Der Spiegel Interview, in The Heidegger Reader, trans.
Jerome Veith, ed. Gnter Figal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009),
pp. 31333, here, p. 326 (Spiegel-Gesprch, Der Spiegel, no. 23 [1976], p. 209).
Following Heideggers wishes, the 1966 interview with Der Spiegel was not published until his death in 1976; see also Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), III, v. 231, p. 57 (Lightly a god, if he
wishes, can save a man, even from far off).
2. Martin Heidegger, Die Gefahr (The Danger), in Bremer und Freiburger
Vortrge, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), vol. 79,
p. 54. The German reads: das Seyn als Seyn die Gefahr . . . das Seyn in sich als
die Gefahr seiner selbst wesen . . . Untranslated. Hereafter GA followed by the
volume number.
3. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977), p. 16 (Die Frage nach der Technik, in Vortrge und Aufstze [Pfullingen: Gnther Neske, 1954], p. 19). See also Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962), pt. I, chap. 3, 15, pp. 99100 (Sein und Zeit [Tbingen: Niemeyer
Verlag, 1953], p. 70).
4. Heidegger, The Question, p. 15 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 19). See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who expressed the economic principle as follows:
There is always a principle of determination in nature which must be sought by
maxima and minima; namely, that maximum effect should be achieved with a
minimum outlay; see Leibniz, On the Radical Origination of Things (1697),
in Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1989), p. 487 (De rerum originatione radicali, in Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhart [Berlin: Weidmann, 187890], vol. VII,
p. 303).
5. Heidegger, The Question, p. 16 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 20), trans.
slightly modified.
6. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 3, 1139 b15ff., in The Complete
Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984, rev. Oxford trans.), vol. II, p. 1799.
345
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7. Ibid., VI, 4, 1140 a12ff., p. 1800, trans. slightly modified; see also Martin
Heidegger, Platos Sophist, trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), chap. I, 7, pp. 28ff. (Platon: Sophistes,
in GA 19, pp. 40ff.); Heidegger, The Question, p. 13 (Vortrge und Aufstze,
p. 17).
8. Heidegger, The Question, pp. 1112 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 15),
where Heidegger quotes the Symposium, 205b, translation modified.
9. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA 55, p. 202. Presently untranslated.
10. Heidegger, The Question, p. 17 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 21). The
French mise disposition is rendered ordering in the English; we prefer
creation of provisions for its precision. The German terms are Her-vorbringen and BeunruhigendeTrans.
11. Heidegger, Die Gefahr, in GA 79, p. 62, untranslated. See also Martin
Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art (19351936), in Off the Beaten Track,
trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 53ff. (Holzwege, in GA 5, pp. 70ff.).
12. Heidegger, The Question, p. 18 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 21; hereafter VA).
13. Ibid., p. 19 (VA, p. 22).
14. See ibid., p. 19 (VA, p. 23).
15. Gestell also means a created structure, or an artifice; its root, gestelli,
comes from the Latin statio, sedes, locus.Trans.
16. Heidegger, The Question, p. 21 (VA, p. 24), trans. slightly modified.
17. We are translating the French dispositif as apparatus; it pertains to
Heideggers discussion of Gestell as framing, architectonic, and artifact in the age
of technology.Trans.
18. Heidegger, The Question, p. 25 (VA, p. 28).
19. Ibid., p. 24 (VA, p. 28).
20. Ibid., p. 25 (VA, p. 28).
21. Ibid., p. 25 (VA, p. 29), trans. modified.
22. Ibid., p. 26 (VA, p. 31).
23. Ibid., p. 32 (VA, p. 36), trans. slightly modified.
24. Ibid., pp. 2627 (VA, p. 30), trans. slightly modified.
25. Heidegger, Die Gefahr, p. 54, where Heidegger equates what he
named, in 7 of On the Essence of Truth, errancy to the zone of danger;
see Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth in Pathmarks, trans. John Sallis,
ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 150
52 (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 7; the German reads: Das Wesen der Irre beruht im
Wesen des Seyns als der Gefahr).
26. Psalms 97:5; see also Isaiah 41:1516.
27. Matthew 11:25; Luke 10:21, and Acts 17:24; I Corinthians 10:26 and
Psalms 24:1.
28. Genesis 1:2728. Franck translates Luthers text throughout.Trans.
29. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New
York: HarperPerennial, 2004), pt. I, Lecture VI, p. 57 (Was heisst Denken? [Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971], p. 24); see also ibid., p. 65 (Was heisst Denken? p. 64);
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and Martin Heidegger, Who Is Nietzsches Zarathustra? in Nietzsche, trans. Joan

Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 197987), vol. II, pt. 2, p. 215 (VA, p. 102).
30. Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA 55, p. 192. Presently untranslated; the German
reads: . . . der stets gesteigerten Mglichkeit dieses Sichwollenknnens.Trans.
31. Martin Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics (27), in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
p. 109 (berwindung der Metaphysik, in VA, p. 94).
32. Heidegger, Heraklit, GA 55, p. 209. Presently untranslated; the German
reads: Woher denn sonst der geschichtliche Bankrott des Christentums und
seiner Kirche . . .; see also p. 213, where the creation thought is characterized as
Judeo-Christian, and for the emptiness in which logic founders, see p. 208.
33. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 40 (GA 54, p. 59).
34. Exodus 22:2.
35. See Deuteronomy 9:9, 11 and 15.
36. See Exodus 34:28.
37. See Deuteronomy 5:13 and 27:16; Exodus 21:17.
38. Psalms 8:67. Luther translates verse 6: Du hast ihn wenig niedriger
gemacht als Gott, mit Ehre und Herrlichkeit hast du ihn gekrnt.
39. See Matthew 17:20, 21:21; Mark 11:23; and I Corinthians 13:2.
40. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 39 (GA 54, p. 58).
41. Ibid., p. 40 (GA 54, p. 58).
42. Ibid., p. 40 (GA 54, p. 59), trans. slightly modified.
43. Quoted by Heidegger without giving the source in Parmenides, p. 40
(GA 54, p. 59), and also in Language in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 206 (Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA 12, p. 26). It is in fact verse 5 of Psalm 37.
44. It should be noted, though, that in 1935 in the introduction to Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger translated as die zehn Gebote Gottes;
see Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), p. 143 (GA 40, p. 143).
46. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, p. 67).
47. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, pp. 6768).
48. Ibid., p. 47 (GA 54, p. 70), trans. modified.
49. mile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth
Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), bk. III, Social
Status, chap. 2, The Four Divisions of Society, p. 254 (Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes [Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1969], vol. I, p. 311).
50. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 47 (GA 54, p. 70). Like Wehr, stems
from the Sanskrit vr nti.
51. Ibid., p. 48 (GA 54, p. 71).
52. See Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, bk. V, Law,
chap. 3, Ius and the Oath in Rome, pp. 389ff. (Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropennes, vol. II, p. 111ff.).
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53. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 4849 (GA 54, pp. 7071).

54. The French reads: Et comment cette conformit (ou ) qui
prsuppose le non-retrait et qui, prenant ce qui nest pas en retrait pour ce quil
est, nest autre que le mode sur lequel saccomplit le dclement, comment cette
conformit, qui tire sa possibilit de l, naurait-elle pas pour site ncessaire ce par quoi lhomme rpond lappel qui lui est adress, ce par quoi il est
dcelant, savoir lnonc, le ?Trans.
56. Ibid., pp. 4950 (GA 54, p. 73).
57. Ibid., p. 50 (GA 54, p. 74).
58. Ibid., p. 51 (GA 54, p. 75).
59. Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Third Meditation),
in The Complete Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
198491), vol. II, p. 24 (Mditation III, in Oeuvres, ed. Adam-Tannery, vol.
IX-1, p. 27).
60. Ibid., p. 32 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 36).
61. Ibid., p. 35 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 41).
62. Ren Descartes, Fourth Meditation in The Complete Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 39 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 45); see also Martin Heidegger, Introduction
to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2005), pp. 94ff. (Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung, in
GA 17, pp. 130ff.), where Heidegger, reading the Fourth Meditation starting in
the winter semester of 192324, interprets Cartesian ontology and the transformation of truth into certitude; an interpretation to which he never returned. We
follow this interpretation here and occasionally refer to texts other than those
used by Heidegger.
63. Descartes, Fourth Meditation, vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 45).
We have added between brackets what the French translation omitted (Franck).
64. Ibid., vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 46).
65. Ren Descartes, Authors Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections (6),
in The Complete Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 292 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 233).
66. Descartes, Fourth Meditation, vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 46).
67. Saint Thomas Aquinas once equated error with sin; see Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger
Brothers, 1947), vol. I, p. 310 (I, Quaestio 62, art. 8).
68. Descartes, Authors Replies to the Second Set of Objections, vol. II,
p. 105 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 116).
69. Ibid., p. 105; also see the letter to Newcastle of March or April 1648
in which Descartes sees in the proposition: I think therefore I am a proof of the
capacity of our soul for receiving intuitive knowledge from God, which he designates as our knowledge of God in beatific vision; The Complete Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, vol. III, pp. 33031 (Oeuvres, vol. V, p. 138). It is interesting
to recall here the rule that Husserl formulated concerning intuitive knowledge
of origins and absolute knowledge: as little interpretation as possible, but as
pure an intuition as possible (intuitio sine comprehensione). In fact, we will hark
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back to the speech of the mystics when they described the intellectual seeing
which is supposed not to be a discursive knowledge; The Idea of Phenomenology,
trans. William. P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1990), Lecture IV, p. 50 (Die Idee der Phnomenologie in Husserliana [The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1950], vol. II, p. 62).
70. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, pp. 11517 (GA 17,
pp. 15657), trans. slightly modified. In a study dedicated to La question de la
vrit dans la philosophie de Descartes, Pierre Guenancia similarly highlights
that the constraint exerted here [in the case of the truths of faith] by grace
over our mind [esprit] is as such no different than the one exerted over the same
mind by mathematical truths or common notions and that once discovered appear to have always been in the mind; Lire Descartes [Paris: Gallimard, 2000],
pp. 48687). Untranslated.
71. Descartes, Fourth Meditation, vol. II, pp. 4041 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1,
p. 46).
72. Ibid., p. 41 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, pp. 4748).
73. See Saint Anselm who, in his On Truth 11, defines truth as a rectitude
perceptible by mind alone and again, in his On Free Will 13, defines the librum
arbitrium as the power of preserving the rectitude of the will for the sake of rectitude itself ; see The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury, ed. Brian Davies and
G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 166 and 191 respectively (LOeuvre dAnselme de Cantorbry, ed. M. Corbin, vol. II, pp. 160 and 218).
74. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, pp. 11718 and
23536 (GA 17, pp. 159 and 311).
75. Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture (1938), in Off the
Beaten Track, Appendices, 9, p. 81 (Die Zeit des Weltbildes, in Holzwege, in
GA 5, p. 107); see also Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 15, pp. 98ff. and
vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 6, pp. 239ff. (Nietzsche [Pfullingen: Gnther Neske, 1961], vol.
II, pp. 144ff. and 320ff.).
76. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 1, 10, p. 74 (Sein und Zeit,
p. 49); on transcendence as an essential trait of onto-theo-logy as such, see Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 2, p. 211 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 349), where, among
other things, Heidegger asserts that if ontology represents transcendence as the
transcendental, theology represents transcendence as the transcendent.
77. See Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. II, p. 1210 (II-II,
Quaestio 9, art. 1) and pp. 119697 (Quaestio 4, art. 8).
79. Martin Luther, Preface to the First Volume of the Complete Edition
of the Latin Works (1545), in Luthers Works, trans. L. W. Spitz, ed. J. Pelikan
(St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1958), vol. XXXIV, pp. 33638 (Martin Luthers Werke,
Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimarer Ausgabe [Weimar: H. Bhlau, 1883], vol. LIV,
pp. 18586); see Romans 1:17.
80. See Saint Anselm, On Truth, in The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury,
12, p. 169: Therefore justice is rectitude of will preserved for its own sake.
81. See Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. I, p. 1147 (I-II,
Quaestio 113, art. 4).
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82. Martin Luther, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology (1517), trans.

H. J. Grimm, in Luthers Works, vol. XXXI, p. 12 (Luthers Werke, vol. I, p. 226).
83. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 5253 (GA 54, p. 77), trans. slightly
modified.
84. Ibid., p. 53 (GA 54, p. 78).
85. Martin Heidegger, Nihilism and History of Being, in Nietzsche, vol.
IV, pt. 2, p. 210 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 348); on the concept of the fundamental metaphysical position, see ibid., vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 25, pp. 184ff. (vol. I,
pp. 448ff.) and vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 14, p. 92 (vol. II, p. 137); on the distinction between essentia and existentia, see vol. III, pt. 2, pp. 168ff. and Metaphysics
as History of Being in The End of Philosophy, pp. 1ff. (Nietzsche, vol. II, pp. 14ff.
and 399ff.). School metaphysics refers to the Schuhlmetaphysik of Leibniz and
Wolff.Trans.
86. We cite the works of Nietzsche in their English translation and according to the following German edition: Smtliche Werke (SW ), or more frequently
the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 196777). Posthumous texts will be referred to in the following way:
KSA volume number in Roman numerals, year(s), the notebook number, note
number, and the page reference. Thus here: KSA XII (188687) 7 (54), pp. 312
13; see Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 26, pp. 199ff. (vol. I, pp. 464ff.).
We say note and not fragment recalling Nietzsches warning to the myopic: Do
you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give
it to you) in fragments? in Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 128, p. 243 (KSA II,
p. 432); also see KSA X (1883) 12 (1), 48, p. 387. Published texts will be referred
to first in their English translation followed by their location in the KSA.
87. KSA IX (1881) 12 (9), p. 577.
88. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 1, p. 8 (Nietzsche, vol. I,
p. 480).
89. Parmenides, p. 53 (GA 54, p. 79), trans. slightly modified.
90. Heidegger, Die Gefahr, p. 55 n.1: . . . dass dieser . . . Gott die Gefahr
sei fr das Seyn?
91. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), 75, p. 62; see also KSA XI (188485) 31 (53),
pp. 38687.
92. Heidegger, Who Is Nietzsches Zarathustra? in Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 2,
p. 233 (Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra? in VA, p. 126).
93. Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics (10), in The End of Philosophy,
p. 93 (VA, p. 76).
94. Ibid., p. 97 (VA, p. 77).
95. Martin Luther, Promotion des Cyriacus Gerichius: Die dritte Disputation gegen die Antinomer [Disputatio tertia contra Antinomos], in Luthers Werke,
vol. XXXIX, 1, p. 489. Untranslated. Twenty additional volumes of the American
edition of Luthers Works are being published by Concordia Publishing House,
general editor, Christopher B. Brown.Trans.
96. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsches Word: God Is Dead, in Off the Beaten
Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), p. 183 (Holzwege, GA 5, p. 244).
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97. Ibid., p. 183 (pp. 24445).

98. Martin Luther, Theses Concerning Faith and Law, The Theses for the
Doctoral Examination of Hieronymous Weller and Nikolaus Medler, September 11
1535, trans. L. W. Spitz, in Luthers Works, vol. XXXIV, p. 110 (Luthers Werke, vol.
XXXIX, I, p. 45).
99. Martin Luther, Die Promotion von Johannes Macchabus Scotus (Disputation de Ecclesia), 3 Februar 1542 in Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, 2, p. 163.
Untranslated; see note 95 above.
100. Martin Luther, The Disputation Concerning Man (1536), trans.
L.W. Spitz, in Luthers Works, vol. XXXIV, p. 139. Franck cites the text of the edition established by Gerhard Ebeling in the first part of his work on this disputation in Lutherstudien, vol. II, pt. 1, p. 21.
101. See Martin Heidegger, Zrcher Seminar, in Seminre, GA 15, p. 437.
Untranslated part of a supplement to the seminar of 6 November 1951. This
is Heideggers answer to the question: Should Being and God be set down as
identical? Heideggers response reads: Belief does not require the thinking of
Being; when it does require it, it is already no longer belief. Luther understood
that. Yet, even in his own church one appears to have forgotten this.
(Der Glaube hat das Denken des Seins nicht ntig. Wenn er das braucht,
ist er schon nicht mehr Glaube. Das hat Luther verstanden. Sogar in seiner
eigenen Kirche scheint man das zu vergessen.)
102. See Gerhard Ebeling, Gewissheit und Zweifel, in Wort und Glaube
(Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 196995), vol. II, p. 172 n.108. Although the first volume of this collection of essays is published in English as Word and Faith (trans.
James W. Leitch [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963]), the two volumes that Franck
cites are as yet untranslated.Trans.
103. See note 83 above.
104. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 24, p. 165 (Nietzsche, vol. II,
p. 221).
105. Ibid. Franck inserts between square brackets what Heidegger omits
citing; see Friedrich Nietzsche, What I Owe to the Ancients (2), in Twilight
of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, see Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 117 (KSA VI,
p. 155).
106. Nietzsche, What I Owe to the Ancients (1), in Twilight of the Idols,
see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 116 (KSA VI, pp. 15455); see KSA XIII
(1888) 24 (1), 7, pp. 62324; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musicians Problem, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings,
trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Epilogue, pp. 26062 (KSA VI, pp. 5053).
107. Nietzsche, What I Owe to the Ancients (2), p. 117 (KSA VI, p. 155).
108. The second mention of ideal is left out by Franck.Trans.
109. Nietzsche, What I Owe to the Ancients (2), p. 117 (KSA VI, p. 155);
see also KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), 8, pp. 62426.
110. KSA XII (1887) 10 (201), p. 580; KSA XIII (188788), 11 (294), p. 114
and (375), pp. 16769; KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), 8, pp. 62426.
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111. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), I, 16, p. 52 (KSA
V, p. 286).
112. Martin Heidegger, Platos Doctrine of Truth, in Pathmarks, p. 174
(Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 227).
p. 221). The adverb everywhere is not italicized in Heideggers text (Franck).
114. KSA VII (187071) 7 (156), p. 199.
115. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 2, p. 14 and vol. IV, pt. 1,
chap. 2, p. 13 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 486 and vol. II, p. 44).
116. KSA XII (1887) 10 (112), p. 521.
117. Heidegger, Nietzsches Word: God Is Dead, in Off the Beaten Track,
p. 165 (Holzwege, GA 5, p. 221).
118. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (147), p. 331.
119. Nietzsche, letter of 9 January 1887 to Franz Overbeck in Nietzsche: A
Self-Portrait from His Letters, trans. and ed. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 94 (Smtliche Briefe, vol. VIII,
p. 9. We are citing the correspondence of Nietzsche in the edition Smtliche
Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, published by G. Colli and M. Montinari; hereafter SB).
120. KSA XI (1885) 34 (5), p. 425.
121. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Random House, 1974), 289, p. 232 (KSA III, p. 530), trans. modified.
122. KSA XI (1885) 40 (65), p. 663.
123. KSA XI (1885) 41 (10), p. 687.
124. The best evangelists are those who show, best and most, how faith in
Christ alone justifies us. This is why the letters of Paul are much more a Gospel
than is Matthew, Luke, or Mark. . . . None have better described the grace we
have through Christ than Saint Paul, especially in the Letter to the Romans,
says Luther; see Foreword to the Sermon on the First Epistle of Saint Peter,
trans. M. H. Bertram, in Luthers Works, vol. XXX, pp. 34 (Luthers Werke, vol. XII,
p. 260).
125. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, 10, p. 133 (KSA VI, p. 176); see also KSA XII (188586) 1 (5), p. 12. The
German reads: Luther giebt wieder die Grundlogik des Christentums . . .
126. Martin Luther, Die Promotionsdisputation von Palladius und Tilemann (1537), in Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, 1, p. 252. Untranslated; see note
95 above.
127. KSA XI (1884) 25 (162), p. 56 and (173), p. 60; see also KSA (1885)
35 (84), pp. 54748.
128. Nietzsche, letter of 26 November 1888 to Paul Deussen in SB, vol.
VIII, p. 492 (not in English translations of Nietzsches selected letters); see also
KSA XII (188687) 6 (4), p. 234, where it is a question of Zarathustras gospel
[Zarathustra-Evangelium], and KSA XIII (188788) 11 (411), p. 190, where The
will to power, attempt at a transvaluation of all values is presented as the gospel of
the future (Zukunfts-Evangelium).
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129. Gerhard Ebeling, Thesen zur Frage der Auferstehung von den Toten in der gegenwrtigen theologischen Diskussion, in Wort und Glaube, vol. III,
p. 452. Untranslated; see note 102 above.
Part 1. From the Resurrection of Body to

Eternal Recurrence
Chapter 1. The Body Under the Law
1. I Corinthians 15:1314. The citations from the Bible are adapted from
Luthers translation, which was the Bible Nietzsche read, and attention has been
paid to fluency with Francks extremely faithful translation of Luthers German
text. There exists no direct English translation of the Luther Bibel.Trans.
2. Ibid., 12:12ff.
3. Ibid., 12:1417.
4. Ibid., 12:19.
5. Ibid., 12:18.
6. II Corinthians 4:10ff.
7. Romans 6:12ff.
8. These two examples are not the only ones. Bultmann, who analyzed at
length the multiple meanings of the Pauline concept of , quotes other ones.
Moreover, it is through the examination of the most comprehensive [and] complex concept which Paul uses to characterize mans existence that his interpretation of the Pauline theology and anthropology begins; see Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles
Scribners Sons, 1951), vol. I, pt. 2, chap. 4, 17, Soma (Body), pp. 192203
(Theologie des Neuen Testaments [Tbingen: Mohr, 1984], 17).
9. I Corinthians 12:19ff.
10. Ibid.,12:22ff.
11. Ibid., 6:13.
12. See Galatians 5:19ff and I Corinthians 6:18.
13. Romans 3:20 and I Corinthians 1:28ff.
14. I Corinthians 15:50.
15. Romans 2:28 and 27.
16. See I Corinthians 1:1726 and II Corinthians 1:12.
17. Galatians 5:24 and 6:14.
18. Romans 8:57.
19. Ibid., 1:23.
20. Ibid., 2:20.
21. II Corinthians 3:14.
22. Galatians 5:14.
23. Colossians 2:8.
24. Romans 10:5.
25. Philippians 3:3.
26. Ibid., 3:19.
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27. Romans 7:7.

