Epigenetic Memory and the Unscathed Life: A Reading of “On Redemption” from Nietzsche’s Thus

Spoke Zarathustra

by

Thomas Steinbuch, PhD, Philosophy, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Xiaoheshan
Campus, Hangzhou, P.R. China

The subject of Nietzsche’s study is the problem of human progress. In his sketches for The Will to
Power he wrote one of its subtitles as an “Essay On a New Interpretation of Evolution.” His
interpretation of evolution was new vis á vis Darwinism in the respect that it was an alternative to
the “will to survive,” which Nietzsche saw as a will to self-preservation. Nietzsche’s theory is
sophisticated. He thought that organisms have an inner drive to grow and that it is only when life is
weak that self-preservation becomes the object of that drive. When life is strong, its inner drive
pushes it to become more. Life adds to itself and becomes more by mastering a resistance. The
inner drive of life that impels it to seek a resistance to get power over it so as to become more is the
will to power. Nietzsche’s new interpretation of evolution is that life seeks to become more as
driven forward by the impetus of the will to power to master the resistance of its intimate
weaknesses. Nietzsche recognized the technical point that if resistance is not equal then either we
cannot reasonably engage it, in the case when it is stronger, or that engaging it has no point, in the
case when it is weaker. His theory states that the will to power in life can interpret a resistance as
being equal to itself. In Ecce Homo he uses the metaphor of warfare to describe his engagement of
a resistance equal to his will to power. A resistance below is not warfare. In this way life develops.
But something is wrong, and it is why Nietzsche is writing. Humanity is not progressing, and in fact,
we are reaching the last man, the point of human decline at which life adding to itself comes to an
end. The will to power is renouncing itself and lost its agency, and “On Redemption” is an analysis of
the causes of that self-renunciation. Nietzsche’s critique of renunciation in Christianity and what is
related to it in science and the arts was motivated by the attempt to expose this subterranean Spirit
of Revenge.

In his recent commentary on Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s Last Laugh, Ecce Homo as Satire, Nicholas
More asserts that there is no coherent thought in Nietzsche’s published works and that he was not
trying to produce such. Instead, says More, Nietzsche was writing satire of bad philosophy. In
More’s view, in his view, all of Nietzsche’s published works are satires. I will return to the
significance of Ecce Homo for the study of “On Redemption” later in the paper. In the same vein,
Kathleen Higgins has pointed out that there is satire in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But the satire in
these works is not their be-all and end-all. In what follows I will introduce the ideas that the imprint
of trauma can be inherited and, together with it, memory of trauma; that we can meliorate
renunciation and retaliation by cognitive exercises of willing that alter our epigenetic code so that
we can be said to “evolve ourselves in our own lifetimes;” that we severally develop our epigenetic
code to add life to ourselves and these developments mass along common epigenetic pathways to
steer the course of human epigenomic evolution.

Nietzsche said in a letter to his friend Overbeck that he inherited a lack of life-force from his father.
His inheritance from his father left him no choice but to explore renunciation of life. His self-
exploration became the basis for the empirical content we find in “On Redemption.” Nietzsche’s
father died at 36 of a brain disease. An autopsy was performed but the reports of the results
conflict. According to one report, one-quarter of his brain had been destroyed. If so, it was probably
caused by tuberculosis bacteria. According to another report, a large tumour had developed. In
Ecce Homo Nietzsche speaks of being already dead as his father, as being on the lowest rung on the
ladder of life as his father and as being a decadent as his father. He says that life did not come to
him from his father. He says that he is as a Doppelganger, having a condition on his aliveness so that
he walks with a “foot beyond life” as the paternal descent that set him beyond all socialized
perspectives. These make a statement of a bad inheritance.

What Nietzsche says about his inheritance from his father reads today as a description of a bad
epigenetic inheritance. There are at least two ways a bad epigenetic inheritance could have
occurred as per the happenstance of his father’s brain disease. One possibility is that Carl
Nietzsche’s brain disease caused a modification of his epigene which then passed to Nietzsche, but
this is not likely. It is unlikely that his brain disease would have resulted in modification to his
epigene. It is also unlikely that anything related to his brain disease would have shown up in
Nietzsche’s epigene for the general reason that epigenetic reprogramming is highly developed in
humans making transgenerational epigenetic heritability rare compared with lower mammals and
plants. Still, this is a possibility to which future research may return. However, Carl Nietzsche’s brain
disease could have been quite advanced at the time of Nietzsche’s foetal and neo-natal
development, especially if it was tuberculosis of the brain. Nietzsche was born four years and ten
months before his father died and it is a possibility that his deteriorating psycho-biological condition
introduced stress into his early environment and this could have affected Nietzsche’s epigene.
Whatever happened, I think it is clear that today we would trace what Nietzsche told us about his
inheritance from his father to the epigenetic code he inherited from him.