28. Ibid., 7:8.
29. Ibid., 7:910.
30. See Deuteronomy 30:15ff.
31. See Psalm 119.
32. Martin Luther, Preface to the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans
(1522), in Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Classics, 2003).
33. See II Corinthians 3:6.
34. Romans 7:14ff.
35. Ibid., 12:2.
36. Ibid., 7:16.
37. Ibid., 7:17ff.
38. See Galatians 5:17ff.
39. Romans 7:21ff.
40. See Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1991), IX, 589 a, pp. 27172; Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna,
rev. ed. B. S. Page (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), V, 1, 10, p. 378.
41. II Corinthians 4:16.
Chapter 2. Justice and Faith

1. Romans 10:4.
2. Ibid., 8:10.
3. Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4:3, 5, and 22.
4. Galatians 5:5.
5. Romans 3:2124.
6. Ibid., 1:1617.
7. II Corinthians 5:17; see also Romans 6:11.
8. Romans 5:1819.
9. Ibid., 7:2425. We omit the second sentence of verse 25, which is obviously an additional gloss.
10. Ibid., 8:14.
11. We do not need to examine here how Saint Paul claims at the same
time that sin goes back to Adam and that it took life with the law. See Bultmann,
Theology, vol. I, chap. 4, 25, The Universality of Sin, pp. 24953 (pp. 25054
in German).
13. Romans 10:16; see also 1:5.
15. Galatians 2:1920.
16. See Galatians 4:19 and I Corinthians 13:12.
17. See I Corinthians 6:20 and Philippians 1:20.
18. G. W. Leibniz, On the True Theologia Mystica (circa 1690), in Philosophical Papers, pp. 36770, here p. 368 (Von der Wahren Theologia Mystica, in
Deutsche Schriften, ed. G. E. Guhrauer, vol. I, p. 412).
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20. Ibid., 15:4244 a.
21. Ibid., 13:12.
22. Ibid., 13:10.
23. See Romans 6:4 and I Corinthians 12:13.
24. Im-perishable qualifies the glorious body, but clearly not dis-honor
and a-sthenia; the negation proceeds from the perspective of the resurrected
body in Christ, even though the latter two negations clearly refer to the carnal
body. Franck explains this as follows: The glorious body presents itself as the negation of the body of the flesh, even if the body of the flesh is understood negatively from the point of view of the body of glory. This is the case, without counting the fact that the body of flesh, in itself, is a negation. That is why it is possible
to say that Saint Paul sees the one as the negative of the other. The negation
works in both directions. Ultimately, the question is one of knowing whether the
negation of a negation is the equivalent of an affirmation. (Le corps glorieux
se prsente comme la ngation du corps de chair mme si le corps de chair est
ngativement compris depuis le corps de gloire. Sans compter que le corps de
chair est en lui-mme ngation. Cest pourquoi il est possible de dire que saint
Paul voit lun comme le ngatif de lautre. Cela joue dans les deux sens. Au
fond, la question est de savoir si la ngation dune ngation peut quivaloir
une affirmation.) Communication 13 August 2010.Trans.
25. See Galatians 6:8 and I Corinthians 15:53.
26. The opposition of the spiritual and the psychic is clearer in Francks
translation of Corinthians, which reads There is not first the spirit, but the soul,
and thereafter the spirit.Trans.
27. I Corinthians 15:44 b-47; see also Genesis 2:7.
30. Romans 12:45. In Francks original, the words in Christ are not in
the text.Trans.
31. Galatians 3:28; see also I Corinthians 12:13.
32. Romans 10:15 b; see also Isaiah 52:7.
33. See Ephesians 4:16.
35. KSA XII (188586) 1 (66), p. 27. No English translation available. See
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1968), for the fragments translated into English; abbreviated in the text as WPTrans. See also KSA XI (1884) 25 (344), p. 102 [WP, 874,
p. 468]; KSA XI (1885) 35 (74), 4, p. 542; KSA XII (188586) 2 (177), p. 154;
KSA XIII (188788) 11 (153), p. 72 [WP, 871, p. 466]; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (5),
p. 218; KSA XIII (1888) 15 (30), 2, pp. 42426, and 15 (110), p. 470; Friedrich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1966), 62, pp. 7476 (KSA V, pp. 8183) and 219, pp. 14748 (KSA V,
p. 154); Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (62), in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ,
pp. 19899 (KSA VI, pp. 25253).
36. See I Corinthians 15:58.
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37. Romans 2:16 and Galatians 6:15.

38. Romans 10:1315 a.
39. See I Thessalonians 2:13.
40. See II Corinthians 5:20.
Chapter 3. One Vision Out of Another

1. II Corinthians 6:16; see also I Corinthians 3:1617 and 6:19.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68, pp. 3942
(KSA III, p. 6468); see also KSA VIII (1879) 42 (57), p. 605.
3. Ibid., pp. 3940 (KSA III, p. 65).
4. Ibid., 84, p. 49 (KSA III, p. 79).
5. Ibid., 68, p. 40 (KSA III, pp. 6566).
6. Ibid. (KSA III, p. 66). Nietzsches original reads: resent, nachtragen;
not drag along, tragen nach.Trans.
7. Ibid., pp. 4041 (KSA III, p. 66).
8. For the following citations, see Acts of the Apostles 9:1ff., also 22:6ff.
and 26:12ff., trans. slightly modified.
9. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 14, Significance of Madness in the History of Morality, pp. 1314 (KSA III, pp. 2627).
10. Ibid., 68, p. 41 (KSA III, pp. 6667).
11. Ibid., 68, p. 41, trans. modified according to the original German
(KSA III, p. 67).
12. Ibid.
13. Nietzsche, letter of 19 July 1880, SB, vol. VI, p. 31; not in English translations of Nietzsches selected letters. The work in question is by Hermann Ldemann, Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus und ihre Stellung innerhalb seiner Heilslehre
(Kiel: Universitt Buchhandlung, 1872). Untranslated.
14. KSA IX (1880) 4 (164), pp. 14243.
15. KSA IX (1880) 4 (219), p. 154 and (252), p. 162.
16. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Frhe Schriften, ed. Hans Joachim Mette and
Karl Schlechta (Munich: Beck, 1994), vol. III, pp. 100ff. This text, dating from
1865, is not in Writings from the Early Notebooks [18671879], trans. Ladislaus Lb,
ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Trans.
17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1), in Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1969), p. 295 (KSA VI, p. 335).
18. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498.
19. KSA IX (1881) 11 (196), p. 519.
20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (142), p. 496.
21. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 62, pp. 3738 (KSA III, p. 62).
22. KSA IX (1881) 11 (143), p. 496.
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23. KSA IX (1881) 12 (226), p. 616 and KSA X (188283) 4 (248), p. 180.
24. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 494.
25. Nietzsche, SB, vol. VI, p. 108ff.; not in English translations of Nietzsches selected letters; see also KSA XII (188586) 2 (180), p. 156 and KSA XIII
(1888) 24 (1), 6, pp. 62123.
26. Nietzsche, letter of 14 August 1881, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His
Letters, p. 57 (SB, vol. VI, p. 112).
27. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 11, p. 80 (Nietzsche, vol. I,
p. 337).
28. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 494; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted
Opinions and Maxims in Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 1, 180, p. 257 (KSA II, p. 458).
29. KSA IX (1881) 12 (21), p. 579.
30. KSA XII (188586) 2 (129), p. 128.
31. KSA IX (1881) 14 (25), p. 631; this note is in fact a draft of 125 of
The Gay Science, The Madman, whose title is borrowed from Psalms 14 and 53.
On the death of God, see The Wanderer and His Shadow in Human, All Too
Human, II, 2, 84, p. 331 (KSA II, pp. 59091).
32. KSA IX (1881) 12 (77), p. 590; another draft of the same paragraph.
33. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 125, p. 181 (KSA III, p. 481).
34. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (148), p. 69 [WP, 30, p. 20].
35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496.
37. KSA IX (1881) 12 (77), p. 590.
38. KSA XI (1885) 39 (13), p. 624.
39. KSA XII (188586) 2 (107), p. 114 [WP, 151, p. 95].
40. Isaiah 43:10. Zarathustrawho separates the divine and the gods
takes the first of the Ten Commandments (You will have no other gods before
me) for the most impious of words; see KSA X (1883) 18 (35), pp. 57576.
41. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (333), p. 143.
42. KSA IX (1881) 11 (147), p. 498.
43. KSA IX (1881) 11 (158), p. 503.
44. KSA IX (1881) 11 (160), p. 503.
45. KSA IX (1881) 11 (203), pp. 52324; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, 72,
pp. 4344 (KSA III, pp. 7071).
46. KSA IX (1881) 11 (248), p. 535.
47. KSA IX (1881) 11 (158), p. 503.
48. KSA IX (1881) 11 (339), p. 573; see also KSA IX (188081) 8 (94),
p. 402, where it is already a matter of a new religion.
49. KSA XI (18841885) 29 (4), p. 337.
50. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 137, p. 189 (KSA III, p. 488), where
Nietzsche describes the Christian scenery.
51. KSA IX (1881) 11 (159), p. 503.
52. KSA IX (1881) 11 (161), p. 503.
53. KSA XI (1885) 34 (199), p. 488.
54. KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609.
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55. See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israels Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 19621963), vol. I,
pt. 2, B, chap. 4, 6, pp. 239ff.
56. II Corinthians 4:17; see also Romans 6:4 and I Corinthians 6:14.
57. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 11, p. 75 (Nietzsche, vol. I,
p. 331).
58. KSA IX (1881) 11 (220), p. 526.
59. KSA XI (1885) 41 (7), p. 682; see also (1885) 34 (149), pp. 47071.
Chapter 4. Circulus Vitiosis Deus?

1. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 21, p. 151, trans. modified (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 41112).
2. See ibid., chap. 9, p. 64 (vol. I, p. 319).
3. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 46, p. 60 (KSA V, p. 67).
4. See ibid., 49, p. 64 (KSA V, p. 70), trans. modified.
5. Ibid., 47, pp. 6162 (KSA V, p. 68).
6. Ibid., 51, p. 65 (KSA V, p. 71).
7. Ibid., 259, p. 204 (KSA V, p. 208); see also KSA IX (1881) 12 (226),
p. 616 and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 125, pp. 18182 (KSA III, pp. 48082).
8. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 52, pp. 6566 (KSA V, p. 72). Nietzsche uses here the titles with which Luther characterizes the two testaments;
see Martin Luther, Preface to the Old Testament (1523), in Martin Luthers
Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress,
2005).
10. Ibid., 53, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 72), trans. slightly modified.
11. Ibid., 55, p. 67 (KSA V, p. 74).
12. Ibid., 53, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 73).
13. See ibid., 54, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 73).
14. KSA XI (1885) 36 (49), p. 571 [WP, 91, p. 56].
15. KSA XII (1887) 10 (58), p. 491 [WP, 9, p. 11].
16. KSA XI (1885) 34 (204), p. 490.
17. God, as Paul created him, is a denial of God.Trans. Nietzsche, The
Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 47, p. 175 (KSA VI, pp. 225
26). Concerning the question mark that comes at the end of the formula circulus
vitiosus deus, see KSA XIII (188687) 7 (3), p. 254, where Nietzsche speaks of
those agnostics who worship a question mark as a god.
18.Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 19,
pp. 14041 (KSA VI, p. 185).
19. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 57, pp. 6869 (KSA V, p. 75).
20. Ibid., 58, pp. 6971 (KSA V, p. 76).
21. See ibid., 59, p. 71 (KSA V, p. 78).
22. Ibid., 60, p. 72 (KSA V, p. 79), trans. modified.
23. See KSA XIII (188788) 11 (264), p. 99.
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25. It is important to recall here what Luther wrote in his commentary to
the Epistle to the Galatians: [Faith] maketh us divine people, and it is the creator
of a certain divinity, not in the substance of God, but in us. . . . [It] is the wisdom
of wisdoms, the righteousness of righteousness, the religion of religions and the
sacrifice of sacrifices. . . . Whosoever then believeth the Word of God . . . is righteous before God . . . which giveth glory unto God: that is, he giveth to God that
which is due to Him; in Luther, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Erasmus Middleton, ed. John Prince Fallowes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1979), pp. 12526
(Luther, Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XL, 1, pp. 36061).
26. KSA XII (188586) 2 (197), p. 164.
27. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 62, pp. 7475 (KSA V, p. 82), trans.
slightly modified. On the new meaning of religion as doctrine of the hierarchy
of souls, see KSA XII (1886) 3 (13), pp. 17374.
28. See KSA XII (1887) 10 (118), pp. 52325 and KSA XIII (1888) 15 (42),
pp. 43336.
29. Romans 6:4.
30. Karl Barth, The Resurrection of the Dead, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York:
Fleming H. Revell, 1933), p. 109; the English reads: . . . the resurrection of the
dead [is] already effected in God (Die Auferstehung der Toten [Munich: C. Kaiser,
1924], p. 112).
31. KSA IX (1881) 11 (195), p. 519.
Part 2. The Shadow of God

Chapter 1. The Double Status of the Body
1. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 10,
p. 133 and 8, p. 131 (KSA VI, pp. 176 and 174); also see KSA XI (1885) 42 (6),
3, p. 696.
pp. 23839); see also Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, Lecture IV,
p. 39 (Was Heisst Denken? p. 15).
3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. I, 1, p. 3. Henceforth referred to
as WWR (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, p. 29); German pagination indicated hereafter between parentheses, following the English citation. Franck
uses the revised edition of Le monde comme volont et comme reprsentation, trans. A.
Burdeau, rev. R. Roos (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, 2nd ed.).
However, Franck revises in turn the Burdeau-Roos translation. We follow the
Payne translation, altering it in those places where fluency with Francks text is
primordial.Trans.
4. WWR, 2, p. 5 (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, p. 32).
5. WWR, 1, p. 4 (vol. I, p. 30). Payne translates this as inner reluctance.
6. WWR, 6, p. 19 (p. 48), trans. modified.
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7. WWR, 6, p. 20 (p. 49).

8. See WWR, 15, p. 82 (p. 123).
9. WWR, 18, p. 99 (p. 142).
10. WWR, 18, p. 100 (p. 143), trans. modified.
11. WWR, 18, p. 102 (p. 146).
12. WWR, 19, p. 104 (p. 148).
13. WWR, 22, p. 110 (p. 155).
14. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroborations from the Empirical Sciences That the Authors Philosophy Has Received Since
Its First Appearance, trans. E. F. J. Payne, ed. David E. Cartwright (Oxford: Berg,
1992), p. 36.
15. WWR, 24, p. 125 (p. 172).
16. See WWR, vol. II, chap. 18, p. 198 (in German, vol. III, p. 232).
17. WWR, vol. II, chap. 20, p. 245 (III, p. 286).
18. See ibid., p. 246 (p. 288).
21. Ibid., p. 251 (p. 294), trans. mod.
22. Ibid., p. 250 (p. 293).
23. Ibid., p. 251 (p. 293).
24. Ibid., p. 252 (p. 295).
25. Ibid., p. 254 (p. 297).
26. Ibid., p. 255 (p. 298).
27. Ibid., p. 259 (p. 302).
28. See WWR, vol. II, chap. 21, p. 270 (III, p. 316).
29. WWR, vol. II, chap. 19, pp. 214 and 237 (III, pp. 250 and 277).
31. WWR, vol. I, 23, p. 115 (vol. I, p. 161).
Chapter 2. The Self-Negation of the Will

1. WWR, vol. I, 25, pp. 12930 (I, p. 177).
2. WWR, Preface to the First Edition, p. xii (p. 7).
3. WWR, vol. I, 31, p. 172 (I, p. 224).
4. KSA VIII (187677) 23 (22), p. 411.
5. WWR, vol. II, chap. 29 (supplement to 3032), p. 365 (IV, p. 433),
trans. modified.
6. WWR, vol. I, 32, p. 175 (I, pp. 22829), trans. modified.
7. WWR, 33, p. 177 (I, p. 230).
8. WWR, 34, p. 178 (I, p. 232).
9. WWR, 38, p. 196 (I, p. 253).
10. WWR, 36, pp. 18485 (I, p. 239).
11. WWR, 36, p. 185 (I, p. 240), trans. mod.
12. WWR, 39, p. 203 (I, p. 260).
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13. KSA XII (188586) 1 (148), p. 44; also see KSA VIII (187677) 23 (27),
p. 413.
14. WWR, 52, p. 257 (I, p. 324).
15. Ibid., pp. 26263 (p. 330).
16. Ibid., p. 264 n.50 (p. 332). In his letter of 17 April 1712 to C. Goldbach,
Leibniz defined it thus: Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi ; see G. W. Leibniz, Opera Omnia Nunc primum collecta in classes distributa, praefationibus et incidibus exornata, studio (1768), Vol. III: Opera Mathematica,
ed. L. Dutens (Hirschberg: Georg Olms, 1989), p. 437. Untranslated, we thank
Franois Duchesneau, Universit de Montral, for his translation.
17. WWR, 48, p. 233 (I, p. 295).
18. WWR, 52, p. 266 (I, p. 334).
19. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 357, p. 308 (KSA III, p. 600); see also
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne
Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), 1, pp. 2734 (KSA I, pp. 8049); KSA
VII (187273) 19 (28), p. 425, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) (3), in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 13646 (KSA I, pp. 35063).
20. Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 7 n.12.
21. WWR, 54, pp. 278 and 280 (II, pp. 351 and 354).
22. WWR, 56, p. 309 (II, p. 387).
23. WWR, 27, pp. 14647 (I, p. 197).
24. WWR, 56, p. 310 n.25 (II, p. 388) and Ecclesiastes 1:18: Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem.
25. WWR, 60, p. 328 (II, p. 410).
26. WWR, vol. II, chap. 45 (supplement to 60), p. 570 (IV, p. 668).
27. WWR, vol. I, 62, p. 335 (II, p. 418).
28. WWR, 63, p. 352 (II, p. 438); see also Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, trans. A. V. Miller and Steven A.
Taubeneck, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990), 448, p. 255: But as
a limited spirit it passes into universal world history, the events of which exhibit
the dialectic of the particular national spirits, the judgement of the world (Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse [Heidelberg, 1817]).
29. WWR, 65, p. 360 (II, p. 448).
30. WWR, 66 and 67, pp. 373 and 375 (II, pp. 463 and 465).
31. WWR, 66, p. 374 (II, p. 464).
32. WWR, 66, p. 373 (II, p. 463).
33. WWR, 68, p. 380 (II, p. 470).
34. See WWR, 55 and 70, pp. 301 and 402 (II, pp. 378 and 497).
35. WWR, 68, p. 380 (II, p. 471).
36. WWR, 68, p. 397 (II, p. 491).
37. WWR, 68, p. 385 (II, p. 477).
38. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (361), p. 159.
39. WWR, vol. I, 71, p. 411 (II, p. 507).
40. WWR, 71, pp. 41112 (II, p. 508).
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Chapter 3. The Great Coincidence

1. WWR, vol. II, chap. 47, p. 589 (IV, p. 690).
2. WWR, vol. I, 65, p. 362 (II, p. 450).
3. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 366, Francks italics.
4. WWR, 68, p. 385 (II, p. 476).
5. WWR, 60, p. 329 (II, p. 411); see also Romans 5:1221.
6. See WWR, 70, p. 407 (II, p. 502).
7. See WWR, 70, p. 404 (II, p. 499).
8. See WWR, 64, p. 358 (II, p. 445); see also Romans 12:19.
9. WWR, 71, p. 411 (II, p. 507).
10. KSA IX (1880) 4 (293), p. 172; see also KSA X (1882) 3 (1), 285, p. 87.
11. WWR, vol. II, chap. 19, p. 230 (vol. III, p. 269), Francks italics for of
the heart.
12. Ezekiel 11:1921.
13. Romans 10:910.
14. KSA IX (1880) 4 (218), p. 154.
15. See Romans 1:21; 2:5; 11:25; II Corinthians 3:1416.
16. Romans 10:2.
17. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 1, 10, p. 74 (Sein und Zeit
pp. 4849); see also Genesis 1:26; Psalm 8.
18. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Way Towards the Blessed Life, or The
Doctrine of Religion, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. W. Smith
(Sterling, Va.: Thoemmes, 1999), vol. II, p. 391 (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder auch die Religionslehre, in Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte [Berlin: Verlag von
Veit, 1845], vol. V, p. 484); see also J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804, 25th Lesson, vol. X, p. 291. In English, J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans.
Peter Heathe and John Lachs (New York: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1982).
19. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the
Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986),
p. 23 (Philosophische Untersuchungen ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die
damit zusammenhngenden Gegenstnde in Schellings Werke, ed. M. Schrder [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1965], vol. IV [180415], p. 242; see also F. W. J. von Schelling,
Philosophie der Offenbarung, part 2 in Schellings Werke, vol. VI [184154], pp. 427
and 402).
20. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 797, p. 485, trans. mod. (Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. F. Wessels and H. Clairmont [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988], p. 522);
see also G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 197175), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, 573,
pp. 30213.
21. KSA XI (1884) 26 (248), p. 215 and KSA XI (1885) 35 (66), p. 539.
22. G. W. Leibniz, Die Leibniz-Handschriften, annotated by Eduard Bodemann (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), I, p. 39, untranslated. The rest of the
text, which Heidegger does not mention in The Principle of Reason, confirms its
importance: One of my main principles is that nothing is created without rea-
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son. It is a principle of philosophy. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally none other

than the admission of divine wisdom, although I do not first speak of this.
23. KSA XI (1884) 26 (412), p. 262; see also (1884) 26 (8), p. 152.
24. KSA XI (1885) 38 (7), p. 605; see also KSA XII (188586) 2 (131),
2, p. 129, wherein German Idealism is interpreted as the attempt to transform
Christianity into a gnosis.
25. See KSA XII (1887) 10 (96), p. 511.
26. KSA XII (1887) 10 (150), pp. 53940; see also KSA X (1887) 9 (42),
p. 355. In 1879, Nietzsche had already characterized Schopenhauers thought as
Christianity stood on its head; see Assorted Opinions and Maxims in Human, All
Too Human, II, 2, 33, p. 223 (KSA II, p. 396).
27. See KSA XIII (188788) 11 (138), p. 64.
28. WWR, vol. I, 70, p. 405 (II, p. 501); also see 60, p. 328 (II, p. 410).
29. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. I: Introduction
and The Concept of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart,
ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Introduction, pp. 84 and 153 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke,
Part 1, Introduction, pp. 4 and 6364). The term coincidence is coincide in
one in the English.Trans.
Chapter 4. Speculative Theology

1. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, rev. ed.), p. 178 (Die
Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie, GA 24, p. 254). Franck published an initial version of this chapter and the two that follow it in Philosophie, no. 42 (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1994), pp. 6996.
2. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 75 (Zur Sache des Denkens, GA 14, p. 82); see also
Martin Heidegger, Vorwort zur ersten Ausgabe der Frhe Schriften (1972), in
Frhe Schriften, GA 1, pp. 5657.
3. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York:
Harper and Row, 1969), p. 43 (Identitt und Differenz, p. 32).
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (New York: Humanities, 1955), vol. I, Introduction, p. 30 (Vorlesungen
ber die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Walter Jaeschke [Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
1993], p. 27).
5. Franck uses Derridas translation of Aufhebung, relve (relieved, resolved, taken up again, brought together, raised); see Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).Trans.
6. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 50 (Identitt und Differenz, p. 40),
trans. modified.
7. Millers translation dispenses with the spatial metaphor present in
the French (Par o la science . . .), entitling the section With What Must the
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Science Begin?; see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1969), vol. I, bk. 1, p. 67. The German reads:
Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?Trans.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Doctrine of Being, in Science of Logic, vol. I, p. 72
(Die Lehre vom Sein [1832], in Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 61).
9. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 53 (Identitt und Differenz, p. 44).
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Subjective Logic, or The Doctrine of the Notion, in
Science of Logic, vol. II, p. 843 (Die Lehre vom Begriff [1816], in Wissenschaft der
Logik, p. 305).
11. Hegel, The Doctrine of Being in Science of Logic, vol. I, p. 50 (Die
Lehre vom Sein [1832], pp. 3334).
12. Ibid., p. 78 (p. 68); see also Identity and Difference, pp. 5354 (Identitt
und Differenz, p. 44).
13. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 54 (Identitt und Differenz, p. 44).
14. See Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, 17,
pp. 5859 (Enzyklopdie [1817]).
15. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pt. VI, 83
Zusatz, p. 122.
16. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to What Is Metaphysics? trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 288 (Einleitung zu Was ist Metaphysik? in Wegmarken,
GA 9, p. 379).
17. Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J. L. Stocks, bk. I, 3, 270 b5ff., in The
Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, p. 450 (De Coelo, 270 b5ff).
18. I Corinthians 1:2223; see 12:3 and Galatians 3:28.
19. Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Ground, trans. W. McNeill, in
Pathmarks, p. 112 (Vom Wesen des Grundes, in Wegmarken, GA 9, pp. 14344).
The word filosofia (philosophia) appears only one time in the entire New Testament, when the author of the Letter to the Colossians cautions, beware that you
are not enslaved with philosophy that empty trickery, according to the human
tradition and the things of the world and not according to Christ. Given that
the human tradition and the things of the world include Mosaic law, philosophy could not have an exclusively Greek sense there. See Colossians 2:8 and
Galatians 4:3 and 910.
20. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 8 (Einfhrung in die Metaphysik,
GA 40, p. 9) and Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 13, p. 88 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 132);
see also Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology and Theology, trans. James G. Hart
and John C. Muraldo, in Pathmarks, p. 53 (Phnomenologie und Theologie
[1927], in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 66).
21. See Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, 384, pp. 1820.
22. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 55 (p. 46), trans. modified. Hereafter ID in English, IuD in German.
23. The same is true for English.Trans.
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24. In translating the New Testament, Luther always renders ho theos as

Gott, God.
25. ID, p. 56 (IuD, p. 47).
26. ID, pp. 5556 (IuD, pp. 4647), trans. modified.
27. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York:
Dover, 1956), pt. III, sect. 3, chap. 2, p. 319 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der
Geschichte, Theorie Werkausgabe, vol. XII, p. 386). In a very different context and
critically, Nietzsche will speak of Christianity as the most cardinal event
[cardinalstes Ereignis] in the history of humanity; see KSA XII (1887) 10 (79),
p. 501.
Chapter 5. The Prophetic Translation

1. Jean-Dominique Barthlemy, LAncien Testament a mri Alexandrie (The Old Testament Came of Age in Alexandria), in tudes dhistoire du
texte de lAncien Testament (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), p. 135.
Untranslated. Elias Joseph Bickerman writes, for his part, that the Greek Pentateuch is a non-Greek book; see The Septuagint as a Translation, in Studies in
Jewish and Christian History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), vol. I, pp. 180 and 186. The
same is argued in the work he finished in 1981 and published in 1988: The Jews in
the Greek Age (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988), p. 107.
2. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pt. IV, p. 387 (Vorlesungen ber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Theorie Werkausgabe, vol. XIX, p. 418).
3. Philo, De Vita Mosis, vol. II, 2528. Franck is citing the French translation of Roger Arnaldez, Claude Mondsert, Jean Pouilloux, and P. Savinel (Paris:
Le Cerf, Collection Oeuvres de Philon dAlexandrie XXII, 1967). In English,
On the Life of Moses, vol. II, chap. 5, trans. Charles Duke Yonge, in The Works of
Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993). We follow
the French for fluency with the text.Trans.
4. Ibid.
5. See E. Levinas, The Translation of the Scriptures, in In the Time of the
Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994),
pp. 46ff.
6. Augustine, The City of God, trans. J. W. C. Wand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), bk. XVIII, 43.
7. Jean-Dominique Barthlemy, LAncien Testament, in tudes dhistoire du
texte de lAncien Testament, p. 139; see also La place de la Septante dans lglise,
pp. 11126, and Pourquoi la Torah a-t-elle t traduite en grec?, pp. 32240.
Untranslated.
8. See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III: The Consummate
Religion, pp. 32324 n.199 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion III: Die vollendete Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke, p. 246).
9. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, p. 315 (Vorlesungen ber
die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, p. 239), trans. modified.
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10. Ibid., pp. 192 and 358 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion,
pp. 125 and 276).
11. Heidegger, ID, pp. 5657 (IuD, p. 47).
12. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Preface to the First Edition, p. 27 (Die
Lehre vom Sein [1832], in Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 6).
13. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Introduction, p. 63 (Wissenschaft der
Logik, p. 50).
14. Ibid., p. 51 (p. 35); see also Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of Logic, Introduction, 9, p. 13.
15. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Introduction, p. 58 (p. 44); see also John
16:13. In his lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel cites these words several times; see Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, pp. 115, 146, 149, 325,
and 383, where we read: The Spirit will lead you to the whole trutha speculative intuition (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, pp. 50, 82, 84,
249, and 300).
16. ID, p. 57 (IuD, p. 48).
17. Ibid., pp. 5758 (p. 49).
18. Ibid., p. 70 (p. 62).
19. Ibid., p. 59 (p. 50).
20. Ibid., p. 60 (p. 51).
21. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 42 and 45 (GA 54, pp. 62 and 66).
22. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, p. 68); see also John 14:6.
23. See Descartes Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne introducing the
Meditations in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, p. 4.
24. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy
of Mind, 393 Zusatz, pp. 4145; see also 384 Zusatz, pp. 1820 and 381 Zusatz,
pp. 815.
25. Hegel, The Doctrine of Being, in Science of Logic, pp. 8990, trans.
modified. (Die Lehre vom Sein, in Wissenschaft der Logik [1830], p. 106); see
also Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, p. 355 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, p. 274).
26. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 33031 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. XII, pp. 399401); see G. W. F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, in Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948), pp. 25657 (Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, in
Frhe Schriften, vol. I, Theorie Werkausgabe, p. 373). In his 193841 study devoted
to negativity in Hegel, Heidegger notes the following, whichmoreoverimplies the acknowledgment of the Christian character of all modern philosophy:
Hegel begins with the beginning, a beginning which is the absolute version of the
ego cogitoa properly modern interpretation of the ; in Martin
Heidegger, Hegel, GA 68, p. 52. Untranslated.
27. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 6, p. 241 (Nietzsche, vol. II,
p. 321), and Martin Heidegger, Zeichen, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, GA
13, p. 212, where the German reads: . . . weil die Grundstellung Hegels, seine
christlich-theologische Metaphysik preisgegeben ist.
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28. Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad

and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 98 (Hegels
Phnomenologie des Geistes, GA 32, p. 141).
29. Ibid., p. 99 (p. 143). For his part, Hegel wrote: But although it must
be conceded that the church fathers studied Greek philosophy, it is still primarily immaterial where the doctrine came from. The question is solely whether it
is true in and for itself ; in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, p. 157 n.17
(Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, pt. I, p. 67).
30. Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 100 (Hegels Phnomenologie
des Geistes, GA 32, p. 143).
31. See ibid., p. 112 (p. 162): Dialectic stands and falls with the matter itself,
just as Hegel took it up as the matter of philosophy. To speak more clearly, one
cannot be enthusiastic about dialectic and involve oneself in the revival of Hegelian philosophy while at the same time pushing asidewith a wink of the eye and
a pitiful smilethings like his Christianity, his Christology, and his doctrine of
the Trinity. If one does this, then the whole of Hegelianism turns into a mendacious prattle; and Hegel himself becomes a ridiculous figure.
Chapter 6. Zeus or Christ

1. ID, p. 61, trans. mod. (IuD, p. 52). Francks italics.
2. The French text reads: ltre est ltre de ltant, cest--dire ltre qui
est ltant. Following Heidegger, Franck is placing the ontological difference
before the division of beings into higher and lower. In the theological drift that
typifies the history of Western ontology, Being becomes the Supreme Being; it
becomes ltre qui est ltant (Being that is a being).Trans.
3. ID, p. 64 (IuD, p. 56).
4. Ibid., pp. 6465 (p. 56).
5. While the English usually distinguishes between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) in the plural, we maintain the singular (ltant) here, because it
is precisely a question of how the Supreme Being (ltant, summum ens) entered
into philosophy. That is, how the highest entity came to co-found metaphysics as
ontology.Trans.
6. See Heidegger, Language in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 202ff. (Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12, pp. 22ff.).
7. ID, p. 65 (IuD, p. 57). Austrag tends to mean to carry something out,
to transact completely; the Grimm dictionary suggests as its cognates perductio ad
finem, exitus, transactio.Trans.
8. Ibid., p. 66 (p. 57).
9. Ibid., p. 66 (p. 58).
10. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of
Logic, 13, pp. 1819; see also ibid., 163, pp. 226ff.
11. ID, p. 66 (IuD, p. 58).
12. Ibid.
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13. Ibid., pp. 6768 (pp. 5960), trans. modified.

14. Ibid., p. 68 (p. 61).
15. Ibid., pp. 6970 (p. 62).
16. After having thus described the essential origin of the onto-theo-logical
constitution of metaphysics, Heidegger refers, in a simple reference, to a text of
Leibniz, as to one of the classical examples in the history of metaphysics of
this situation. That is to say that the entirety of the texts in the history of metaphysics must be understood on the basis of this state of affairs. Conversely, any
documentary inquiry into the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics
however ample and systematic it may beis in principle powerless to corroborate or put into question Heideggers concept of metaphysics. Everything that
results by way of the step back, as Heidegger foresaw, may merely be exploited
and absorbed by [the] metaphysics [that carries on] in its own way, as the result
of representational thinking; see ID, pp. 7273 (IuD, p. 65), and for the remark
about Leibniz, see p. 70 (pp. 6263).
17. Ibid., p. 69 (p. 61).
18. Martin Heidegger, Logos (Heraclitus, fragment B 50), in Early Greek
Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975),
p. 73 (Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 216). This is the Diels-Kranz fragment 32.
19. Ibid.
20. ID, p. 70 (IuD, p. 62).
21. See Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 121ff. (GA 54, pp. 180ff.).
22. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, trans. F. A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks,
p. 267 (Brief ber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 351).
23. See Martin Heidegger, The Thing: Epilogue, in Poetry, Language,
Thought, p. 184 (Nachwort zu Das Ding, in Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 177); see
also Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 13637 (Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung, GA 4, p. 114). There, Heidegger defines the Judeo-Christian prophets
as announcing the God on whom the certainty of salvation in supra-terrestrial
beatitude counts. Aside from the fact that it is rather difficult to speak of Christian prophets, Israels prophetism concerns neither the certainty of salvation
nor certainty of the supra-terrestrial. To put it differently, Isaiah is not Luther,
Luther is not Platonic, and Christ does not prophesy, Christ fulfills.
24. See Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 109ff. (GA 54, pp. 162ff.) and Martin
Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1979), chap. 1, pp. 1213 (Heraklit in Seminre,
GA 15, p. 27): The gods of the Greeks . . . have nothing to do with religion. The
Greeks did not have faith in their gods.
25. Exodus 3:14.
26. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, pp. 12425 n.31 and
p. 127 (Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, pt. I, pp. 41 and 43), trans.
modified.
27. Ibid., p. 399 (p. 294).
28. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy
of Mind, 377 Zusatz, p. 2.
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29. See Martin Heidegger, Hegel and the Greeks, trans. R. Metcalf,
in Pathmarks, pp. 33334 (Hegel und die Griechen, in Wegmarken, GA 9,
p. 441).
30. Although we have proceeded according to an entirely different orientation, we here join the analyses of Jean-Luc Marion, who does not argue for the
speculative, i.e., Trinitarian, character of Hegels onto-theo-logy; see J.-L. Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 1, 3, pp. 33ff., and concerning Hegels concept
of God, see ibid., p. 35 ( Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans ltre [Paris: Fayard, 1982],
pp. 51ff. and 54).
31. See ID, p. 72 (IuD, p. 64).
32. Zarathustra says, I could only believe in a god who knew how to dance
in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London:
Penguin Books, 1969), I, On Reading and Writing, p. 68, trans. modified.
33. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Religion, vol. I, Introduction, p. 73 (Vorlesungen ber die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. XVIII, p. 94).
34. See Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 98 (Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, GA 32, p. 141), which cites a text other than those to which he has
already referred.
35. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 22, p. 157, trans. modified. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 657) and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 108 (variant),
p. 167.
Part 3. The Guiding Thread

Chapter 1. The Plurality of the Body
1. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 3, 142, p. 78 (KSA II, p. 138).
2. Novalis, Logological Fragments II, in Philosophical Writings, trans. and
ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),
p. 78 (Vorarbeiten zu Verschieden Fragmentsammlungen [1798] [256], in Werke, ed.
H.-J. Mhl and R. Samuel [Munich: Carl Hanser, 19781987], vol. II, p. 376).
Final italics are Francks.
3. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien I (17991800) (97), in Werke, vol. II,
p. 766. Untranslated fragment.
4. Revelation 23:13.
5. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, trans. and ed. David W. Wood
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 557, p. 99 (Das Allgemeine
Brouillon [17981799], in Werke, vol. II, p. 599); see also 433, p. 67 (vol. II,
p. 556) and 571, p. 100 (vol. II, p. 602).
6. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien III (17991800) (393), in Werke, vol. II,
p. 831. For comparable Novalis fragments and a discussion of Romantic religion, see William Arctander OBrien, Romantic Religion: 17991800, in Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), chap. 5,
pp. 21644.Trans.
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7. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien I (17991800) (75), in Werke, vol. II,

p. 762 (among selected fragments cited in Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Historical Reprint Series, 2005],
pp. 16785). See I Corinthians 3:1617, cited by Nietzsche in KSA XII (1887)
10 (179), p. 563.
8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 24, p. 95 (KSA V, p. 335).
9. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 407, p. 63 (Das Allgemeine
Brouillon [17981799], in Werke, vol. II, p. 551).
10. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 299, p. 240 (KSA III, p. 538); also see KSA
XI (1885) 35 (45), pp. 53132 [WP, 463, p. 255] and 42 (1), 6, p. 692 [WP, 977,
p. 512].
11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (370), p. 248; see KSA (1884), 25 (120), p. 45 and
(362), p. 107; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (151), pp. 33233 [WP, 394, pp. 21112].
12. Ephesians 4:24; see also Romans 6:6 and 13:14; Galatians 3:27.
13. KSA X (188283) 4 (83), p. 138; Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
(1874) (4), in Untimely Meditations, p. 150 (KSA I, p. 367); KSA IX (1881), 11 (27),
p. 452. In the Illuminations, published in 1886, using also the Pauline expression,
Rimbaud exclaims: Oh! Our bones are now reclothed with newly desiring bodies
(Being Beauteous) or again: You turn your head away: new love! You look back
againnew love! (To a Reason). See Arthur Rimbaud, Season in Hell and Illuminations, trans. Mark Treharne (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 73 and 83.
14. KSA XII (188586) 1 (216), p. 58; also see KSA X (1883) 3 (1), 148,
p. 70.
15. KSA XI (1885) 34 (235), p. 499. In one of his ultimate notes, in which
his whole enterprise is summed up, Nietzsche announces: It is only starting
from me that there are hopes anew; see KSA XIII (188889) 25 (6), p. 640.
16. KSA XI (1884) 26 (374), p. 249.
p. 194 (KSA VI, p. 248); see also ibid., 13, pp. 13536 (KSA VI, p. 179) and KSA
XI (1884) 25 (135), p. 49.
18. KSA XII (188586) 2 (91), p. 106 [WP, 518, p. 281]; see also KSA XI
(1884) 27 (70), p. 292 and KSA XII (188687) 7 (63), pp. 31718 [WP, 487,
p. 269].
19. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 639 [WP, 492, p. 272].
20. KSA XII (188687) 5 (56), p. 205 [WP, 489, p. 270].
21. KSA XII (188687) 7 (55), pp. 31314 [WP, 519, p. 281]; see also KSA
XII (188687) 7 (63), pp. 31718 [WP, 487, p. 269].
22. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, 693, p. 369].
23. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (485), p. 141.
24. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (15), p. 635 [WP, 532, p. 289].
25. See KSA XI (1885), 36 (35) [WP, 659, p. 34748], 37 (4) and 40 (15)
[WP, 532, p. 289]; KSA XI (1884) 27 (70), p. 292.
26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (119), p. 297 [WP, 809, p. 428].
27. See KSA XII (18861887) 5 (56), pp. 2056 [WP, 489, p. 270].
28. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (36), pp. 56566 [WP, 659, p. 34748]; KSA XII
(188586) 2 (102), p. 112 (WP, 491, p. 271).
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29. Friedrich Nietzsche, An Attempt at Self-Criticism (2), in The Birth of

Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5 (KSA I, p. 14).
30. KSA XII (18851886) 2 (130), p. 129 [WP, 797, p. 419, trans. slightly
modified for fluency with the original].
31. KSA XI (1884) 25 (445), p. 132.
32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 3, p. 41 (KSA IV, p. 14),
trans. slightly mod.
33. KSA XII (1887) 9 (102), p. 394 [WP, 802, p. 422]; also see KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (117), pp. 29395 [WP, 800, pp. 42021] and (119), pp. 29699 [WP,
812, p. 430].
34. KSA XII (188586) 2 (114), p. 118 [WP, 796, p. 419].
35. See KSA XII (188586), 2 (119), p. 121.
36. KSA XII (188586) 2 (114) [WP, 796, p. 419]; see also Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human, I, 1, 27, p. 26 (KSA II, p. 48), where art is already understood as what ensures the transition between religion and a philosophical
science effectively liberating.
37. See, for example, KSA XIII (1888) 17 (9), pp. 52930.
38. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (120), p. 299.
39. After having blamed Wagner for knowing neither to walk nor to
dance, Nietzsche comments: but these are physiological judgments and not aesthetic ones: onlyI dont have an aesthetics anymore!; see KSA XII (188687)
7 (7), p. 285.
40. KSA XI (1884) 25 (408), p.119; see KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 28687.
41. KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 28687; see also (1883) 7 (151), p. 292.
42. See KSA VIII (1875) 6 (48), pp. 11518; see also KSA XI (1885) 35
(45), pp. 53132 [WP, 463, p. 255]; KSA XI (1885) 42 (6), 6, p. 696.
43. KSA IX (1880) 6 (359), p. 288.
44. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 301 [WP, 692, p. 369]; see KSA XIII
(188788) 11 (114), p. 54: there is no such thing as willing but only a willing
something: one must not remove the aim from the total condition.
45. KSA VIII (1875) 9 (1), p. 181.
46. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, 492, p. 271].
47. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 57677. It is possible that Nietzsche had in
mind here a text from Kant, read no doubt when he was undertaking in 186768
a thesis on teleology and the organism. In The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1783), Kant indeed wrote:
For it is astonishing that something like an animal body should even be possible. And even if I could fully understand all its springs and pipes, all its nerve
ducts and levers, its entire mechanical organisation, I should still continue to
be amazedamazed at the way so many different functions can be united in
a single structure, amazed at the way in which the processes for realising one
purpose can be combined so well with those by means of which some other purpose is attained, amazed at the way in which the same organisation also serves
to maintain the machine. . . . Nor, indeed, is the ground of my amazement removed once I have convinced myself that all the unity and harmony I observe
<Q>In n. 39, should

we add two hows, making it knowing neither how to walk nor
how to dance?
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around me is only possible because a Being exists which contains within it the
grounds not only of reality but also of all possibility; see Theoretical Philosophy
(17551770), trans. and ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), sec. III (Reflection 8), p. 192 (Akademieausgabe, vol. II, p. 152). We
mention this text to show henceforth that Nietzsches interpretation of the body
and of knowledge holds for a critique of Kants transcendental logic.
48. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 18, p. 102.
49. KSA XII (188586) 1 (72), p. 29.
50. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (122), p. 303.
51. KSA X (188283) 4 (207), p. 169.
52. KSA XI (1884) 27 (59), p. 289.
53. KSA XI (1885) 34 (123), p. 461; also see KSA X (188283) 4 (189),
p. 165.
54. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 19, p. 26 (KSA V, p. 33). These are
mortal souls; see KSA XI (1885) 40 (8), pp. 63132 and (42), p. 650 [WP, 490,
pp. 27172].
55. KSA XII (188586) 1 (58), p. 25.
56. KSA XI (1885) 40 (61), p. 661.
Chapter 2. The Criterion