Nietzsche’s bad inheritance from his father began his study of the renunciation of life. Because of its
dreadful past, says Zarathustra, humanity today is in limbs and pieces, as on a battle-field, or a
butcher’s table. It would seem Nietzsche was thinking about our historical past. After all, what
would he have to say to someone who reported that he has no memory of “dreadful accident” in his
own past, and that he had had an unscathed life? In fact, today we know that traumatic imprint is
heritable, although not to what extent. But, drought, feminine, disease and war leave a heritable
imprint as epigenetic code. Memory of past trauma is heritable as well. Research into Alzheimer’s
disease has established the role of epigenetic regulation in the encoding, consolation and retrieval of
memory. We have evidence in mammals of transgenerational heritability of epigenetic regulation of
associative memory bearing DNA through four generations. The association between a certain scent
and an electric shock, for instance, is heritable. Obviously, it is false to say that in the fourth
generation there is memory of the experience of an electric shock, but equally obviously, it is false to
say that there is not. As in the case of peripheral vision were something is both seen and not seen,
in epigenetic memory, something is remembered and not remembered. We simply do not know
how much ancestral memory we have. A modern reading of what would seem to be Lamarckianism,
or Nietzsche’s new Lamarckianism is that we are the inheritors of epigenetic imprint of trauma and
epigenetic memory of trauma such that even in the unscathed life the will is pulled into
preoccupation with a remembered but non-contemporary past.
But even in our contemporary past Nietzsche points to how we are bound spectators witnessing the
past devour its children, like Moloch and so fall prey to renunciation. His text recalls the sorrows of
remembering as Tennyson explored them in his poem, Tears, Idle Tears: “oh death in life, the days
that are no more,” he writes. Remembering the days that are no more is a “divine despair,” writes
Tennyson. And in her elegiac poem Cold in the Earth, Emily Brontë writes of the “rapturous pain” of
remembering her dead beloved that afterwards makes mere everyday life unbearable. We are
drawn to torturous sorrow of the pastness of the past. Reflecting on the sufferings of the world,
Keats longed for a “rich death” in Ode to a Nightingale to escape them. But for Nietzsche, the
feeling-states of Romantic Pessimism represent the renunciation of life. Nietzsche’s agenda calls for
mastering Tennyson’s “divine despair” at the passing of the days that are no more as a self-
renouncing feeling state of the will. By willing the days that are no more precisely to be days that
are no more, I master renunciation of life on account of their passing. And otherwise, they will
remain as death in the midst of life. But this is what we do not know how to do, and it is Zarathustra
who has shown us. By willing the recurrence of a renunciation-resistance in the past, controlling the
feeling of wanting to change things, we master renunciation and add life.

Nietzsche tells us in that the will to power has turned against itself. This has happened because the
will to power suffers in not being able to will backwards. I take Nietzsche to be saying that we are
weakened by a traumatic past. Because we are, we have become beings of renunciation and
retaliation. The will is renouncing life and retaliating against its very agency that alone can
strengthen life in us. The first thing we must do is get control over compulsive feelings and thoughts
of renunciation and retaliation on account of the traumatic past. We can do this by controlling the
feeling of wanting to change the past. By controlling the feeling of wanting to change things we give
the will a chance to strengthen itself against renunciation. But because trauma is in the past there
we have no way to control wanting to change it. Nietzsche derives the Spirit of Revenge from the
suffering of the will to power. The will has turned against itself in imposing a regimen of equality
and proscribing the exercise of power by which wills become unequal. Its strategy is that if the will
of life cannot add to itself by exercising power over what its intimate weaknesses in life, life will
remain weak and crippled. That is its revenge.