1. KSA XII (188586) 2 (159), p. 143 [WP, 620, p. 333]; also see KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (98), p. 275 [WP, 551, p. 296]: If I think of the muscle apart from its
effects, I negate it . . .
2. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, 490, p. 271]; also see KSA XIII (1888)
23 (2), pp. 600601 [WP, 815, p. 432]: there is only one kind of force.
4. KSA VII (187273) 19 (159), p. 469.
5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55); see also KSA XI
(1885) 40 (37), pp. 64647, KSA XII (188586) 2 (139), pp. 13536 [WP, 554,
pp. 300301], and KSA XII (18861887) 5 (9), p. 187 [WP, 1018, p. 526].
6. KSA XI (1885) 36 (31), p. 563 [WP, 619, pp. 33233]. We read inner
will (innere Wille) and not inner world (innere Welt), following in this way the
text of the first edition of the works of Nietzsche, the Grossoktav-Ausgabe, vol. XVI,
p. 104, and not the one from the Colli Montinari edition; see also KSA XI (1885)
35 (68), p. 540, where the internal side of the force is treated.
7. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (105), p. 28283 [WP, 710, p. 378]; also see, as early
as KSA VII (18691870) 3 (23); KSA VII (187273) 19 (155) and (156).
8. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (81), p. 261 [WP, 689, p. 368]; also see KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (79) [WP, 634 and 635, pp. 33739] and 14 (82) [WP, 689, p. 368],
where in the same meaning, Nietzsche talks about quantum of power, quantum of will to power, dynamic quanta, and quanta of will.
9. KSA XI (1885) 35 (55) [WP, 1064, p. 547, trans. modified] and (54)
[WP, 1064, p. 547]; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), (190), (233), (245), (265),
and (305).
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10. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79) [WP, 634, p. 338] and KSA XI (1884)
25 (196).
11. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (83) [WP, 674, p. 356]; see also (1888) 14
(184) [WP, 567, pp. 3056].
12. See KSA XII (188586) 2 (94), p. 107.
13. KSA XII (188586) 2 (157), pp. 14243 [WP, 564, p. 304, trans. modified]; also see KSA XI (1884) 26 (224), p. 208.
14. KSA XII (188586) 2 (76), p. 96 [WP, 660, p. 349].
15. It is Gilles Deleuze who insisted on the importance of the distinction
between active and reactive forces; see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pt. II, Active and Reactive,
pp. 3972.
16. KSA XII (188687) 7 (48), p. 311.
17. KSA XII (1887) 10 (111), p. 520; see also 10 (145) [WP, 1009, p. 522]:
Points of view for my values: . . . whether out of stored-up energy, spontaneously, or merely stimulated reactively, and provoked?
18. KSA XII (188586) 2 (131), p. 132 [WP, 69, p. 46 (note), trans.
modified].
19. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 120, p. 77 (KSA III, p. 115).
20. KSA XII (188586) 2 (97), p. 108 [WP, 1013, p. 523, trans. modified].
See also (1885) 41 (7), pp. 68182 [WP, 1051, p. 541], where the efflorescence
of the Greek body is presented as a criterion.
21. KSA XII (1887) 9 (1), p. 339.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Write Such Good Books: Twilight of the
Idols, in Ecce Homo, 2, p. 314 (KSA VI, p. 355).
23. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), pp. 56061 [WP, 642, p. 342], KSA XII
(1887) 10 (138), pp. 53536 [WP, 639, pp. 34041].
24. KSA XII (188687) 5 (64), p. 209 [WP, 657, p. 346, trans. modified].
25. KSA XII (188687) 6 (14), p. 238 partially in [WP, 565, pp. 3045,
trans. modified].
26. See Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 5, pp. 5056
(KSA I, pp. 82226); Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, in Human, All
Too Human, II, 1, 162, p. 249 (KSA II, p. 444); KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), pp. 561
62; KSA XI (1884) 26 (224), p. 208 and 27 (31), p. 283.
27. See KSA XII (188586) 2 (94), p. 107.
(1884) 25 (205), p. 67 and KSA XII (188687) 6 (8), p. 236.
29. See KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), pp. 29395 [WP, 800, pp. 42021] and
14 (170), pp. 35657 [WP, 794, p. 419].
(1884) 26 (72), pp. 16768 and (75), pp. 16869 [WP, 987, pp. 51516].
31. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 103, p. 60 (KSA III, p. 92); on the morality of
taste, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (112), p. 481; on the historicity of sensations, see KSA
IX (1881) 11 (252), p. 537; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (63), p. 290; KSA XI (1885)
34 (255), p. 507; KSA XII (188586) 2 (35), p. 81.
32. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (73), p. 36 [WP, 715, p. 380].
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33. Nietzsche assimilates the conditions of existence to what is a priori;

see KSA XI (1884) 25 (307), 5, p. 90.
34. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 34243 [WP, 462, p. 255].
35. See KSA IX (1880) 3 (19), p. 52.
36. The thing in itself (ens per se), writes Kant in effect, is not a different
object, but a different relation (respectus) of representation to the same object;
see Opus postumum in Akademieausgabe, vol. XXII, VII Convolut., pp. 26, 43, and
4546). The difference between the thing in itself and the phenomenon being
grounded in the distinction between the intuitus originarius and the intuitus derivatus, it is indeed, and through a long series of mediations, to the death of
God that the assertion of the perspectival character of knowledge refers. (The
recent English translation, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Frster and Michael
Rosen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], is a judicious selection
of passages that does not include all the pages referenced by Franck. The closest
corresponding citations are found on pp. 172, 179, and 186.Trans.)
37. KSA XII (188687) 6 (23), p. 241.
38. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285.
39. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (374), p. 167; see also KSA XII (188586) 2
(108), p. 114; KSA XII (188687) 5 (25), p. 194.
40. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, Of the Bestowing Virtue, p. 104
(KSA IV, p. 102).
41. KSA XI (1885) 34 (120), p. 460.
42. KSA XII (188687) 5 (25), p. 194.
43. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 143, pp. 19192 (KSA III, p. 491). This
paragraph, which presents one of the first occurrences of the word overman, must be understood in relation to paragraph 125, The Madman, which
announces the death of God (pp. 18182); see also KSA IX (1881) 12 (7),
p. 577.
p. 141 (KSA VI, p. 185).
45. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, 492, p. 271, trans. slightly modified for fluency with the French]; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (8), pp. 27677 and
27 (27), p. 282; (1885) 34 (123), pp. 46162.
46. KSA X (188384) 24 (28), p. 661 [WP, 417, p. 224].
47. KSA XII (1887) 9 (165), p. 433 [WP, 126, p. 78].
48. KSA XI (1885) 40 (39), p. 648 and 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, 490, p. 271];
on number, see also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, 19, p. 22; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 4, pp. 45 (KSA V, p. 18) and 21, pp. 2830 (KSA
V, pp. 3536); KSA X (1883) 8 (25), pp. 34243 [WP, 574, pp. 3089], KSA XI
(1885) 34 (169), p. 477, KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, 634, p. 338].
49. KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), p. 647.
50. Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science in Phenomenology
and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row,
1965), p. 144 (Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, in Husserliana [The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1987], vol. XXV, p. 59).
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Chapter 3. Pleasure and Pain

1. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), p. 577.
2. KSA XII (188586) 2 (87), p. 104.
3. KSA XII (188586) 2 (69), p. 92.
4. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, Of the Despisers of the Body, p. 62
(KSA IV, p. 39).
5. KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167; see KSA X (188283) 4 (147), p. 157 and
KSA X (1883) 7 (263), p. 322, where the drive is understood as a personification of an activity.
6. Ibid.
7. KSA XII (188687) 7 (60), p. 315 [WP, 481, p. 267].
8. KSA XI (1884) 27 (27), p. 282.
9. KSA XI (1884) 25 (460), p. 135; see also Nietzsche, Human, All Too
Human, I, 2, 99, p. 53 (KSA II, pp. 9596); KSA IX (1880) 3 (7), p. 49, KSA IX
(1881) 11 (289), p. 552, KSA XII (188586) 2 (203), pp. 16566.
10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), p. 561; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
109, pp. 16769 (KSA III, pp. 46769).
11. KSA IX (1881) 11 (164), p. 505.
12. See KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 28687; KSA X (188283) 4 (217),
pp. 17273.
13. KSA XI (1884) 25 (437), p. 128; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (202),
p. 306.
14. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 300 [WP, 688, p. 366].
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 358 [WP, 699, p. 371]; see also KSA XIII
(188788) 11 (77), p. 38 [WP, 694, p. 369] and KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), pp. 513
14 [WP, 658, p. 347].
18. KSA XI (1884) 26 (275), p. 222; on tickling, see KSA X (1882) 3 (1)
133, p. 69, in which to the question What is the best life? Nietzsche answers:
To be tickled to death; on rhythm and tension peculiar to pleasure, see KSA
XII (188687) 7 (18), p. 302, where pleasure is understood while passing as tickling of the feeling of power; see also KSA XIII (188788) 11 (76), p. 38 [WP, 697,
p. 370] and (1888) 14 (81), pp. 26061 [WP, 689, pp. 36768].
19. KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), p. 514 [WP, 658, p. 347, trans. slightly modified].
20. KSA XI (1884) 27 (25), p. 282; see also KSA XII (188687) 5 (50),
p. 204; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), pp. 35860 [WP, 699, pp. 37172].
21. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, 693, p. 369, trans. slightly
modified].
22. KSA XII (1887) 9 (92), p. 387.
23. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (18), p. 226; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (24),
p. 229.
24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (378), p. 111; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124,
(427), pp. 12425 and (517), p. 148; KSA XII (188586) 1 (97), p. 34.
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25. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (61), p. 30 [WP, 701, pp. 37273, trans. slightly
modified].
26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, 699, p. 372].
27. See KSA XI (1884) 26 (239), p. 211 and (241), pp. 21114.
(1884) 25 (390), p. 114; KSA XI (1884) 27 (21), p. 280.
29. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, 699, p. 371]; see also KSA IX
(1881) 11 (309), pp. 55960.
30. Ibid., pp. 35960 [WP, 699, p. 372].
31. Ibid., p. 359 [WP, 699, pp. 37172].
32. Ibid., p. 359 [WP, 699, p. 372].
33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (402), pp. 11617; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (314),
pp. 56263.
34. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (90), p. 458 [WP, 479, p. 265].
Chapter 4. To Will, to Feel, to Think

1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, 635, p. 339].
2. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260.
3. KSA VII (187071) 5 (81), p. 114 and KSA VIII (1877) 22 (117), p. 400.
4. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266; see also KSA XI (1885) 36 (25),
p. 561 [WP, 545, p. 293], where absolute space is defined as the substratum
of force.
5. KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 179, p. 207.
6. KSA XI (1885), 35 (55), p. 537 [WP, 1064, p. 547, trans. slightly modified].
7. See Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problme de lespace (Paris: ditions de
Minuit, 1986). Untranslated.
8. KSA X (1883) 7 (173), p. 298; see KSA XII (188687) 5 (81), p. 220,
where the ants are opposed to the synthetic men, that is to say, to the overmen; concerning the hierarchical origin of language, see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 2, pp. 2526 (KSA V, pp. 25860) and KSA XII (188586) 2
(156), p. 142.
9. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), p. 561; KSA XII (188586) 1 (124), p. 40
[WP, 642, p. 342].
10. KSA XI (1884) 34 (123), pp. 46162.
11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (36), p. 157.
12. KSA X (1883) 7 (167), p. 298.
13. KSA XI (1885) 40 (55), p. 655.
14. See, for example, KSA XI (1884) 25 (391), p. 114. After having asserted that physical pain is only the consequence of mental pain, Nietzsche talks
there about a multitude of judgments, acts of will and affects concentrated in one single
instant.
15. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (376), p. 110 and (401), p. 116; KSA XI (1885)
40 (49), p. 653.
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16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), p. 563.

17. KSA XII (188687) 5 (56), p. 206. Only the part related to the methodological priority of the body is translated in WP, 489, p. 270; see also KSA XII
(188586) 1 (72), p. 29.
18. KSA XII (188586) 2 (78), p. 98.
19. KSA XII (188586) 2 (84), pp. 1034 [WP, 531, pp. 28889].
20. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 13, p. 45 (KSA V, p. 279).
21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), p. 646.
22. KSA X (1883) 7 (226), p. 312.
23. KSA X (1883) 20 (4), p. 590.
24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (360), p. 107.
25. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow (55), in Human, All Too
Human, II, 2, p. 323 (KSA II, p. 577).
26. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 19, p. 25 (KSA V, p. 32), trans. modified; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 99, pp. 15256 (KSA III, pp. 45357)
and 127, pp. 18384 (KSA III, pp. 48283).
27. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), p. 504.
28. KSA XII (188586) 1 (16), p. 14; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (107),
p. 285 [WP, 458, p. 251]: [Thinking] is an action, and the former presupposes
thought.
29. KSA XI (1884) 26 (17), p. 153.
30. KSA XIII (1888) 17 (5), pp. 52627; see also Friedrich Nietzsche,
Expeditions of an Untimely Man (20), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of
the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 90 (KSA VI, p. 124) and KSA XIII (1888) 16 (40),
p. 499: All things ugly weaken and sadden man: it reminds him of decline,
danger, impotence. One can measure with a dynamometer the impression
of ugliness. Where it is depressed, it is under the effect of something ugly.
The feeling of power, the will to powerthis grows with beauty, declines with
ugliness.
31. Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man (8), in Twilight of the
Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 8283 (KSA VI, p. 116), trans.
modified; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), p. 294 [WP, 800, p. 421].
32. Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (4), in Ecce
Homo, pp. 3023 (KSA VI, p. 341); see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (70), p. 372.
33. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 381, p. 346 (KSA III, p. 635), trans. slightly
modified.
34. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (376), p. 169 [WP, 314, p. 173] and KSA XIII
(1888) 15 (118), p. 480.
35. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), sec. I, bk. 2, p. 154 [note] (Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Akademieausgabe, vol.
V, p. 272 [note]); Kant, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, in Ethical Philosophy, trans.
James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), bk. II, Introduction, 16ff.,
p. 67ff. (Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde der Tugendlehre, vol. VI, p. 407ff.); Immanuel
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pt. I, bk. 3, 73ff., p. 149ff.
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(Anthropologie, vol. VII, p. 251ff.); see also Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 45ff.
(Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, GA 43, p. 51ff).
36. KSA XII (1887) 10 (133), p. 532 [WP, 931, p. 491].
38. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 300 [WP, 688, p. 366].
39. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 23, p. 31 (KSA V, pp. 4546).
pp. 17273; KSA X (1883) 7 (60), pp. 26162 and 7 (268), p. 323.
42. KSA XI (1885) 38 (8), p. 607, which constitutes a first version of 19 of
Beyond Good and Evil.
43. KSA XI (1885) 40 (39), p. 648.
44. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 12, pp. 2021 (KSA V, p. 27); see also
KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), pp. 1011.
45. Ibid., 19, pp. 2627 (KSA V, p. 33).
46. See KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 1, p. 187 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, Of Self-Overcoming, pp. 13639 (KSA IV, pp. 14649); see also KSA
XII (188586) 2 (190), p. 161 [WP, 254, p. 148]; KSA XII (188687) 5 (71),
10, p. 215 [WP, 55, p. 37]; KSA XII (188687) 7 (54), pp. 31213 [WP, 617,
pp. 33031]; KSA XII (1887) 9 (1), p. 339; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (174), pp. 36062
[WP, 652, p. 345, 702, p. 373, 703, pp. 37374].
47. KSA XI (1885) 40 (61), p. 661.
48. KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 243, p. 216.
49. KSA XI (1885) 34 (250), pp. 5056; see also as early as KSA IX (1881)
11 (131), p. 489 and KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), p. 90: Freedom of the will is the
theory of a feeling.
51. KSA XI (1884) 25 (436), p. 127; see also 25 (185), p. 64.
Chapter 5. Organization and Reproduction

1. Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, pp. 56 and 62 (ber den Willen in der
Natur, in Werke, vol. V, p. 243).
3. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 5, 224, pp. 1078 (KSA II,
pp. 18789) and 231, pp. 11011 (KSA II, p. 194); Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
223, p. 211 (KSA III, p. 510).
4. KSA XII (188687) 7 (25), p. 304 [WP, 647, pp. 34344]; see also 7 (9),
p. 297 [WP, 649, p. 344]; 7 (44), p. 309 [WP, 649, p. 344] and KSA XI (1884)
26 (85), pp. 17172.
5. KSA X (1883) 7 (204), p. 306.
6. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (495), p. 144.
8. KSA IX (1880) 4 (53), p. 112. This formula is not properly speaking
Neoplatonic but expresses, according to Johann Julius Baumann, from whom
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Nietzsche takes it, the canon of the Neoplatonists; see J. J. Baumann, Handbuch der Moral nebst Abri der Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1879), p. 135.
Untranslated.
9. KSA XI (1884) 26 (407), pp. 25859; see also KSA XI (1885) 38 (13),
pp. 61213 [WP, 972, pp. 50910].
10. See KSA XIII (1887) 9 (71), p. 372 [WP, 724, p. 385].
11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (174), p. 195; see also KSA X (1883), 7 (172),
pp. 29798.
12. KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124; see also 25 (411), p. 119.
13. KSA XI (1884) 25 (433), p. 127.
14. KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), 10, p. 630.
15. KSA XI (1885) 36 (28), p. 562 [WP, 645, p. 343, trans. slightly modified].
16. KSA XII (188687) 7 (25), p. 304 [WP, 647, p. 344].
17. KSA X (1883) 7 (94), p. 274.
18. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 12, p. 77 (KSA V, p. 314); see
also KSA XI (1884) 26 (174), p. 195 and KSA IX (1881) 11 (134), pp. 49092.
19. KSA XII (188586) 2 (77), p. 97 [WP, 590, p. 323].
20. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (188586), 5 (99), pp. 22627.
21. KSA XII (188586), 2 (148), pp. 13940 [WP, 643, p. 342].
22. KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124.
23. KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167.
24. KSA XI (1885) 34 (194), p. 486.
25. KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), p. 514 [WP, 658, p. 347].
26. KSA XI (1885) 40 (38), pp. 64748; see also KSA XII (188586) 1
(105), pp. 3536.
27. KSA XI (1884) 26 (204), p. 203; see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (125), p. 463;
KSA XII (188586) 1 (4), pp. 1011.
28. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), p. 293.
29. See Georges Canguilhem, Cell Theory in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 2556, here p. 31 (La thorie cellulaire, in La connaissance de la vie, p. 49); Franois Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History
of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 117
(La logique du vivant [Paris: Gallimard, 1970], p. 132); and Martin Heidegger, The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pt. II,
chap. 4, 53, pp. 22324 (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, GA 2930, p. 327).
30. KSA XI (1885) 34 (51), p. 436.
31. KSA X (188283) 4 (217), p. 172; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (97),
p. 275.
32. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (285), p. 110 [WP, 917, p. 485].
33. KSA XI (1885) 35 (58) and (59), p. 537.
34. KSA XII (188586) 2 (76), p. 96.
35. KSA XII (1887) 9 (151), p. 424 [WP, 656, p. 346, trans. slightly
modified].
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36. KSA IX (1881) 11 (345), p. 575 and KSA XI (1885) 36 (15), p. 557 [WP,
1062, p. 547].
37. See KSA IX (1881) 11 (213), p. 525.
38. KSA IX (1881) 11 (284), p. 550. As W. Mller-Lauter showed it, this
note is relative to the book of Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, which came out in 1881, and to which Nietzsche referred on many occasions. See Wolfgang Mller-Lauter, Der Organismus als innerer Kampf, in
Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 7, 1978, pp. 189223. A later version of the same study appeared in Mller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1999), chap. IX, pp. 16181. The essay was not published in the German
original.
39. KSA X (188384) 24 (36), p. 664; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (134),
pp. 49092.
40. KSA IX (1881) 11 (284), p. 550.
41. KSA XII (188586) 1 (58), p. 25.
42. KSA XI (1885) 36 (21), p. 560 [WP, 655, p. 346]. On the formation of
organs from the will to power as a unity of willing, feeling, and thinking, see KSA
XI (1885) 40 (37), pp. 64647 and KSA XII (188586) 1 (57), p. 24, where Nietzsche aims to present the transformations of the will to power, its arrangements,
its specializationsin parallel to the morphological development.
43. KSA XII (188687) 7 (9), p. 297 [WP, 644, p. 342, trans. slightly modified]; on the concept of perfection, see KSA XII (188586) 2 (76), pp. 9697
[WP, 660, pp. 34849].
44. KSA XI (1884) 25 (408), p. 119.
45. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 366 [WP, 585, p. 318].
46. KSA XII (188586) 2 (69), p. 92.
47. KSA XI (1884) 25 (128), p. 47; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (134), p. 532
[WP, 927, pp. 48990].
48. See KSA XII (188586) 2 (13), p. 73, where the will to power is qualified as mystic pathos, aspiring towards ever new expansion of distance; and
KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, 635, p. 339], where it is specified that the
will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathosthe most elementary fact
from which becoming and effecting first emerge . . .
49. KSA XI (1884) 26 (157), p. 191.
50. KSA XII (188586) 2 (68), p. 92.
51. KSA XI (1885) 40 (8), p. 631.
52. KSA XI (1885) 34 (217), p. 495.
53. KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), p. 561.
54. KSA XI (1884) 26 (274), pp. 22122; see also KSA XI (1885) 43 (2),
pp. 7012; KSA XII (1887) 9 (98), pp. 39192 [WP, 488, pp. 26970].
55. KSA XII (188586) 1 (118), p. 38 [WP, 654, p. 345].
56. KSA XII (188687) 5 (64), p. 209 [WP, 657, p. 347]; see also KSA XII
(188586) 2 (76), pp. 9697 [WP, 660, pp. 34849]. W. Mller-Lauter showed
that these notes refer to the book by W. H. Rolphs, Biologische Problem zugleich als
Versuch zur Entwicklung einer rationalen Ethik, that Nietzche acquired in 1884; see
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also W. Mller-Lauter, Der Organismus als innerer Kampf, in Nietzsche-Studien,

1978, p. 222 n.180, and KSA XI (1885) 35 (34), pp. 52326.
57. KSA XII (1887) 10 (13), p. 461 [WP, 653, p. 345].
58. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55), trans. slightly
modified; see also KSA XII (188586) 1 (30), pp. 1718; KSA XII (188687) 6
(26), pp. 24345. On hunger and nourishment as consequences of the will to
power, see KSA XII (188586) 2 (76), pp. 9697 [WP, 660, p. 349]; KSA XII
(1887) 9 (151), p. 424 [WP, 656, p. 346]; KSA XIII (188788) 11 (121), p. 57;
KSA XIII (1888) 14 (174), pp. 36062.
59. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (356), p. 106; KSA XI (1884) 26 (68), p. 166; KSA
XIII (1888) 14 (144), pp. 32829.
60. KSA XI (1885) 40 (28), pp. 64344.
61. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 12, pp. 7778 (KSA V, pp. 31415).
62. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (40), p. 353 [WP, 560, pp. 3023]; 9 (62),
pp. 36869 [WP, 580, p. 312]; 9 (91), pp. 38387 [WP, 552, pp. 297300].
63. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 417 [WP, 521, p. 282].
64. KSA XI (1884) 25 (431), p. 126.
65. See KSA XIII (188788) 11 (361), p. 159, where Nietzsche, following
Schopenhauer, translates Mitleid with caritas.
66. Nietzsche regarded the whole church as a domination-formation and
ventured that the Catholic Church, the oldest of all state-forms in Europe,
now best represents the old states; KSA X (1883) 7 (242), p. 318; see Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 358, p. 313 (KSA III, p. 605) and KSA X (1883) 7 (242),
p. 318.
67. KSA XI (1884) 25 (113). Nietzsche immediately adds: Compassion.
For another.
68. KSA XI (1885) 43 (1), p. 699; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 118,
pp. 17576 (KSA III, p. 476).
69. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (432), p. 126; 25 (437), p. 128; 26 (277), pp. 22223.
70. KSA XI (1884) 27 (42), p. 286; see also 27 (49), p. 287.
71. KSA XII (1887) 9 (16), p. 346 [WP, 994, p. 518].
72. KSA XI (1884) 25 (441), p. 130.
73. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 395 [WP, 569, pp. 3067].
74. KSA XI (1885) 34 (249), p. 505; see also Heidegger, Being and Time, pt.
I, chap. 5, 33, pp. 195203 (Sein und Zeit, pp. 15360).
75. KSA XI (1885) 35 (67), p. 539.
76. KSA XI (1885) 39 (12), p. 623.
77. KSA XI (188485) 31 (41), p. 377; KSA XII (188687) 6 (9), p. 236.
Part 4. The Logic of the Body

Chapter 1. Dehumanization as a Method
2. Ibid.
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3. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, 3, p. 218 (KSA VI, p. 259), trans. modified; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (50), p. 161; KSA XI (1885) 35 (69), p. 540;
KSA XII (188586) 1 (200), p. 55; KSA XII (1887) 10 (3), p. 455; KSA (1888)
16 (32), p. 492 and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 39, pp. 4950 (KSA V,
pp. 5657).
4. KSA XII (1888) 14 (8), p. 221.
5. KSA XI (1884) 25 (305), p. 88. In 1880, at the end of a note examining the conditions necessary to the flourishing of the individual, Nietzsche concluded: perhaps humanity MUST die out from morality. KSA IX (1880) 6 (153),
p. 235. See also KSA VIII (187677) 23 (82), pp. 43233 and Nietzsche, Daybreak,
45, p. 31, 429, p. 184 and 501, p. 204 (KSA III, pp. 52, 264 and 294).
6. KSA XI (1884) 27 (23), pp. 28081. Humanity here is opposed to
higher-humanity [Hheren Menschen]; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (232), p. 210.
7. KSA XI (1884) 25 (305), p. 88.
8. KSA IX (1881) 11 (110), p. 480.
9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (10), pp. 44344, where as such translates sachlich;
see also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 12, p. 119 (KSA V, p. 365).
10. This expression is the last one in a note that begins with these words:
Task: to see things as they are! KSA IX (1881) 11 (65), p. 466; see also KSA IX
(1881) 13 (5), p. 619.
11. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 188, pp. 100102 (KSA V, pp. 108
10).
12. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), pp. 49496; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
110, pp. 16971 (KSA III, pp. 46971), for which the entirety of this addition
is an outline.
13. KSA X (188283) 6 (1), p. 231; see KSA XI (1885) 40 (65), pp. 66366
and 41 (9), pp. 68386, where Nietzsche recounts the experience that leads to a
kind of birds freedom, to a sort of panoramic gaze of a bird; see also KSA XIII
(188788) 11 (30), p. 17.
14. KSA X (1883) 8 (3), p. 326.
15. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285.
16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496.
17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (119), p. 483. The difficulty of this citation makes it
important to reproduce in the original. Wissenschaft angeblich auf der Liebe
zur Wahrheit um ihrer selber willen! . . . In Wahrheit sind alle unsere Triebe thtig,
aber in einer besonderen gleichsam staatlichen Ordnung und Anpassung an
einander, so dass ihr Resultat kein Phantasma wird: ein Trieb regt den anderen
an, jeder phantasirt und will seine Art Irrthum durchsetzen: aber jeder dieser Irrthmer wird sofort wieder die Handhabe fr einen anderen Trieb (z.B. Widerspruch Analyse usw.). Mit allen den vielen Phantasmen errth man endlich fast
nothwendig die Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit . . .Trans.
18. KSA IX (1880) 6 (18), p. 197.
19. KSA XII (1888) 16 (30), p. 491.
20. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609.
21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (13), p. 634. We already find this in Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human, I, 1, 11, p. 16 (KSA II, pp. 3031).
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22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109, p. 168 (KSA III, p. 468); see KSA XIII
(188788) 11 (74), p. 37.
23. KSA X (188384) 24 (5), p. 645 (note entitled On the Origin of
Logic); KSA XII (1887) 9 (91), pp. 38387 and 9 (106), p. 395; see also KSA IX
(1881) 11 (121), p. 406.
24. KSA XI (1884) 26 (279), p. 223; KSA XIII (188788) 11 (31), pp. 117
18; KSA XI (1885) 44 (5), pp. 7078.
25. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) (4), in Untimely Meditations, p. 150 (KSA I, p. 367).
26. KSA XII (1887) 9 (119), p. 404; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (279), p. 223;
KSA XI (1885) 43 (8), p. 697, and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 224, pp. 151
53 (KSA V, pp. 15760); with regard to synthetic man, see KSA XII (1887) 10
(111), p. 520.
27. KSA IX (1881) 11 (197), pp. 51920.
28. KSA IX (1881) 11 (21), p. 387.
29. KSA VII (1870) 5 (39), p. 103.
30. KSA VII (187273) 19 (158), pp. 46869; 19 (237), p. 494; 19 (125),
p. 459.
31. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 48, p. 32 and 438, p. 187 (KSA III, pp. 53 and
268); see KSA IX (1880) 6 (239), p. 261 and (429), p. 308; KSA X (1883) 12 (1),
160, p. 397; KSA XI (1884) 26 (75), 3, p. 169; KSA XII (188586) 1 (12), p. 13
and 2 (77), p. 97.
32. KSA IX (1881) 11 (211), p. 525: Nietzsches expression is die Entmenschung der Natur; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (238), p. 532.
33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (434), p. 127.
34. KSA XI (1884) 25 (371), pp. 1089.
35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (65), p. 466.
36. KSA X (18821883) 4 (172), p. 162.
37. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285. In regard to the An-sich, see KSA IX
(1884) 25 (192), p. 65 and (377), p. 111; (1884) 26 (86), p. 172; (1884) 1 (120),
p. 460; (1885) 38 (14), pp. 61315; KSA XII (188586) 2 (149), p. 140 and (154),
pp. 14142; (188687) 5 (11), p. 188; (1887) 9 (40), p. 353; KSA XIII (1887) 11
(134), p. 62; (1888) 14 (103), pp. 28082. In a note where he recalls that every
sensation includes an evaluation, Nietzsche gives himself the task of presenting
[his] type of idealism ; see KSA IX (1882) 21 (3), 52, p. 685. On the opposition between idealism and realism, see KSA XI (1884) 25 (196), p. 66.
38. KSA XII (188687) 7 (16), p. 300.
39. KSA XII (1887) 9 (173), p. 438.
40. See KSA XII (1886) 1 (131), p. 153: homo natura. The will to power ;
see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 34243 and (75), p. 375.
41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5, p. 46 (KSA IV, p. 19),
trans. expanded with the German; see also KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 128, p. 201.
42. KSA XI (1884) 26 (222), p. 208.
43. The word given is set between quotation marks in the very important
36 in Beyond Good and Evil (p. 47); see also 186, p. 97 (KSA V, p. 54, 105; [the
German word is gegebenTrans.]).
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44. KSA IX (1881) 11 (78), p. 471; see also 11 (79), p. 471.

45. KSA X (1883) 7 (133), p. 286.
46. KSA XI (1885) 35 (3), pp. 50910; see also KSA XII (1888) 16 (75),
pp. 51011. On the logical character of the grand style of which Wagners art,
for example, is incapable, see KSA XI (1885) 41 (2), 6, pp. 67273.
47. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 395; see also KSA XII (188586) 2 (111),
p. 117.
48. KSA XI (1885) 34 (49), pp. 43536.
49. KSA XI (1884) 25 (312), p. 92; see also 25 (71), pp. 2728.
50. Nietzsche did posit a state of as principle; see KSA XI (1884)
26 (82), p. 170 and (1885) 35 (29), pp. 52122.
51. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1982),
vol. I, 59, p. 136 (Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977], vol. III-1, p. 113).
52. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York:
Humanities, 1970), vol. I, Investigation II, chap. 1, 3, p. 343 (Logische Untersuchungen, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984], vol. XIX-1, p. 118).
53. See Husserl, Ideas, vol. I, 49, pp. 10912 and 150, pp. 35962 (Ideen,
pp. 9193 and 31317). After he envisioned (49) the possibility of a chaotic experience whose corollary would be the absence of world, Husserl added: nevertheless, in that case it could be that, to some extent, crude unity-formations become constituted, transient supports for intuitions which were mere analogues
of intuitions of physical things because quite incapable of constituting conservable realities, enduring unities which exist in themselves, whether or not they
are perceived. Husserl does not specify what phenomenological givens are liable to justify such an assertion.
54. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time (18931917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1991), 30, p. 64 (Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins, in Husserliana
[The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966], vol. X, p. 62).
55. KSA X (188283) 4 (77), pp. 13536.
56. KSA IX (1881) 12 (34), p. 58, partially recopied in KSA XIII (1887
88) 11 (87), p. 41; see KSA IX (1881) 12 (26), p. 580 and 12 (38), p. 583; KSA
IX (1881) 14 (8), pp. 62425 and 14 (9), p. 625; KSA XII (188586) 2 (174),
pp. 15354.
57. See Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), 3, 16 b19ff., in The
Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, p. 26.
58. KSA IX (1881) 14 (8), pp. 62425.
Chapter 2. Fear and the Will to Assimilation

1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (213), p. 525; see also 11 (201), p. 522.
2. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498.
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4. KSA IX (1881) 11 (72), p. 469; see 11 (7), pp. 44243, where Nietzsche opposes imaginary individuals [die eingebildeten Individuen] to true life
systems [wahren Lebens-systeme]; see also 11 (121), p. 484.
5. KSA X (188384) 24 (28), p. 662; on the prodigiously accidental character of every combination, see KSA XI (1884) 25 (158), p. 55.
6. KSA XI (1885) 34 (180), p. 481.
7. KSA IX (1881) 11 (293), p. 554.
8. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 5, 1382 a2122, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
vol. II, p. 2202.
9. See KSA XIII (1888) 23 (2), pp. 600601.
10. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV, Of Science, p. 312 (KSA IV,
p. 377). In regard to the conscientious man of spirit, see KSA XI (188485) 31
(10), 3, p. 362 and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV, The Leech, pp. 26164 (KSA IV,
pp. 30912). What Nietzsche ascribes to fear corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to
what Heidegger ascribes to anguish, which serves as a reduction in the existential
analytic. As proof, if it were needed, note that the division between fear and anguish is often difficult to establish; see Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 5,
30, pp. 17982 and chap. 6, 40, pp. 22835 (Sein und Zeit, pp. 14042 and
18491); see also Jean-Louis Chrtien, Peur et altrit, in La voix nue: Phnomnologie de la promesse (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 226ff. Untranslated.
11. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 4, 169, p. 89 (KSA II, p. 157); see
also KSA IX (187980) 1 (96), p. 27.
13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (280), pp. 22324.
14. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 142, p. 90 (KSA III, p. 134: die Lehrmeisterin
jener Mitempfindung).
16. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 201, p. 113 (KSA V, p. 122); see also
262, p. 212 (KSA V, p. 213), where the same thing is said of danger.
17. KSA XI (1884) 26 (301), p. 231.
18. KSA XII (188687) 7 (3), p. 255; see Plato, The Theaetetus, trans.
M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 155 d, p. 277,
and Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (A), 2, 982 b12ff. in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol.
II, p. 1554.
19. KSA IX (1880) 4 (194), p. 148.
20. KSA XI (1884) 25 (88), p. 31.
21. KSA XI (1884) 27 (49), p. 287; see KSA XII (1887) 10 (39), p. 474.
22. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 5, 1383 a67, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
vol. II, p. 2203: There must be some faint expectation of escape. This appears
from the fact that fear sets us thinking what can be done, which of course nobody does when things are hopeless.
23. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (363), 3, p. 160.
24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (160), pp. 5556.
25. KSA XII (1887) 10 (21), p. 466; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (71),
pp. 46869.
26. KSA XII (1887) 10 (8), p. 458.
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27. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (357), p. 106. Is there not, in obedience, something like hypnotism [etwas ist wie Hypnotismus]? and KSA X (1883) 3 (1), 96,
p. 64: There is in the moral world a great deal of hypnotism. If hypnosis is indissociable from any hierarchical relationship, it never ceases to be at work in the
life of the body. Nietzsche once defined the hypnotic state as the separation
of an awakened intellect and a dormant intellect to specify, a little later on, that
by day, the inferior intellect is closed to consciousness; by night, the superior
intellect sleeps and the inferior one enters into consciousness (dream). In light
of this, the practice of hypnosis does not consist so much in putting the superior
intellect to sleep as in inverting the relations between wakefulness and sleep,
insofar as they are connected to the constitutive hierarchy of the body; see KSA
X (1882) 1 (31), p. 16; KSA XI (1884) 26 (34), p. 156; and Franois Roustang,
Influence (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 81ff., as well as his Quest-ce que
lhypnose? (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1994). Untranslated.
28. KSA XI (1884) 26 (276), p. 222; see KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), pp. 560
61, 40 (55), p. 655.
29. KSA XI (1884) 25 (436), p. 127.
30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), pp. 56364; see also 12 (163), p. 604.
31. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (121), pp. 4067, and (1887) 10 (53), pp. 482
84, where Nietzsche asserts that he sees nothing else in politicis than problems of
power, of a quantum of power against another quantum.
32. KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 34243; see also KSA XII (188687) 5 (61),
pp. 2078.
33. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (40), p. 238; see also KSA XII (188586) 2 (76),
pp. 9697. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man (37), in
Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 103 (KSA VI, p. 138),
where Nietzsche asserts that the declining life is the ideal of French and English sociologists.
pp. 29899, and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 268, pp. 21617 (KSA V,
pp. 22122).
35. KSA XI (1884) 27 (30), p. 283.
36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (205), pp. 2034.
37. KSA XI (1885) 34 (86), p. 448.
38. KSA X (1883) 7 (173), p. 298.
39. Ibid.
40. See KSA X (188283) 4 (171), p. 162.
41. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (63), p. 450.
42. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5, pp. 4547 (KSA
IV, pp. 1821).
43. KSA X (188283) 4 (163), p. 160; see also (1882) 1 (38), pp. 1920
and KSA XI (1885) 41 (2), 8, pp. 67677, where Nietzsche speaks of Paganini,
Liszt, and Wagner as of three marvelous and dangerous men bizarrely placed
between God and apes.
44. KSA X (188283) 4 (204), p. 168.
45. KSA X (1883) 7 (170), p. 297.
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46. In regard to Chinese, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (44), p. 458, (262),

pp. 54041 and (274), pp. 54647; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (17), pp. 46263,
where Chinesism is defined as a sort of stagnation in the level of man. It is relative to this signification of China that the qualifier the great Chinese must be
attributed to Kant. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 210, pp. 13435 (KSA V,
pp. 14244) and Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ,
11, pp. 13334 (KSA VI, pp. 17778). For the great man, see KSA IX (1881)
14 (15), p. 626; compare this with KSA IX (1881) 11 (287), pp. 55152, KSA
XIII (1888) 16 (9), p. 485 and KSA XII (188687) 5 (87), p. 222, where Nietzsche copies Montesquieus words to the effect in order that one man might
rise above humanity . . . that costs most dearly to all the rest. See Montesquieu,
Sulla and Eucrates, in The Personal and the Political: Three Fables by Montesquieu,
trans. W. B. Allen (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008), pp. 98
109, here, p. 104 (Dialogue de Sylla et dEucrate, in Oeuvres compltes, vol. I, ed.
Roger Caillois, p. 505).
47. KSA X (1883) 7 (21), pp. 24445.
48. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 39596.
49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
(1873) (1), in Writings from the Early Notebooks, trans. Ladislaus Lb, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p. 256; KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523 and G. W. Leibniz, New
Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan
Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), bk. II, chap. 27, 3,
p. 231.
50. G. W. Leibniz, On Nature Itself, or on the Inherent Force and Actions of Created Things (1698), in Philosophical Papers, 13, p. 506 (De ipsa
natura . . . in Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. IV, p. 514); see also G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) 9 ibid., p. 308 and the letter to Arnauld of
14 July 1686 ibid., p. 335.
51. KSA IX (1881) 11 (166), p. 505; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (231), p. 74.
52. KSA IX (1881) 11 (237), pp. 53132.
53. See KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523 and 11 (231), p. 530, where Nietzsche shows that there could not be two identical things without there being an
absolutely identical genesisand this, for all eternityand, consequently, without all other things being likewise absolutely identical, for all time.
54. See KSA XI (1885) 38 (14), pp. 61315.
55. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 228, p. 212 (KSA III, p. 508), trans. modified. The myopia that consists either in seeing being where there is only becoming, or in eternalizing becoming, is the mark of art, of the moral mode of
thought, and qualifies God himself; see KSA XII (188687) 7 (54), p. 312; KSA
IX (1881) 15 (48), p. 651; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (163), p. 347 and (188788) 11
(122), pp. 5859.
56. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 111, p. 171 (KSA III, pp. 47172), trans.
slightly modified.
57. Ibid., 348, p. 291 (KSA III, p. 584); see also Nietzsche, Expeditions
of an Untimely Man, (2) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The
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Anti-Christ, p. 78: but la science belongs to democracy; KSA XII (188586) 2

(179), p. 155; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (20), p. 347 and (29), p. 349.
58. KSA XII (188687) 5 (18), p. 191; see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil, 268, pp. 21617 (KSA V, pp. 22122).
59. It is worth emphasizing here that Nietzsches critique of democracy
does not amount to the approbation of political regimes that were, or still are,
its adversaries, and that in the final analysis it aims at all those forms of political
organization proper to the age of technology, since the German Reich results
partially from this; see Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, (39) in
Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 1046 (KSA VI,
pp. 14042) and Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 8, 472, pp. 17073.
60. KSA IX (1881) 11 (32), p. 490.
61. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (163), p. 604.
62. KSA IX (1881) 11 (134), pp. 49092. This note relates to the work
of Wilhelm Roux, already mentioned; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 118,
pp. 17576 (KSA III, p. 476).
63. KSA XI (1885) 40 (33), p. 645; see also KSA XI (1885) 42 (7), p. 697.
64. KSA XI (1885) 40 (7), p. 631.
65. Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man (39) in Twilight of the Idols,
see Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, p. 104 (KSA VI, p. 140), trans. modified.
67. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (18), p. 464.
Chapter 3. Simplication and Judgment

1. KSA XII (188687) 7 (9), pp. 29596.
2. KSA XII (188586) 2 (90), p. 106.
3. KSA IX (1881) 12 (219), p. 615; the German reads: der Magen, moralisch beschrieben; and KSA XI (1884) 26 (211), p. 205.
4. KSA XI (1884) 25 (93), p. 32 and (185), p. 64; (1884) 26 (141), p. 186.
5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 230, pp. 15960 (KSA V, pp. 16768);
see also KSA X (188384) 24 (14), pp. 65051.
6. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 418.
7. KSA XI (1884) 26 (61), p. 164; see also (1884) 25 (377), p. 111, where
the Erkenntniss-Apparat is likened to a shrinking machine and to a ReduktionsApparat; (1884) 25 (409), p. 119, where it is compared to an AbstractionsApparat; and (1884) 26 (52), p. 161, where it is likened to a simplification
apparatus.
8. KSA XI (1885) 34 (46), p. 434.
9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (286), p. 551.
10. KSA XI (1885) 34 (253), p. 506.
pp. 54344.
12. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), pp. 5034; see also KSA IX (1880) 6 (411),
p. 303; KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 and (1885) 38 (4), p. 598.
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13. KSA XI (1885) 38 (14), p. 613; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (286),
pp. 55051 and (320) pp. 56566 and (335), p. 572; KSA (1883) 9 (38), p. 357.
14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (325), pp. 56768.
15. KSA IX (1881) 11 (162), pp. 5034.
16. See KSA X (188283) 4 (94), pp. 14243.
17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (315), p. 563.
18. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 57778.
19. Nietzsche, Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(3), in Ecce Homo, pp. 300301 (KSA VI, p. 340); see also Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, III, The Home-Coming, p. 202 (KSA IV, p. 231).
20. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650.
21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), pp. 54344.
22. Ibid.
23. KSA XI (1885) 34 (124), p. 462.
24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Introduction
to the B version, IV, p. 14 (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Akademieausgabe, vol. III,
p. 10); see also Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, vol. I, 6, 17 a25, p. 27 and 10, 19 b5, p. 31.
25. See Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, vol. I, 5, 17 a16, p. 26.
26. KSA XI (1885) 40 (7), p. 631 and KSA XII (188586) 2 (90), p. 106.
27. KSA XI (1884) 26 (65), p. 166.
28. Immanuel Kant, The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures
(1762), in Kant: Theoretical Philosophy (17551770), trans. and ed. David Walford
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1, p. 89 (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren erwiesen [1762], p. 47).
29. KSA XII (188687) 7 (3), p. 256.
30. KSA XII (188687) 7 (4), p. 264. In Human, All Too Human, I, 1 18,
pp. 2122, Nietzsche already considered that belief was the essence of judgment,
and grounded belief on the sensation of what is agreeable or painful.
31. KSA XII (1887) 9 (89), p. 382.
32. KSA XII (1887) 9 (41), p. 354.
33. KSA XII (1886) 4 (8), p. 182; see also KSA XII (1885) 2 (83), pp. 1013
and (84), pp. 1034; on the stupidity of belief, see KSA XII (1887) 9 (136),
p. 413. The words between brackets were inserted by the KSA editors.Trans.
34. See II Samuel 23:3; Isaiah 28:16, 30:29; and Ephesians 2:20.
35. Isaiah 7:9. Francks translation of Luther reads: If you do not believe,
no, you cannot be stable.Trans.
36. Isaiah 40:2831.
37. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 347, p. 287 (KSA III, p. 581). The famous
proof of strength consists of proving a thought by way of its effects; see Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 50, p. 178 (KSA VI,
p. 229); KSA XIII (1888) 14 (57), p. 245; and Matthew 7:16.
38. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), p. 59.
39. KSA XII (1887) 9 (37), p. 352; see also KSA X (1883) 12 (24), p. 404.
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40. Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture (1938), in Off the Beaten
Track, Appendices, 6, p. 77 (Die Zeit des Weltbildes, in Holzwege, GA 5,
p. 102); see also Heidegger, Nietzsches Word: God Is Dead in Off the Beaten
Track, pp. 15758 (Nietzsches Wort Gott ist tot, in Holzwege, pp. 20910);
and Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 26, p. 174ff. (Nietzsche, vol. II,
p. 230ff.).
41. KSA XI (1884) 25 (517), p. 148.
43. KSA XI (1884) 26 (58), 163.
44. KSA XI (1885) 35 (57), p. 537.
45. KSA X (188283) 4 (131), p. 152. It is fitting to remember that Nietzsche began by explaining the formation of identical cases by way of the intervention of the imagination; see KSA IX (188081) 10 (D79), p. 430; KSA IX (1881)
11 (12), p. 445 and (13), pp. 44546.
46. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 84, p. 140 (KSA III, p. 442); see Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (A), 2, 983 a34 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II,
p. 1555 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, Of Poets, pp. 14952 (KSA
IV, pp. 16366).
47. See KSA XI (1885) 34 (194), p. 486.
48. KSA XI (1884) 25 (372), p. 109.
49. This is a variant of 127 in The Gay Science (see KSA III, pp. 48384).
50. On the link between self-regulation and preservation, see KSA XI
(1884) 25 (427), pp. 12425.
Part 5. The System of Identical Cases