Because our lived being is in limbs and pieces from the traumatic past and without wholeness, and
we did not know how to strengthen ourselves against it, the Spirit of Revenge arose renouncing life
and the will to power of life. The will to power interpreted its suffering as a just punishment for
having life-strengthening agency. This is the origin and meaning of Christianity. The cognitive
exercise of willing the recurrence of the past allows us to control wanting to change things and
master renunciation and so affirms the agency of will to power to strengthen life against the
inherited trauma that has left us in ruins. With the agency of will to power restored, humankind can
look forward to a future when it will have evolved by will to power to become whole. We can
formulate the above thoughts as set of hypotheses in epigenetics: Can the will to power in life
strengthen life against its intimate weaknesses as inherited from the traumatic past? Can I make
changes to my epigene that can meaningfully be considered as adding life? Can such changes be
heritable? Can changes to the epigene that add life that we make severally mass along a common
epigenetic pathway with the result that we can influence the evolution of the human epigenome?

A key puzzle of “On Redemption” is that the will has not learned how not to renounce the past and
that it must be taught this by Zarathustra, who claims for himself the world-historical identity as the
Teacher of the Eternal Recurrence. But why is this possible for Nietzsche/Zarathustra alone? For the
answer, we must turn to Ecce Homo. Recall that Nietzsche says that he had not said anything in Ecce
Homo that he could not have said five years earlier at the time of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which
suggests that Ecce Homo can be read as an introduction to it. Without understating why Nietzsche
alone is in the position to teach the Eternal Recurrence, it is no wonder that the book was not well
received and even today, read as a satire. Who then is Nietzsche that he is the teacher of the
Eternal Recurrence? It is the same Nietzsche who put himself forward in Ecce Homo as the leader of
the values-revaluation, and he tells us there that he alone is that identify because of his bad
inheritance from his father.

Ecce Homo goes further than just stating facts of his bad inheritance from his father and gives an
interpretation of these facts as meaning an identity. Nietzsche’s stated purpose in writing Ecce
Homo is to say who he is because wished to justify being in the singular position of leading the
values-revaluation. Pace Professor More, Nietzsche he does not say that his philosophy is
demanding and that that is why he is writing an autobiography. Nietzsche states a singular identity –
he is the one alone who is justified in making the heaviest demand, which is a singular identity. I do
not think Zarathustra’s identity as the Teacher of the Eternal Recurrence is a spoof of philosopher’s
arrogance in wanting to be followed, which I take to be the way, or a way Professor More would
read it.

Zarathustra’s identity as the Teacher of the Eternal Recurrence is related to the identity Nietzsche
sets out for himself in Ecce Homo. It is plainly in the text that his identity that justifies his making
the heaviest demand of a values-revaluation is his interpretation of his inheritance from his father of
looking from the perspective of sickness and then again, by willing life that adding life to himself,
looking also from the perspective of health, as he calls it, “the fullness and assurance of a rich life.”
The question of what is Zarathustra’s identity arises in “On Redemption” and is later answered as his
being the Teacher of the Eternal Recurrence. Zarathustra’s identity as the Teacher of the Eternal
Recurrence is an interpretation of the same facts of his inheritance from his father and the
developments that resulted. From his bad inheritance from his father, Nietzsche is at “the lowest
rung on the ladder of life,” he suffers from an affective disorder of compulsive renouncing and
retaliating which he has mastered and, by doing so, reached the highest rung on the ladder of life
where those values are reversed and affirmation of will to power is in their place. Obviously, it
would be overwhelming to will all the past to recur. But Zarathustra alone is equal to any
renunciation–resistance, whereas the rest of humanity is indexed to a renunciation-resistance at
given moment of strength of will to power which is equal to it. But Nietzsche/Zarathustra is equal in
strength of life to any renunciation-resistance because has mastered renunciation in the setting of
his bad inheritance from his father. He can master any renunciation-resistance by willing the value
of the renunciation to recur and he adds life to himself by doing so. The counter-example of
Auschwitz has often been raised against Nietzsche’s idea . We will the recurrence of even terrible
things to show faith that will to power will come forward and strengthen life at least to some degree
against those terrible effects. In the critical use of the case in question, emphasis has been on the
suffering of the Auschwitz inmates and the apparent pointless of willing it to recur, short of
metaphysics of the interconnectedness of all events, which is not grounded in Nietzsche texts. But
there is another way to apply Nietzsche’s idea. Faith in will to power can mean faith that it can
strengthen life against the intimate weakness of authoritarianism that came out as the cruelty that
caused that suffering. Wilhelm Reich investigated the nature of authoritarianism as life-weakening
fearfulness of freedom in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

In another interpretation of the facts of his inheritance from his father and the results as a singular
identity, Nietzsche says that he is on the highest rung on the ladder of life. Pace Professor More,
Nietzsche never said that his father was on the highest rung on the ladder of life and that his mother
was on the lowest, which would, if he had, would surely have made for some kind of joke. It is
Professor More’s bad inference from the text that Nietzsche says this. If Nietzsche/Zarathustra’s
identity as being the Teacher of the Eternal Recurrence is an interpretation of facts about himself as
per his inheritance from his father, then he did not put up that identity for the purpose of satire. If
Nietzsche was writing about something in regard to which he had intuitions even though not
knowledge, and if it was real, a bad epigenetic transfer. then he was not writing satire.