Chapter 1. Sensation and Evaluation
1. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 365 [WP, 585, p. 317].
2. KSA XII (1887) 9 (38), p. 352 [WP, 507, pp. 27576, trans. slightly
modified].
3. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (81), p. 261 [WP, 689, p. 367]; see also KSA XI
(1884) 26 (284), p. 225 [WP, 1059, p. 545] and KSA XII (188586) 2 (179),
p. 155.
4. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 13, p. 21 (KSA V, pp. 2728); see also
KSA IX (1881) 11 (108), p. 479; KSA XI (1884) 26 (277), pp. 22223 and 26
(313), p. 233; KSA XII (188586) 2 (63), p. 89 [WP, 650, p. 344], and 2 (68),
p. 92; (1887), 9 (91), pp. 38387 [WP, 533, pp. 28990]. The intensification
of power is perhaps not as unfamiliar to the Conatus as Nietzsche seems to have
thought. Without any doubt each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors
to persevere in its being. But defining joy as the passive state through which
the mind passes to a greater perfection, does Spinoza not acknowledge that a
certain growth in power is correlated with the Conatus? See Spinoza, Ethics, rev.
ed. Amelia Hutchinson and James Gutmann (New York: Hafner, 1949), bk. III,
prop. 6, p. 135 and note to prop. 11, pp. 13738.
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5. KSA XII (1887) 9 (38), p. 353 [WP, 507, p. 276]. On the preserving
character of logic and truth, see KSA IX (1881) 15 (9), pp. 63637 and 15 (10),
pp. 63738, as well as KSA XII (188687) 6 (14), p. 238 and KSA XI (1884)
25 (372), p. 109; on the preserving character of the Good, the True and the
Beautiful in themselves, see KSA XII (1887) 10 (167), pp. 55455 [WP, 804,
pp. 42324] and 10 (194), pp. 57273 [WP, 298, p. 168]; on values as conditions
of existence and preservation, see KSA X (188384) 24 (15), pp. 65153 [WP,
260, p. 150].
6. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (73), p. 36 [WP, 715, p. 380].
7. KSA XI (1885) 36 (19), p. 559 [WP, 494, p. 272].
8. KSA XI (1884) 26 (127), pp. 18384 [WP, 496, pp. 27273, trans.
slightly modified].
9. KSA XI (1884) 25 (427), p. 125.
10. KSA X (188384) 24 (29), p. 662.
11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (236), p. 210 [WP, 615, p. 329].
12. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (152), p. 333.
13. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), p. 544.
14. KSA IX (1880) 6 (349), p. 286.
15. KSA XI (1885) 38 (10), p. 609.
16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (330), p. 570; see also KSA XI (1885) 43 (2), pp. 7012
and KSA XII (188687) 7 (54), pp. 31213 [WP, 617, pp. 33031].
17. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, 35, p. 78 (Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins, vol. X, p. 74). Let
us note in passing that this description raises a question that phenomenology is
not sure to be able to answer: from which instance is it possible to characterize as
absurd the tempo of the constitutive flux, since on the one hand, meaning and
reason are constituted in it, and on the other hand, there are no other fluxes
thanks to which it would be possible to compare tempi?
18. Ibid., 36, p. 79 (Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins, p. 75).
19. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (51), p. 442 [WP, 466, p. 261].
20. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). The Greek term is in
Feldweg-Gesprche 194445, GA 77, p. 8.
21. KSA VII (187273) 19 (210), p. 484. Franck also refers to Catherine
Chevalleys extended Introduction to Niels Bohr, Physique atomique et connaissance humaine (Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge) (Paris: Gallimard, 1991),
p. 99 and n.223. This movement of classical concepts into metaphors is Bohrs
remark, as reported by Heisenberg, writes Chevalley.Trans.
22. KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 [WP, 520, p. 281].
23. Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I,
p. 687, bk. III, 8, 432 a7.
24. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, 569, p. 307].
25. KSA IX (1880) 6 (62), p. 209.
26. See Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima) in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
vol. I, bk. III, 426 b8, p. 678.
27. KSA IX (1882) 21 (3), 52, p. 685 and KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167.
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28. KSA X (188283) 6 (4), p. 234; see also KSA X (188283), 4 (142),
p. 155, and 5 (1), 52, p. 193, where the same thing is said about drives.
29. See Aristotle, On the Soul, bk. III, 427 b12, p. 680.
30. KSA XI (1884), 27 (63), p. 290; see also KSA XII (188586) 2 (95),
p. 107 [WP, 505, p. 274] and KSA X (1883) 13 (1), p. 428: My thoughts are
colors: my colors are songs.
31. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), p. 503.
32. KSA VIII (187677) 23 (186), p. 470.
33. KSA XI (1885) 38 (10), pp. 6089; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (33), p. 253.
34. See KSA XI (1884) 26 (71), p. 167.
35. KSA XI (1884) 26 (35), p. 157; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (64), p. 264
and KSA XI (1885) 34 (132), p. 464: What is it then to perceive? To-considersomething-to-be-true [Etwas-als-wahr-nehmen]: to say yes to something.
36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (414), p. 262; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (103), p. 277.
37. See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time,
31, p. 70 and Appendix I, p. 106 (Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins,
pp. 68 and 100).
38. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), p. 59 [WP, 506, p. 275].
39. KSA XII (188586) 2 (92), pp. 1067 [WP, 500, p. 273].
40. KSA XI (1885) 34 (49), pp. 43536.
41. KSA XII (1887) 9 (62), p. 369 [WP, 580, p. 312].
42. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 39596 [WP, 569, pp. 3067].
43. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (152), p. 334 [WP, 515, p. 278]; see also KSA XII
(1887) 9 (63), p. 369 [WP, 581, p. 312].
44. KSA XI (1885) 34 (252), p. 506.
Chapter 2. The Formation of Categories

1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), p. 276 [WP, 551, pp. 29697].
2. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 418 [WP, 521, p. 282, trans. slightly modified].
3. KSA XII (1887) 10 (21), p. 466 [WP, 1019, p. 527]; on the definition of
culture, see KSA XII (1887) 9 (72), pp. 37374.
4. See Nietzsche, Daybreak, 26, p. 21 (KSA III, pp. 3637); Nietzsche, The
Wanderer and His Shadow, 31, in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, p. 316 (KSA II,
p. 626), and Nietzsche, Daybreak, 173, p. 105 (KSA III, p. 154).
5. KSA XII (188687) 7 (3), pp. 25556.
6. KSA XII (1887) 9 (89), p. 382 [WP, 517, p. 280].
7. KSA XII (188586) 2 (77), p. 97; see also KSA XIII (188788) 11 (415),
pp. 19394 [WP, 853, pp. 45153], where the will to art or to lie is attributed to
everything that is.
8. KSA XII (188586) 2 (126), p. 125 [WP, 537, p. 291].
9. See KSA XII (188586) 2 (117), p. 120 [WP, 600, p. 326] and KSA XII
(188687) 7 (6), pp. 27475 [WP, 279, pp. 15859], where Nietzsche makes the
inventory of the major figures of inertia.
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10. KSA XII (188586) 2 (78), p. 98.

11. KSA XII (188687) 5 (10), pp. 18788.
12. KSA XI (1885) 34 (244), p. 502.
13. KSA XI (1885) 41 (11), p. 688 [WP, 499, p. 273]; see also KSA XII
(1887) 9 (144), pp. 41718; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 27476 and 15 (90),
pp. 45860.
14. See KSA XII (188687) 7 (3), pp. 25556, 9 (89), p. 382 [WP, 517,
p. 280] and KSA VII (187273) 19 (236), pp. 49394.
15. KSA XII (188687) 6 (11), p. 237 [WP, 513, p. 277].
16. KSA XII (1887) 9 (98), p. 391 [WP, 488, p. 270], and Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, 14, p. 22 (KSA V, pp. 2829).
17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 14, p. 22 (KSA V, p. 28), and Plato, The
Laws, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), III,
689 b, p. 73; see also KSA XII (1887) 8 (3), p. 330, where Nietzsche depicts Plato
as a classical priest and KSA XIII (188788) 11 (294), p. 114.
18. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (356), p. 156; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (53),
pp. 16162.
19. KSA XI (1885) 34 (208), p. 492.
21. KSA XI (1885) 34 (131), p. 464.
22. KSA XII (1887) 10 (202), p. 580 [WP, 558, p. 302].
23. KSA XI (1884) 25 (327), p. 96 and (463), pp. 13637.
24. KSA XI (1884) 26 (156), p. 190.
25. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), pp. 5859 [WP, 506, p. 275].
26. KSA XII (1886) 6 (4), p. 233; see also KSA XI (1884), 26 (372),
pp. 24849.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
(1), in Writings from the Early Notebooks, p. 256 (KSA I, pp. 87980).
28. KSA XII (188586) 1 (28), p. 17.
Chapter 3. Space and Time

1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (155), p. 500.
2. KSA IX (1881) 11 (184), p. 513.
3. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266.
4. KSA XI (1885) 36 (25), p. 561 [WP, 545, p. 293].
5. KSA X (1882) 1 (27), p. 15.
6. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (29), p. 17 [WP, 690, p. 368].
7. KSA XI (1885) 35 (54), p. 536 [WP, 1064, p. 547]; see also KSA XI
(1885) 43 (2), p. 701: the form of the world as a cause for its circular process.
8. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (245), p. 534,
where it is a question of the infinite flowing of time.
9. This is because in cycle time only the succession itself is repeated, not
the instants.Trans.
10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (281), p. 549.
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11. On two occasions, Nietzsche qualifies time as absolute. First, when he

notes that our derivation of the feeling of time, etc. still presupposes time as absolute, and then when, in an incomplete note that is difficult to interpret, he
warns that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a being,
has nothing to do with truth, we can recognize it from this, for example, that
we have to believe in time, space, and movement, without feeling compelled to
[+++] here as absolute; see KSA XI (1884) 25 (406), p. 118 and KSA XI (1886
87) 7 (63), p. 318 [WP, 487, p. 269, trans. modified].
12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 374, p. 336 (KSA III, pp. 62627). This text
belongs to book V, which dates from 188687, and it is thus subsequent to the
thought of recurrence.
13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (384), p. 252.
14. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266.
15. KSA XI (1884) 34 (56), p. 438.
16. KSA X (1883) 21 (5), p. 601.
17. KSA X (1882) 1 (3), p. 9.
18. KSA IX (1881) 11 (155), p. 500.
19. KSA XI (1885) 35 (67), p. 539; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (216), pp. 70
71; KSA XII (188687) 5 (16), p. 190.
20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (38), p. 158.
21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (27), p. 643.
22. KSA XII (188586) 2 (139), p. 135 [WP, 554, p. 300].
23. KSA IX (1881) 11 (184), p. 513.
24. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), pp. 9091.
25. KSA XI (1884) 26 (385), p. 252.
26. KSA XI (1884) 25 (406), p. 118.
27. KSA IX (1881) 11 (260), p. 540; see also Virgil, Aeneid, inVirgil: Eclogues;
Georgics; Aeneid IVI; Aeneid VIIXII; Appendix Vergiliana (2 Vols.), trans. H. Rushton
Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999
2000), vol. I, Aeneid III, v. 587, p. 411; and Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers in Oresteia, in The Complete Greek Tragedy, vol. I, trans. Richmond Lattimore, ed. David
Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959), v.
3237, p. 94. Five years later, Nietzsche relates the same experience in the same
terms; see KSA XII (1886) 4 (5), pp. 17879.
28. Aristotle, Physics (Physica), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, bk. IV,
219 b1, p. 372.
29. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. II, chap. 6, 81, p. 477, trans. modified
(Sein und Zeit, p. 425).
30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (281), p. 549.
31. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), p. 543.
Chapter 4. Representation
1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (329), p. 569. The German reads: Aber auch das vorstellende Sein, dessen Existenz an den irrthmlichen Glauben gebunden ist, muss
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entstanden sein, wenn anders jene Eigenschaften (die des Wechsels, der Relativitt) dem esse zu eigen sind . . .
2. See Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 15, pp. 9798
(KSA I, pp. 85758); KSA VII (1873) 26 (11), pp. 57475 and (12), pp. 57579;
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 18, pp. 2122 (KSA II, pp. 3840); KSA
XI (1885) 35 (56), p. 537 and (61), p. 538; KSA XI (1885) 40 (12), p. 633, (24),
pp. 64041 and (41), p. 650. On Nietzsche and African Spir, see Paolo DIoro,
La superstition des philosophes critiques (The Superstition of Critical Philosophers), in Nietzsche-Studien, 1993, pp. 257ff.
3. See African Spir, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, pp. 6 and 110ff. The expression identical cases is found in
A. Spir; see, for example, pp. 68 and 201.
4. Ibid., p. 301.
5. Ibid., p. 303.
6. Ibid., p. 38.
7. KSA IX (1881) 11 (325), p. 568.
8. KSA XI (1884) 27 (19), pp. 27980.
9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (330), pp. 56970.
10. Ibid., p. 570.
11. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, 569, p. 307]; see also KSA XII
(1887) 9 (40), p. 353 [WP, 560, pp. 3023], in which objectivity is led back to
a difference of degreestherefore, of forceamidst what is subjective. On the
assimilation of force to the subject, see KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, 490,
pp. 27071] and KSA XIII (1888) 14 (186), pp. 37374 [WP, 636, pp. 33940].
12. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, Investigation V, chap. 2, 10,
pp. 55356 (Logische Untersuchungen, in Husserliana, vol. XIX-1, pp. 37984).
13. KSA XI (1885) 35 (35), p. 526; see also 40 (16), pp. 63536 and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 54, pp. 6667 (KSA V, p. 73), where, against Descartes, Nietzsche understands the I as the product of a synthesis of thought.
14. KSA XII (188586) 2 (193), p. 162 [WP, 548, p. 294]; see also 2
(67), p. 91.
15. KSA XI (1884) 26 (301), p. 231; see also 26 (280), pp. 22324.
16. KSA XI (1885) 40 (23), pp. 63940; see also 40 (20), pp. 63738.
17. KSA XII (188586) 2 (139), p. 136 [WP, 631, p. 336]; see also KSA
VII (187273) 19 (209), pp. 48284; KSA XII (188586) 1 (38), p. 19 and (39),
p. 19; 2 (78), p. 30; KSA XII (188687) 7 (34), pp. 3067; KSA XII (1887) 10
(158), p. 549 [WP, 484, p. 268].
18. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 16, p. 106, trans. modified
(Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 153).
19. KSA IX (1881) 12 (37), p. 583; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 87,
pp. 14243 (KSA III, pp. 44445) and Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner (Where
I Admire), in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of Idols and Other Writings,
pp. 26566 (KSA VI, pp. 41718).
20. KSA XII (188687) 7 (1), pp. 24950.
22. Ibid., 20, p. 28 (KSA V, p. 35).
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23. KSA XII (188687) 6 (13), p. 237.

24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (211), p. 69 [WP, 862, p. 459].
25. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 12, p. 90 (Nietzsche, vol. I,
p. 348). On the distinction between a fundamental question and a guiding question, see Nietzsche, vol. I, chap. 11, pp. 67ff. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 79ff.); on the difference between Nietzsches language and that of Heidegger, see Nietzsche, vol.
II, pt. 1, chap. 3, pp. 2527 (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 27778); on chaos, see Nietzsche,
vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 12, pp. 9192 and vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 12, p. 77 (Nietzsche, vol.
I, pp. 350 and 562).
26. Descartes, letter of 29 July 1648 to Arnauld (5), in The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, vol. III, p. 358 (Oeuvres, vol. V, p. 223).
Chapter 5. Coordination and Necessity

1. KSA VII (187273) 19 (118), p. 458.
2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 112, p. 173 (KSA III, pp. 47273); see also
Nietzsche, Daybreak, 121, p. 77 (KSA III, p. 115).
3. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109, pp. 16769 (KSA III, pp. 46769)
and KSA IX (1881) 11 (201), pp. 52223.
4. This is the initial formulation of the second analogy of experience,
which will be reformulated in 1787 under the title of Principle of Temporal Succession According to the Law of Causality; see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 3045 (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Akademieausgabe,
vol. IV, p. 189 and vol. III, p. 233; volume IV corresponds to the A edition of 1781
in English translations, while volume III corresponds to the B edition of 1787 in
the same. Hereafter KRV.Trans.).
5. KSA IX (1880) 4 (288), p. 171; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, 130, pp. 80
82 (KSA III, pp. 12022).
6. KSA IX (1881) 11 (255), p. 538.
7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 22, p. 30 (KSA V, p. 37) and KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (79), pp. 25759.
8. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 31213 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 204 and
vol. III, p. 249).
9. KSA X (188384) 24 (36), p. 664.
10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523; on the finite number of effective states
of the world, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (152), p. 500 and (232), p. 530 and (245),
pp. 53435; KSA X (1882) 1 (27), p. 15; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), 5, p. 376.
11. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), pp. 55354.
12. KSA XII (188586) 2 (143), p. 137 [WP, 638, p. 340].
13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (46), p. 159.
14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498.
15. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), p. 553.
16. KSA XI (1885) 36 (15), p. 556 [WP, 1062, p. 546].
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17. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), 3, p. 375 [WP, 1066, p. 548, trans. slightly
modified].
18. Ibid., 2, p. 374 [WP, 1066, p. 548].
19. KSA XII (1887) 10 (138), p. 535.
20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523.
21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (245), p. 534.
22. KSA IX (1881) 11 (157), p. 502.
23. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, Of the Vision and the Riddle,
2, p. 178 (KSA IV, p. 200).
24. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, 635, p. 339, trans. slightly
modified].
25. This last expression is found in 259 of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,
p. 204 (KSA V, p. 208).
26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), p. 274 [WP, 551, p. 295 n.22, trans. slightly
modified].
27. KSA XI (1884) 25 (215), p. 70.
28. KSA XII (1887) 10 (53), p. 482 [WP, 120, p. 73, trans. slightly modified].
29. KSA IX (1881) 11 (211), p. 525; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
109, pp. 16869 (KSA III, pp. 46869); KSA X (188283), 4 (80), 5, p. 137.
30. Letter of 11 October 1931 in Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel (19181969), ed. Joachim Storck (Marbach am Neckar:
Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1990), p. 44. Untranslated.
31. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (29), p. 17 [WP, 690, p. 368]. The original
reads: Mann kann das, was die Ursache dafr ist, dass es berhaupt Entwicklung giebt, nicht selbst wieder auf dem Wege der Forschung ber Entwicklung
finden; man soll es nicht als werdend verstehen wollen, noch weniger als
geworden . . . der Wille zur Macht kann nicht geworden sein.
32. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, 693, p. 369].
33. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 2, 2, p. 170 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 16).
34. Ibid., vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 4, p. 212 (vol. II, p. 287).
35. See ibid., vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 13, p. 98ff. (vol. I, p. 462ff.).
36. KSA XI (1885) 38 (12), pp. 61011 [WP, 1067, pp. 54950, trans.
slightly modified].
Chapter 6. The Subject of Causality

1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 27576 [WP, 551, p. 297].
2. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 23536 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 11314),
trans. slightly modified.
3. Ibid., p. 242 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 126).
4. Ibid., p. 236 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 114).
5. Ibid., p. 242 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 12627).
6. Ibid., p. 247 (KRV, vol. III, p. 134).
7. Ibid., p. 141 (KRV, Vol. IV, p. 125).
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8. See ibid., pp. 41617 and 423 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 350 and 363).
9. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (113), p. 54 [WP, 477, p. 264].
10. Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 4676 in Akademieausgabe,
vol. XVII, p. 656; see also Reflexionen, 5750, wherein order is defined as the
connection according to a rule and 5708, where the rule is understood as the
objective unity of the consciousness of the manifold in representations; in vol.
XVIII, pp. 343 and 331. The partial English translation does not include these
paragraphs; see Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, trans. Karl Ameriks and
Steve Naragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
11. KSA XII (188586) 2 (78), pp. 9899.
12. KSA X (1884) 26 (413), p. 262.
13. KSA IX (188182) 16 (16), pp. 66162; see also KSA X (188384)
24 (9), pp. 64748 [WP, 664, p. 350]; KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), pp. 9091 and
(371), pp. 1089 and (427), pp. 12425.
14. KSA X (188384) 24 (15), p. 652 [WP, 667, p. 352].
15. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 127, pp. 18384 (KSA III, p. 483), trans.
modified.
16. KSA XI (1885) 40 (53), p. 654.
17. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), 277, p. 86.
18. KSA X (1883) 9 (10), p. 348; see also KSA X (1883) 9 (48), p. 362; 13
(11), pp. 46061; 24 (15), pp. 65153 [WP, 260, p. 150 and 667, pp, 35253]
and (32), p. 663 [WP, 767, p. 403]; KSA XI (1884) 26 (254), p. 216 and 27 (1),
p. 275; KSA XI (1885) 34 (53), pp. 43637.
19. KSA X (188384) 24 (34), p. 663 [WP, 671, p. 354]; KSA XI (1884) 27
(24), pp. 28182; KSA XI (1885) 34 (55), pp. 43738; see also KSA X (1883) 12
(30), pp. 4056.
20. KSA X (1884) 25 (214), p. 70.
21. The curious spacing is Heideggers.Trans.
22. Martin Heidegger, Recollection in Metaphysics in The End of Philosophy, p. 66 (in German, see Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 471).
23. KSA XII (1887) 9 (178), p. 442 [WP, 95, p. 60].
24. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, Lecture III, p. 34; Gray
translates this as abbreviations of words (Was Heisst Denken?, p. 58).
25. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in Ethical Philosophy, trans.
James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), bk. I, chap. 3, p. 49.
p. 136 (KSA VI, p. 180); see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (219), p. 394.
27. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36, p. 4748 (KSA V, pp. 5455).
28. KSA XII (188586) 5 (9), p. 183.
29. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 27475 [WP, 551, pp. 29596]; see also
KSA XII (188586) 2 (83), pp. 1013 [WP, 550, pp. 29495].
30. KSA XII (1887) 9 (188), p. 450 and KSA XIII (188788), 11 (410), p. 189.
31. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, 490, p. 270].
32. KSA XII (1887) 10 (19), p. 465 [WP, 485, pp. 26869, trans. modified
for fidelity to Nietzsches text].
33. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 39596 [WP, 569, p. 307].
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34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 232 and 41112 (KRV, Vol. IV, pp. 107,
341 and 343).
35. KSA IX (188182) 16 (16), p. 663.
36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (12), pp. 15253 [WP, 497, p. 273, trans. slightly
modified].
37. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5, p. 45 (KSA IV, p. 19).
Part 6. From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body

Chapter 1. Memory
1. The French reads: Reconduire la logiqueen tant que structure dun
corps ordonn sa propre conservation, la connaissanceen tant que cration
dun monde permettant la conservation de lorganisme et le sujeten tant que
mode dtre conservatoire dune formation de domination, reconduire donc
la logique, la connaissance et le sujet au systme des cas identiques ne permet
cependant pas encore de comprendre lidentit de ces cas. The English translation is based on the kind suggestion of the author.Trans.
2. KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 [WP, 520, p. 281: the principle of identity has behind it the apparent fact of things that are the same].
3. A. Spir, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality), in Gesammelte Werke,
vol. I, p. 119. Untranslated.
4. KSA XII (188687) 7 (4), p. 266 [WP, 530, pp. 28788]; see also KSA
IX (188082) 6 (49), p. 205, wherein the principles of identity and contradiction are led to the submission that wants equality [will Gleichheit setzen], and to
the power that drives, to recognize the difference [Verschiedenheit anzuerkennen].
From 1873, Nietzsche wrote that the only single form of knowledge which we
trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the
tautology: A = A; see Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 10, p. 77
(KSA I, p. 841).
5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109, p. 168 (KSA III, p. 468); see also KSA IX
(1881) 11 (150), p. 499.
6. KSA IX (1881) 11 (210), p. 525; see also (1881) 11 (207), p. 524 and
(244), pp. 53334.
7. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 44, pp. 5356 (KSA V, pp. 6063);
KSA XI (1884) 26 (452), p. 271. Following J. P. Hebel, Heidegger once qualified
man as a plant; see HebelDer Hausfreund, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens
(Out of the Experience of Thinking), GA 13, p. 150. Untranslated.
8. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, 18, p. 21 (KSA II, p. 39), trans.
modified.
9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (84), pp. 47273. The first note devoted to eternal
recurrence is found in the same notebook as this, under the number 141.
10. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. I, chap. 12, p. 84ff. (Nietzsche, vol.
I, p. 341ff.).
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11. KSA XI (1885) 34 (50), p. 436.

12. KSA X (1883) 12 (39), p. 408. As illustrated by the example of the protoplasm, the will to power explains the assimilation of the inorganic by the organic.
13. KSA IX (1881) 12 (15), p. 578.
14. G. W. Leibniz, The Theory of Abstract Motion: Fundamental Principles (1671), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 17, p. 141 (Theoria motus
abstracti [1671], in Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. IV, p. 230).
15. KSA X (1883) 12 (31), p. 406.
16. KSA XI (1884) 25 (403), p. 117 and (514), p. 148.
17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (138), p. 493.
18. KSA VII (1873) 29 (29), p. 636; see also KSA VII (1873) 29 (38), 2,
pp. 64041.
19. See KSA XII (188687) 7 (3), pp. 25458.
20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (94), p. 175.
21. KSA XI (1885) 38 (2), p. 597; see also (1885) 34 (249), p. 505.
22. KSA XI (1885) 40 (34), pp. 64546; see also (1885) 34 (167), pp. 476
77 and KSA XII (188586) 2 (146), p. 139.
23. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 1, pp. 578 (KSA V,
pp. 29192).
24. KSA IX (1880) 2 (68), p. 44.
25. KSA XI (1884) 25 (409), p. 119.
27. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (142), pp. 32527 [WP, 423, p. 227].
28. KSA XI (1885) 34 (249), p. 505.
Chapter 2. Consciousness
1. KSA X (1883) 7 (126), pp. 28485; see also KSA X (188384) 24 (16),
pp. 65356 [WP, 676, pp. 35758], which constitutes an augmented version of
the same note.
2. See KSA VII (187273) 19 (48), pp. 43435; KSA IX (1880) 5 (47),
pp. 19293; KSA XI (1884) 25 (369), p. 108, 26 (49), p. 161 [WP, 476, p. 263]
and 26 (52), p. 161; KSA XI (1885) 39 (16), p. 626; KSA XII (188586) 1 (20),
p. 15, 1 (61), p. 26 and 2 (103), p. 112; KSA XII (188687) 7 (1), pp. 24750 [WP,
666, pp. 35152].
3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 357, p. 305 (KSA III, p. 598); see also KSA IX
(1880) 5 (44), p. 191.
p. 137 (KSA VI, p. 180).
5. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), p. 564.
6. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 57778.
7. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (25), p. 421 [WP, 440, p. 243].
8. KSA IX (188081) 10 (F 101), p. 438; see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (87),
p. 448; KSA XII (188586) 1 (54), pp. 2324.
9. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, 569, p. 307].
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10. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 354, pp. 29899, trans. modified; see also
KSA XI (188485) 30 (10), p. 356.
11. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (131), p. 313 [WP, 439, p. 242].
12. KSA XI (1884) 25 (401), p. 116; see also KSA XI (1885) 40 (49), p. 653.
13. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), p. 578.
14. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, 492, p. 271, trans. slightly modified]; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (8), pp. 27677 and (27), p. 282; KSA XI (1885)
34 (123), pp. 46162. On the aristocracy in the body, see KSA XI (1885) 40 (42),
p. 650 [WP, 490, pp. 27071] and KSA XII (188586) 2 (76), pp. 9697 [WP,
660, pp. 34849].
15. KSA XI (1885) 34 (131), p. 464.
16. KSA XI (1885) 34 (187), p. 484.
17. See KSA XI (1884) 27 (26), p. 282 and KSA XII (188586) 1 (124), p. 40.
18. KSA XII (188586) 2 (95), p. 108 [WP, 505, p. 275].
19. KSA X (1883) 15 (51), p. 493.
20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (114), pp. 17980.
21. KSA XII (188586) 5 (55), p. 205; see also (188586) 5 (68), p. 210
[WP, 527, p. 285].
22. See Jean Cavaills, Sur la logique et la thorie de la science (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1942, 1960), p. 78.
23. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (113), p. 53 [WP, 477, pp. 26364, trans.
slightly modified]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (336), pp. 99100; KSA XI (1885)
34 (30), p. 430.
24. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (145), pp. 678 [WP, 524, p. 284].
25. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pt. II, chap. 6, 99, p. 253 (Formale und
transzendentale Logik, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974], vol.
XVII, p. 260).
26. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, vol. I, 150, pp. 36061 (Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, in Husserliana, vol. III-1, p. 314).
27. KSA XI (1885) 34 (46), p. 434.
28. KSA XII (188687) 5 (56), p. 206 [WP, 489, p. 270] and 7 (9), p. 295
[WP, 504, p. 274]; see also KSA X (188384) 24 (28), pp. 66162 [WP, 417,
p. 224], in which Nietzsche inscribes, among several innovations, the search for
a new center of the personality.
29. KSA XII (188687) 6 (19), p. 239. On the fallacious character of phenomenology, which Nietzsche divides into phenomenology of consciousness and
phenomenology of the sensuous world, see KSA XII (188687) 7 (9), pp. 294
97; KSA XIII (188788) 11 (113), pp. 5354 [WP, 477, pp. 26364]; KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (152), pp. 33335 [WP, 478, pp. 26465].
30. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (83), p. 40 [WP, 674, pp. 35556].
31. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 13, p. 17 (KSA II, p. 34).
32. KSA XI (1884) 26 (35), pp. 15657, Nietzsche writes Zeitumkehrung;
in Human, All Too Human 13 it was already a question of an inverted succession
(ein umgedrehtes Nacheinander).
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33. KSA XI (1885) 34 (54), p. 437; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (44), p. 159; for
the inversion in pain, see KSA XI (1884) 27 (21), p. 280.
34. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (90), p. 459 [WP, 479, p. 265]; see also Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Four Great Errors (4), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the
Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 6162 (KSA VI, p. 92).
35. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, 699, p. 372].
36. KSA X (1883) 7 (211), p. 308.
37. While the French puissance is generally translated as power, it also denotes potential in the Aristotelian sense of dynamis. The English translates Wille
zur Macht as Will to Power, generally, and so we use power here, recognizing
nevertheless that the French pouvoir is preferred in referring to political or institutional power, while puissance concerns the ability to do.Trans.
38. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
et al. (London: Hogarth, 195374), vol. XXII, Lecture 31, p. 73 (Neue Folge
der Vorlesungen zur Einfhrung in die Psycho-analyse, in Gesammelte Werke [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1972], vol. XV, p. 80). Freud himself points out
that this use of the impersonal pronoun (id) goes back to Nietzsche; see The
Ego and the Id (part II) in the Standard Edition, vol. XIX, p. 23 n.3 (Das Ich und
das Es, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. XIII, p. 251); see also editors Introduction,
p. 7.Trans.
39. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 80 (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen, vol.
XV, p. 86).
40. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (128), p. 310 [WP, 289, p. 163].
41. See KSA XIII (1888) 14 (111), pp. 28889 [WP, 430, pp. 23435] and
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 57, pp. 18891
(KSA VI, pp. 24144).
Chapter 3. The Decisive Instant

1. KSA XI (1884) 26 (328), p. 236.
2. KSA XI (1884) 25 (296), p. 86 and (294), p. 86. Nietzsche entitled many
of his outlines for the work devoted to eternal recurrence The New Enlightenment; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (293), p. 228 and (298), pp. 22930; (1884) 27
(79), pp. 29495 and (80), p. 295; KSA XI (188485) 29 (40), p. 346; KSA XI
(188586) 1 (94), p. 34. As for Tartuffery, it characterizes morality, scientism,
and humanization; see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 24, p. 35 (KSA V,
pp. 4142), 228, pp. 15658 (KSA V, pp. 16365), 249, p. 185 (KSA V, p. 192);
KSA X (1883) 21 (4), pp. 600601; KSA XI (1884) 25 (211), p. 69 [WP, 862,
pp. 45859], (213), pp. 6970, (238), p. 74 and (309), pp. 9192; KSA XI (1885)
34 (256), pp. 5078; KSA XII (188687) 5 (50), 51, p. 204; KSA XII (1887) 9
(173), pp. 43739 [WP, 315, pp. 17375].
3. KSA IX (1881) 13 (12), p. 620.
4. If we are here specifying that appearance means lie, this is because
things are otherwise elsewhere in Nietzsche. From the moment appearance
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(Schein), in the traditional sense of the term, denotes what is inaccessible to logic,
and this logic is known to be falsifying, it becomes possible to reuse the old word
appearance to designate reality inasmuch as it is not logical, in short, as denoting will to power. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (53), p. 654. Relative to Nietzsches
language, this example virtually has the value of a rule.
5. KSA XI (1884) 25 (492), p. 143.
6. KSA XI (188485) 29 (4), p. 337.
7. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (50), p. 24 [WP, 566, p. 305].
8. KSA XII (188687) 7 (54), p. 312 [WP, 617, p. 330]; see also KSA X
(1883) 17 (40), p. 551, where Nietzsche, against the horizon of eternal recurrence, comes to speak of the being in becoming (der Seiend, der im Werden).
9. KSA X (188283) 4 (126), p. 150. Atom here designates what, somewhat later on, will be called force, drive, etc.; see KSA XI (1885) 43 (2),
pp. 7012.
10. We choose to use instant throughout, in preference to moment,
for consistency with Francks text and because instantAugenblicksuggests a
time possibly briefer than moment.Trans.
11. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), 3, p. 375 [WP, 1066, p. 548, trans. modified].
1, p. 176 (KSA IV, p. 197).
13. Ibid., 2, p. 178 (KSA IV, pp. 199202), trans. modified.
14. Ibid., pp. 17879 (KSA IV, pp. 199202), trans. modified.
15. Ibid., pp. 17980 (KSA IV, pp. 199202), trans. slightly modified.
16. Ibid., p. 180 (KSA IV, pp. 199202), trans. slightly modified on authors
suggestion.
17. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, The Convalescent, 2, pp. 234
35 (KSA IV, p. 273), trans. slightly modified.
18. See ibid., Prologue, 3, pp. 4143 (KSA IV, pp. 1416) and 5, pp. 45
47 (KSA IV, pp. 1821), trans. slightly modified.
19. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 8, pp. 5657 (Nietzsche, vol. I,
pp. 31112). In the main and up until now, we have followed Heideggers interpretation of these two sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, explicitly devoted to
eternal recurrence; see also ibid., chap. 6, p. 37ff. and chap. 24, p. 176ff. (vol. I,
p. 289ff. and p. 438ff.).
20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (143), p. 496.
21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (220), pp. 52627. By new laws, Nietzsche means
new hierarchies, and thus new values, since they permit the reorganization
of affects.
22. KSA XI (1884) 25 (434), p. 127.
23. KSA XI (1885) 39 (11), p. 622; see also KSA XI (1885) 35 (55), p. 537
[WP, 1064, p. 547].
24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (158), p. 55 and KSA XII (188687) 7 (38), pp. 3078
[WP, 1032, pp. 53233]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (358), p. 107; 26 (117),
pp. 18081 [WP, 907, p. 480]; KSA XI (188485) 29 (54), p. 348; KSA XIII
(1888) 14 (31), p. 234 [WP, 293, p. 165].
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25. KSA IX (1881) 11 (163), p. 505. One year earlier, Nietzsche already
noted: To live IN SUCH A WAY that our energy be the highest and the most joyful
and sacrifice everything for that. NB; see KSA IX (1880) 6 (289), p. 271.
26. KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), p. 11. Now (Jetzt) is here a synonym for the
instant; see also KSA X (1883) 18 (14), p. 570 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, The Convalescent, 2, pp. 23738 (KSA IV, pp. 27577).
27. KSA XI (188485) 29 (13), p. 340.
28. KSA X (1883) 7 (226), p. 312; see also KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 1,
p. 187.
29. KSA XII (188687) 5 (71), 6, p. 213.
30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 495. The original reads: . . . ein absoluter
berschuss von Lust muss nachzuweisen sein, sonst ist die Vernichtung unser
selbst in Hinsicht auf die Menschheit als Mittel der Vernichtung der Menschheit
zu whlen.Trans.
Chapter 4. The Incorporation of Truth

1. KSA XI (1884) 26 (259), p. 218.
2. KSA XI (1884) 26 (283) and (284), pp. 22425.
3. KSA IX (1881) 11 (161), p. 503; (1884) 25 (322), p. 95; KSA XII (1887)
9 (1), p. 339; KSA XI (188485) 29 (14), p. 340; (188485) 31 (16), p. 365;
(1884) 25 (405), pp. 11718; KSA XII (188586) 2 (118), p. 120 and 2 (131),
pp. 13132.
4. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), p. 553.
5. KSA IX (1881) 11 (318), pp. 56465.
6. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 10, pp. 3637 (KSA V, p. 271),
trans. modified.
7. We here understand drama in the sense of the Greek : an
action burdened with consequences; see Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue grecque, entry (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008). This usage does not contradict Nietzsches critique of the translation of the word
drama by action (Handlung) that intends the theatrical sense of the term; see
KSA VIII (187677) 23 (74), p. 427. Nietzsche writes: Aber Drama bedeutet
Ereigniss, factum, im Gegensatz zum fictum (But drama means event,
factum, by contrast with fictum)Trans. See also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (34),
p. 235 and Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musicians Problem (9), in The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, pp. 24951 (KSA VI,
pp. 3235).
8. KSA XI (1884) 26 (75), 1, p. 168.
9. Heidegger, Who Is Nietzsches Zarathustra? in Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 2,
p. 233 (Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra? in Vortrge und Aufstze, p. 126).
10. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, The Convalescent, 2, pp. 235
36 (KSA IV, p. 274).
11. KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 184, p. 207.
12. KSA X (188283) 4 (198), p. 167.
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2, p. 180 (KSA IV, p. 202).
14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (156), pp. 5012.
15. KSA XII (1887) 9 (91), p. 385.
16. Ibid.
17. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 5, p. 32ff. and chap. 21,
p. 137ff. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 508ff. and p. 632ff.).
18. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, On the Blissful Islands, p. 111
(KSA IV, p. 111).
19. KSA XI (1884) 26 (192), p. 200.
20. KSA X (1883) 7 (84), p. 271.
21. KSA XI (1884) 25 (260), p. 80; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 257,
pp. 2012 (KSA V, pp. 2056); Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The
Anti-Christ, 50, pp. 17879 (KSA VI, pp. 22930). The expression ways of freedom is the title of a number of chapter and book projects. See, for example,
KSA VII (1873) 29 (164) and (229), pp. 700 and 72223; KSA VIII (1876) 16 (8)
and (9), pp. 28889; KSA VIII (1876) 17 (21), p. 300; KSA VIII (1876) 18 (1),
p. 314; KSA XIX (1884) 25 (484), pp. 14041.
22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 324, p. 255 (KSA III, p. 55253). In media
vita was also the first title under which Nietzsche projected his Ecce Homo; see KSA
XII (188586) 2 (65), p. 89 and KSA XIII (1888) 24 (2), p. 632.
23. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, Of the Virtue That Makes
Small, 3, p. 191 (KSA IV, p. 216).
24. See KSA X (1882) 2 (5), p. 44; KSA X (188283) 4 (77), pp. 13536;
KSA X (1883) 7 (1), pp. 23536; KSA XI (1884) 25 (307), pp. 8990 and (1884)
26 (353), p. 243; KSA XII (1887) 9 (104), p. 394.
25. KSA X (188384) 24 (28), p. 661.
26. See KSA X (1882) 1 (110), p. 40.
27. KSA X (1883) 15 (19), pp. 48384 and (1883) 16 (86), pp. 52930; see
KSA X (1883) 17 (63), pp. 55758; (1883) 22 (1), p. 612; KSA XI (188485) 31
(41), pp. 37778, where Nietzsche summons us to create a backbone for the will,
and KSA X (1883) 9 (56), p. 364, where revaluation is described as annihilation
and resurrection of morality [Vernichtung und Auferstehung der Moral].
28. KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), p. 10.
p. 503; (167), p. 506 and (172), p. 507.
30. KSA XI (188485) 32 (9), p. 406.
31. Psalms 20:89; Romans 11:20.
32. KSA XI (1884) 28 (64), p. 329; see also (188485) 31 (37), p. 374 and
KSA VII (1871) 9 (58), p. 296. As the German word indicates, the independents (die Selbstndigen) are those who stand by themselves, and hold or draw
their constancy from themselves.
33. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), p. 342. The German reads: An Stelle von
Metaphysik und Religion die ewige Wiederkunftslehre.
34. KSA IX (1881) 14 (25), pp. 63132; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
125, p. 181 (KSA III, pp. 48082).
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35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (70), p. 468; see also (1881) 11 (82), p. 472.
36. KSA XI (1885) 35 (41), p. 528; see also KSA X (1882) 2 (6), p. 45. The
German reads: Das, was kommt. Eine Prophetie.
37. KSA XI (1884) 25 (226), p. 73; see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I,
Of Voluntary Death, pp. 9799 (KSA IV, pp. 9396).
38. KSA X (188283) 5 (1), 137, p. 202. On the meaning of festivals, see
KSA XII (1887) 10 (165), p. 553.
Chapter 5. The Priestly Revaluation

1. KSA XI (1885) 39 (1), p. 619; see also (1885) 40 (2), p. 629 and (50),
pp. 65354; KSA XII (188586) 1 (35), p. 19.
2. KSA XII (188586), 2 (73), p. 94.
3. KSA XII (188586) 2 (100), p. 109; (188687) 5 (75), p. 218; (1887) 9
(164), p. 432; KSA XIII (188788) 11 (411), 4, p. 190 and (414), p. 192; (1888)
14 (78), p. 257 and (136), p. 320 and (156), p. 340; (1888) 15 (100), p. 466;
(1888) 16 (86), pp. 51516.
4. KSA XIII (1888) 18 (17), p. 537.
5. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (416), p. 194, written in September 1888; see also
(1888) 19 (2), p. 542 and (8), p. 545; (1888) 22 (14), p. 589 and (24), p. 594.
6. KSA XIII (1888) 19 (8), p. 545 and 22 (14), pp. 58990.
7. KSA XIV, Kommentar zu den Bnden 113, pp. 43435. The subtitle
indicated here, between brackets, was ultimately crossed out by Nietzsche.
8. Nietzsche, Smtliche Briefe (SB) in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli
and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 196777), vol. VIII, p. 492 (not in
English translations of Nietzsches selected letters). See also his letter to Georg
Brandes from 20 November 1888 in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, trans.
and ed. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971), pp. 13132 (SB, p. 482).
9. Nietzsche, SB, vol. VIII, p. 545 (not in English translations of Nietzsches
selected letters).
p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 169). Trans. slightly modified. See also II Timothy 2:3ff. In Luthers translation of the second Epistle of John, the Antichrist is also called the
deceiver (Verfhrer). Nietzsche takes up this name and applies it to Zarathustra;
see II John 7; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, 4, pp. 21920 (KSA VI, p. 260);
KSA X (1883) 13 (4), p. 454; KSA XI (1885) 34 (199), p. 487; (1885) 39 (22),
p. 628 (Zarathustra als Verfhrer der Jugend).
11. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow (265), in Human, All Too
Human, II, 2, pp. 37374 (KSA II, pp. 66667); see also Pindar, Pythian X in
The Complete Odes, trans. Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
verses 2930, p. 82: But neither on foot nor by sea could you discover / The fabulous way to the gathering of the Hyperboreans.
p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 169).
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13. Ibid., 2, p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 170).