Nietzsche disciplined himself not to want to change things in his own life and his empirical self-
exploration in this regard was the basis of his idea of controlling wanting to change the past by
willing it to recur. In Ecce Homo, Wise/4 and Wise/5 Nietzsche describes cognitive exercises that
control wanting to change things and so master the feelings of renunciation and retaliation. In
Wise/4 Nietzsche says that he masters renunciation by remaining unprepared, and so buffoons
become mannered and bears become tame. They do not change objectively of course, and, indeed,
there are no such objects as buffoons and bears to begin with. Nietzsche mastered having
expectations for the buffoons to be otherwise, hence there are no expectations for them to thwart
and so nothing about them the feeling of wanting things to change can get hold. This is not just now
and again. He says he is always equal to chance, that is, equal to the unexpected, he never has
thwarted expectations. This means that there is no need for him to index another’s buffoonery as a
renunciation-resistance to a particular moment of strength of will to power. For him there is no
buffoonery “above” the ability of his will to power to master renunciation, no so-called buffoonery
that would be so extreme that he would renounce it as buffoonery and not just leave it to be as is.
And in Wise/5 Nietzsche tells us that he masters retaliation against a wrongdoer by the cognitive
exercise of blaming himself for the wrongdoing to him. Blaming himself for the wrongdoing of
another to him means that there is no wrongdoing of the other and so nothing to retaliate for.
Again, by the cognitive exercise of blaming himself he controls the feeling of wanting to change
things, and this masters the renunciation-resistance. The wrongdoer is affirmed: “all days are holy
and all days divine” in the words of Zarathustra. The point of these cognitive exercises on occasion
of renunciation and retaliation resistances add life, and that is their point. It is a merely a
coincidental fact that added life come to be as the outcome of these cognitive exercises has the
character of affirmation. It is only because they master renunciation that this is so. Saying “yes” to
what is is an empty gesture unless it is an exercise of life-creating mastery of a life-weakening
resistance. On this point I am at odds with Professor Reginster in his book on Nietzsche, The
Affirmation of Life. Willing the recurrence of past is an exercise of will to power and that means
evolutionary development of life, which does not follow from the mere idea of affirmation of life
alone.

As with having no expectations for the behaviour of others and blaming oneself for the wrongdoing
of another to oneself, willing the recurrence of the past is a cognitive exercise designed to control
the feeling of wanting to change things. Because life becomes more in the present, renunciation of
life because of events in the past must come forward to be dynamically engaged in the present.
Willing the recurrence of the traumatic past dynamically masters renunciation of life, so for any past
renunciation-resistance, indexed to the present moment of strength of will to power, willing it to
recur masters life renunciation. Out from beneath its own self-renunciation, the will to power can
strengthen life in us and by this means we will evolve the wholeness of the Over-Person from out of
the ruins of our living being such as we are in now.

Nietzsche had a great vision of human evolution. In ruins from the traumatic past, our lived being is
to become whole as the Over-Person who adds life as we master renunciation and affirm the will to
power. Nietzsche’s Lamarckianism, or his new Lamarckianism, is more than a historically interesting
starting point for a reconstructive reading. Today we can translate Nietzsche’s vision into a
scientifically meaningful theory about human epigenomic evolution. Epigenetic technology holds
promise to further Nietzsche’s vision more securely then he could have hoped. Clinical applications
of epigenetic research may discover pharmacological interventions that will do the job Nietzsche
was trying to accomplish with cognitive exercises alone. For all that, it is hard to see how the
political will to realize his vision can prevail as there are already so many stakeholders in the game of
switching genes on and off. If we do not attend to Nietzsche’s warning that we must address
renouncing the will to power in life or continue “in ruins” there will not be the foundation on which
the post-human can arise, let alone endure, and this momentous event will collapse on itself. Only
the evolution of the human epigenome into the Over-Person of invincible inner aliveness as brought
forth by the will to power can sustain the post-human, and only epigenetic technology can bring the
Person out of the realm of faith and into the realm of the feasible. They are one and the same
advance.