14. Ibid., 6, pp. 12930 (KSA VI, p. 172).
15. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, Lecture VII, p. 80, trans.
modified. (Was heisst Denken?, p. 75. The German reads: das furchtbare Buch).
pp. 14647 (KSA VI, pp. 19192), trans. mod.
17. KSA VII (187071) 5 (34), p. 102; 5 (50), p. 106; 5 (97), p. 119; KSA VII
(187071) 7 (19), wherein Nietzsche refers to Psalms 1:6 and 9:6.
18. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 72, p. 43 (KSA III, p. 70); and The Anti-Christ, in
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 24, p. 147 (KSA VI, p. 192).
19. Deuteronomy 32:47; see also Amos 8:11ff. and Ezekiel 18:4.
20. Numbers 29:11ff.
21. Isaiah 38:1819, trans. slightly modified.
22. See Psalms 88:6ff.
23. KSA VII (187071) 5 (30), p. 100.
24. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 8, 475, pp. 175 (KSA II, p. 310).
25. KSA IX (187980) 1 (73), pp. 2122.
26. KSA IX (1880) 3 (103), p. 75.
27. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 136, p. 188 (KSA III, p. 487); KSA X (1883)
7 (23), p. 249. The German reads: Diese ganze Moral-Wendung ist in Europa
jdisch. See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 250, p. 185 (KSA V, p. 192);
KSA IX (188081) 8 (6), p. 385 and (47), p. 393.
28. Colossians 2:17.
29. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 84, p. 49 (KSA III, p. 79); see also KSA IX (1880
81) 10 (D 81), p. 431; KSA XI (1885) 42 (6), 5, p. 696.
30. KSA IX (1880) 8 (97), p. 403; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, 38, p. 27
(KSA III, p. 46). The German reads: Die Juden haben den Zorn anders empfunden, als wir, und ihn heilig gesprochen.
31. KSA XI (1885) 36 (42), p. 569.
32. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 52, pp. 6566 (KSA V, p. 72); see
also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 22, pp. 14344 (KSA V, pp. 392
94).
33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (332), p. 97. On the grand style, see Nietzsche, The
Wanderer and His Shadow (96), in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, p. 334 (KSA
II, p. 596); KSA XI (1884) 25 (321), p. 95; (1885) 35 (74), 1, pp. 54142; KSA
XIII (188788) 11 (138), p. 63; (1888) 15 (118), pp. 47781. Finally, Nietzsche,
Expeditions of an Untimely Man (11) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the
Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 85 (KSA VI, pp. 11819).
34. See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israels Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 196263), vol. I, pt.
2, D, 2, p. 364ff.
35. KSA IX (1880) 6 (357), pp. 28788.
36. KSA IX (1881) 15 (66), pp. 65657.
37. KSA VIII (1876) 17 (20), p. 299.
38. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 377, p. 170 (KSA III, p. 246), and Nietzsche, The
Gay Science, 135, pp. 18788 (KSA III, pp. 48687).
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39. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 7, pp. 3334 (KSA V, pp. 267
68); see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 195, p. 108 (KSA V, pp. 11617).
41. KSA IX (1880) 3 (128), p. 89. The political form of this spiritual extension of Europe is colonization, whose extreme cruelty Nietzsche underscored on a number of occasions; see KSA XI (1884) 25 (177), p. 61; (1884)
25 (152), p. 53 and 25 (163), pp. 5657; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (29),
p. 471.
42. KSA XI (1884) 25 (115), pp. 4344. On Nationalitts-Wahnsinn and
nationalist madness, see Nietzsche, Daybreak, 190, p. 111 (KSA III, p. 163); KSA
IX (1880) 7 (280), p. 375; KSA XII (188586) 2 (3), pp. 6768; Nietzsche, The
Gay Science, 377, p. 339 (KSA III, p. 630); Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 256,
p. 196 (KSA V, p. 200) and KSA (1888) 18 (3), p. 532. In regard to nationalist
rage, Nietzsche specifies that the Jews are today themselves an antidote against
this ultimate disease of European reason.
43. KSA IX (1880) 6 (71), p. 213; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 251,
p. 187 (KSA V, p. 193). See also KSA XI (1885) 34 (237), p. 500; KSA XIII (1888)
18 (10), p. 535.
44. KSA XII (188687) 5 (52), p. 205 and KSA IX (1881) 11 (296), p. 555;
see also KSA (188586) 1 (153), p. 45: NB. Against Aryan and Semite. Where
the races are mixed, source of great culture.
45. KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1) 6, pp. 62123; see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy
of Morals, II, 11, p. 75 (KSA V, p. 311).
46. KSA XI (1884) 25 (221), p. 72; see Nietzsche, Daybreak, 205, pp. 124
25 (KSA III, pp. 18182).
47. KSA XIII (1888) 22 (5), pp. 58586.
48. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (195), pp. 38081.
49. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J.
Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). In German, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter/Studienbuch,
2001).
50. See KSA X (1883) 15 (60), p. 494. The first works of Wellhausen date
from 1876 through 1878.
51. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, 24
27, pp. 14652 (KSA VI, pp. 19198).Trans.
52. The division of the Hebraic canon into three parts is first mentioned
in the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiastes. The author of that prologue, which dates from the second century b.c.e., distinguishes between the
Law, the Prophets, and the Scriptures.
53. See Martin Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Studies, trans.
D. R. Ap-Thomas (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), pp. 16, here p. 2 (Die
Gesetze im Pentateuch, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament [Munich: C.
Kaiser, 1966, 3rd ed.], pp. 1520, whose analyses and historic reconstruction we
are following here. Franck translates from the German).Trans.
54. See ibid. p. 14 n.19, and pp. 1920 (Die Gesetze, pp. 25, 32).
55. Ibid., pp. 1617 (Die Gesetze, p. 28).
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56. Exodus 20:1.

57. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 22 (Die Gesetze, p. 40).
58. On the league of the twelve tribes, see Martin Noth, The History of
Israel, trans. Stanley Godman (New York: Harper and Row, 1960, rev. 1st ed.),
pt. I, pp. 53138.
59. Martin Noth has shown, moreover, that by their contents and before
the Exile, all the Old Testament laws presupposed the Covenant between God
and Israel. Indeed, to ensure the exclusivity of that Covenant, one excluded all
that belonged to other cults devoted to different gods. The diversity of legislative
content can be reduced to unity the moment that the laws of Israel have as their
function, in the midst of a Canaanite world, to implement the first commandment. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 4960 and especially pp. 5659,
which feature an exemplary explanation of the prohibition on the consumption
of pork (Die Gesetze, pp. 6781, esp. 7880).
60. See Amos 8:2; Hosea 1:9; Isaiah 2:6.
61. See Jeremiah 31:3135; Ezekiel 16:5963 and 37:2628.
62. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 6667 (Die Gesetze,
pp. 8990).
63. Ibid., pp. 6770, where Noth, discussing Ezekiel 4048, shows the ways
in which Israels vision of its future borrows from the old sacred confederation
of the tribes (Die Gesetze, pp. 9093).
64. See Noth, The History of Israel, pt. III, chap. 2, 2627, pp. 31645.
65. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 80 (Die Gesetze, pp. 1056); see
also p. 91 (p. 114). On the admission of foreigners into the house of Yahweh,
see Isaiah 56:18.
66. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 106 (Die Gesetze, p. 140).
67. Ibid., p. 80 (Die Gesetze, p. 106); see also pp. 8183, where chapter 9
of Nehemiah is analyzed (pp. 10710).
68. Ibid., p. 86 (Die Gesetze, p. 114); see also pp. 91 and 95 (pp. 119
and 125).
69. See ibid., pp. 8795 (Die Gesetze, pp. 11524).
70. Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1.
71. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 96 (Die Gesetze, p. 125).
72. Concerning the problem raised in the chapters of Leviticus 26 and
Deuteronomy 28 in which Yahweh promises blessings to those who observe
his laws, and curses to those who do not, see Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch,
pp. 100102 (Die Gesetze, pp. 13134). See also the study that takes its title
from the word of Saint Paul (Galatians 3:10), For All Who Rely on Works of the
Law Are Under a Curse, in Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pt. III, pp. 11831
(Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, pp. 15571).
73. Judges 5:11.
74. Ezekiel 18:25 and 29.
75. Ezekiel 20:25.
76. See, for example, Psalm 94.
p. 147 (KSA VI, p. 193); see also KSA XII (188687) 5 (88), p. 223. Generally,
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Wellhausen does not grant much importance to the period prior to the kingdom, that is, to that of the holy confederation of the tribes.
78. Ibid., p. 148 (KSA VI, p. 194).
79. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (377), pp. 17071. The last sentence of this
quote is from Wellhausen. There, it is preceded by the following lines: The relation of Yahweh to Israel was in its nature and origin a natural one; there was no
interval between Him and His people to call for thought or question. Only when
the existence of Israel had come to be threatened by the Syrians and Assyrians,
did such prophets as Elijah and Amos raise the Deity high above the people,
sever the natural bond between them, and put in its place a relation depending
on conditions, conditions of a moral character. To them Yahweh was the God of
righteousness in the first place, and the God of Israel in the second place, and
even that only so far as Israel came up to the righteous demands which in His
grace He had revealed to him. They [these prophets] inverted the order of these
two fundamental articles of faith. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, pt. III, chap. 11, p. 417 (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, pp. 42324).
80. KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), p. 343; KSA XII (1887) 10 (90), pp. 5078; KSA
XII (1887) 10 (138), p. 535.
81. KSA XII (1888) 20 (128), p. 570.
p. 148 (KSA VI, p. 194).
83. Ibid., 26, pp. 14849 (KSA VI, pp. 19495); see also KSA XIII (1888)
14 (213), pp. 39091.
84. See M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, trans. and ed. J. A. Clines,
Philip R. Davies, and David M. Gunn (Sheffield, Eng.: JSOT, 1981) (berlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien [Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957]). In this work, published
in 1943, Noth showed that the entirety which in the Hebrew Bible extends from
Deuteronomy to II Kings had to be attributed to one and the same author; viz.,
the Deuteronomist. Wellhausen had already emphasized the kinship between
the Deuteronomist and the Book of Judges, between Samuel and the two books
of the Kings; see Prolegomena, pt. II, chap. 7, pp. 27294.
85. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, pt. III, chap. 13, p. 89 (berlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, p. 100).
86. See II Kings 22:323:3.
87. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, pt. III, chap. 13, p. 92 (berlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, p. 103).
p. 150 (KSA VI, p. 196), trans. modified.
89. Ibid., 12, p. 135 (KSA VI, 12, p. 178), trans. modified; see also KSA
XIII (1888) 14 (189), pp. 37677.
p. 150 (KSA VI, 26, pp. 19697).
91. Friedrich Nietzsche, Morality as Anti-Nature (5), in Twilight of the
Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 55 (KSA VI, p. 86).
92. The sanction is in the specific sense of Roman law, that which puts
a law into effect. See Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Eliza-
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beth Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), bk. 6, Religion, chap. 1, The Sacred, p. 454 (Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes,
[Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1969], vol. II, p. 190).
93. KSA XII (188687) 7 (6), pp. 27576.
94. KSA XII (1887) 10 (152), pp. 54142.
95. KSA XIII (1887) 11 (377), p. 17273. Nietzsches italics read: als sei das
Gttliche dem Weltlichen, Natrlichen durch ussere Merkmale entgegengesetzt. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, pt. III, chap. 11, pp. 42122. On the
kingdom of the priests and the holy people, see Exodus 19:6 and Isaiah 61:6.
96. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 10, pp. 3637 (KSA V, pp. 270
71); see also KSA (1887) 8 (4), pp. 33236.
97. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 11, p. 118 (KSA V, p. 363).
98. See KSA X (188384) 24 (28), pp. 66162.
99. In 1875, Nietzsche already interpreted the Jewish religion as a religion
of vengeance and of justice; KSA VIII (1875) 5 (166), p. 88. See also Deuteronomy 32:35; Isaiah 35:4; Jeremiah 9:8; Psalms 94:1 and 58:11.
100. See Isaiah 41:21ff.
p. 139 (KSA VI, p. 183), trans. modified to include Nietzsches italics; see also
KSA XIII (1888) 17 (4), 2, p. 524.
102. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (29), p. 233.
103. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow (33), in On the Genealogy
of Morals, p. 182 (KSA II, p. 566) and Nietzsche, Daybreak, 202, pp. 12122 (KSA
III, pp. 17778).
Chapter 6. The New Justice

p. 151 (KSA VI, p. 197).
2. Ibid. (KSA VI, p. 198), trans. slightly modified.
3. Ibid. (KSA VI, p. 198).
4. Ibid., 31, p. 155 (KSA VI, p. 202).
5. Ibid., 29, p. 153 (KSA VI, p. 200).
6. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (1887) 10, (51), p. 481; KSA XIII (188788) 11
(363), p. 160 and (390), p. 183.
7. Ibid., 32, p. 157 (KSA VI, p. 204).
8. See ibid.
9. Ibid., 31, 32 and 34, pp. 155, 156 and 158 (KSA VI, pp. 202, 203 and
2067).
10. Ibid., 33 (KSA VI, p. 206).
11. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (42), p. 435.
p. 158 (KSA VI, p. 206).
13. Ibid., 32, p. 156 (KSA VI, p. 204).
14. Ibid., 39, p. 163 (KSA VI, p. 211).
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15. KSA XIII (188788) 11 (282), p. 108 and KSA XII (1887) 9 (35),
pp. 35052; see also Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, 42, pp. 16667 (KSA VI, pp. 21517).
p. 159 (KSA VI, p. 207), trans. modified.
17. Ibid., 40, p. 165 (KSA VI, p. 213); see also KSA XIII (188788) 11
(378), pp. 17578.
18. See ibid. Did Jesus understand himself as the messiah, or was he only
taken as such by the Christian community? The question remains open, to say
the least. See R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. I, chap. 1, 4 The
Question of the Messianic Consciousness of Jesus, pp. 2632 (Theologie des Neuen
Testaments [Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984], pp. 2635).
19. Ibid.
20. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 8, pp. 3435 (KSA V, pp. 26869).
21. KSA XII (1887) 10 (79), p. 501.
p. 140 (KSA VI, p. 185).
23. Ibid., 41, p. 166 (KSA VI, p. 215).
24. Ibid., trans. modified.
25. Ibid., 42, p. 166; (KSA VI, pp. 21516), trans. modified.
26. Ibid.
27. See I Corinthians 7:10ff. and 9:14. On the relations between Jesus and
Saint Paul, see KSA XIII (1888) 15 (108), pp. 46869, as well as R. Bultmann,
The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul, in Faith and
Understanding, ed. Robert W. Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1987), pp. 22046.
28. See I Corinthians 15:58.
pp. 16768 (KSA VI, p. 217).
30. KSA XI (1885) 38 (12), p. 611. The German reads: Diese Welt ist der
Wille zur Machtund nichts ausserdem! See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,
36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55).
31. KSA XII (188687) 7 (8), D, p. 292. See KSA XIII (188788) 11 (122),
pp. 15859; and on the Christian character of what was, up to now, the supremely desirable things, see KSA XII (1887) 10 (150), pp. 53940 and KSA XIII
(188788) 11 (55), pp. 2728.
32. In 1946, in a speech entitled The European Spirit and the World of
Machines, Georges Bernanos described, in a Christian fashion, the Christian
origins of technology, noting that man made the machine and the machine became man, by a kind of diabolical inversion of the mystery of the Incarnation.
See Georges Bernanos, The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, trans. Joan Ulanov and
Barry Ulanov (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), p. 201 (La libert pour quoi
faire? in Essais et crits de combat [Paris: Gallimard, 1995], vol. II, p. 1362).
p. 168 (KSA VI, p. 217).
34. KSA IX (1881) 11 (163), p. 505.
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p. 175 (KSA VI, p. 225). God, as Paul created him, is a denial of God.
36. Nietzsche, Why I Write Such Good Books (1), in Ecce Homo, p. 258
(KSA VI, p. 300).
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Am a Destiny (7, 8, 9), in Ecce Homo,
pp. 332, 333 and 335 (KSA VI, pp. 371, 373 and 374); see also KSA XIII (1888) 14
(89), p. 265 and (137), p. 321.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, An Attempt at Self-Criticism (5), in The Birth of
Tragedy, p. 9 (KSA I, p. 19); see also Nietzsche, Why I Write such Good Books
(2), in Ecce Homo, p. 263: I am, in Greek, and not only in Greek, the Antichrist
(KSA VI, p. 302).
39. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 295, p. 235 (KSA V, p. 238); see also
KSA XI (1885) 34 (176 and 181), pp. 47880 and 48183; KSA XI (1885) 41 (9),
pp. 68386; Plato, Lysis, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 218a, and Plato, Symposium, ibid., 204a.
40. See Nietzsche, What I Owe to the Ancients (5), in Twilight of the Idols,
see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 121 (KSA VI, p. 160); see also KSA XI
(1885) 34 (182), p. 483, for the book project: Dionysus: Attempt at a Divine Way
of Philosophizing.
51, 58, pp. 173, 181 and 194 (KSA VI, pp. 223, 232 and 247).
42. See KSA XI (1885) 41 (7), p. 681. The German reads: Dionysos ist ein
Richter!
44. KSA XII (188586) 2 (96), p. 108.
45. KSA XI (1884) 25 (344), p. 103.
46. KSA XI (1885) 44 (6 and 7), pp. 7067.
47. KSA XII (188687) 5 (71), 34, p. 212.
48. See KSA XIII (188788) 11 (226), 2, pp. 8788; KSA XIII (1888)
14 (5), pp. 21820 and 15 (110), pp. 46971.
49. I Corinthians 15:2122; see also Romans 5:1220.
50. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 46, p. 60 (KSA V, p. 67); see also KSA
XII (1884) 25 (292), p. 86.
53. Colossians 4:3 and II Thessalonians 2:7.
54. KSA XII (188687) 5 (71), 15, p. 212; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14
(157), p. 341. Here, Nietzsche writes that extreme means always characterize
abnormal states.
55. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 20, p. 140 (KSA V, p. 389). In
1880, Nietzsche had already pointed out that to invent sin and then the condition of redemption from it is humanitys most incomparable realization. This
tragedy makes the others so insipid!; see KSA IX (1880) 7 (251), p. 369.
56. Letter to Peter Gast, 21 July 1881, in SB, vol. VI, p. 108ff. (this letter
is cited in English only in association with the letter to Franz Overbeck, 23 June
1881, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, p. 55 n.1).
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57. KSA IX (1880) 5 (33), p. 188.

58. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496.
59. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, Of Redemption, pp. 16162
(KSA IV, pp. 17980), trans. slightly modified.
60. Ibid., p. 161, trans. slightly modified.
61. See Matthew 8:12; 13:42 and 50; 22:13; 24:51, and 25:30.
62. See Romans 2:9 and 8:35. This is not the only meaning of the word
tribulation, which generally denotes the worldly life of the Christian between
sin and grace; see II Corinthians 1:4, 7:4 and I Thessalonians 3:3ff.
63. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), 330, p. 93.
64. The Anti-Christ, 45, p. 173 (KSA VI, p. 223).
65. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, Lecture X, p. 104 (Was heisst
Denken?, p. 43). After having thus described the way in which eternal recurrence
frees us from revenge, Heidegger observes that Christian faith knows another
way of re-willing the It was: repentance. But Nietzsche defined repentance as
a revenge against oneself, the Christian manner of re-willing the past always
comes out of the economy of revenge; see ibid., p. 105 (Was heisst Denken?, p. 44)
and Nietzsche, KSA X (1883) 16 (90), p. 532.
66. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496.
67. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, Of Redemption, p. 162 (KSA IV,
p. 180), trans. modified.
68. See KSA XI (1885) 39 (13), pp. 62324; KSA XII (188586) 2 (122),
p. 122; KSA XII (188687) 7 (24), p. 303; KSA XII (1887) 8 (7), pp. 33738
and 9 (135), p. 413.
69. KSA XI (1884) 25 (484), p. 141. The German reads: Gerechtigkeit als
bauende ausscheidende vernichtende Denkweise, aus den Werthschtzungen
heraus: hchster Reprsentant des Lebens selber.
70. KSA XI (1884) 26 (149), p. 188.
71. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 21, p. 148 and pt. 3,
chap. 6, p. 245 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 646 and vol. II, p. 327). Heidegger interprets
these two notes on justice quite differently.
72. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, Of Love of Ones Neighbor,
pp. 8688 (KSA IV, pp. 7779); see also KSA X (1882) 3 (1), 225 and 229,
pp. 7980.
73. KSA X (188283) 4 (271), p. 184, and KSA XI (1884) 25 (290), p. 85.
(In both texts, the questions are introduced by the great test or trial.Trans.) It
goes without saying that the redemption here must be understood in the Christian sense of the term.
74. KSA XII (188687) 5 (39), p. 198. The German reads: Sprach der Naivett and contrasts with die raffinierste Form des modernen Gedankens. See
also KSA XII (188687) 6 (22), pp. 23940. Here, the world of old forms part of
the theme.Trans.
75. KSA X (188283) 5 (32), p. 226.
8/31/11 3:12:43 PM
Didier Franck is a professor of philosophy at the Universit de Paris X,

Nanterre, and scholar of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. He is the author most recently of Lun-pour-lautre: Levinas et la signification (2008).
Bettina Bergo is an associate professor of philosophy at the Universit de
Montral. She has edited and translated many works, including Nietzsche
and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God (with Jill Stauffer, 2009). She
is the author of Levinas Between Ethics and Politics (2002).
<Q>Author and translators: Please review

your bios carefully.
They will appear both
inside the book and
on the paperbacks
cover.
Philippe Farah is a graduate student in the philosophy department at the

Universit de Montral.
8/31/11 3:12:43 PM

Nietzsche and The Shadow of God

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NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD

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Translated from the French by Bettina Bergo and

Northwestern University Press

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Northwestern University Press

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Part 1. From the Resurrection of Body to Eternal Recurrence

The Body Under the Law

Justice and Faith

One Vision Out of Another

Circulus Vitiosis Deus?

Part 2. The Shadow of God

The Double Status of the Body

The Self-Negation of the Will

The Great Coincidence

The Prophetic Translation

Part 3. The Guiding Thread

The Plurality of the Body

Pleasure and Pain

To Will, to Feel, to Think

Organization and Reproduction

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Part 4. The Logic of the Body

Fear and the Will to Assimilation

Simplication and Judgment

Part 5. The System of Identical Cases

Sensation and Evaluation

The Formation of Categories

Space and Time

Coordination and Necessity

The Subject of Causality

Part 6. From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body

The Decisive Instant

The Incorporation of Truth

The Priestly Revaluation

The New Justice

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NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD

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unconcealment. In other words, we could not disclose what is, in the

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