The central symbol of the new values is “the superman”, and the superman is a new human being who looks with joy upon the “eternal return”. What is the eternal return? It is a belief that all the events of our lives, will repeat eternally. Nietzsche thought this was an emerging implication of the scientific worldview, and he thought that it would cause a vast spiritual crisis in the openly atheist Europe of the future. He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
Just wanted to flag that to me this sounds at best disputed and really just not accurate.
The Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence both might be more literary devices than genuine things Nietzsche believes in. On the eternal recurrence, I think most people agree the main point of it is to serve as a kind of litmus test for a person’s constitution. There’s an attempted proof of the idea in the Nachlass but I don’t think most scholars think Nietzsche literally endorsed it. On the Ubermensch, there are not many references to the character outside of Zarathustra, and most of the external references are about TSZ, and within TSZ there’s a reading that the Ubermensch is itself an idea that needs to be overcome. Happy to elaborate but note that the Ubermensch is already mentioned as Z’s ideal prior to his encountering the idea of the eternal recurrence, and it doesn’t seem like the idea is part of his convalescence. I also think you can read Part IV as being about overcoming the idea, or anyway not taking it quite so seriously.
I don’t know where you are getting the thing about mass suicides. Maybe it’s true, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.
Just wanted to flag that to me this sounds at best disputed and really just not accurate.
The Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence both might be more literary devices than genuine things Nietzsche believes in. On the eternal recurrence, I think most people agree the main point of it is to serve as a kind of litmus test for a person’s constitution. There’s an attempted proof of the idea in the Nachlass but I don’t think most scholars think Nietzsche literally endorsed it. On the Ubermensch, there are not many references to the character outside of Zarathustra, and most of the external references are about TSZ, and within TSZ there’s a reading that the Ubermensch is itself an idea that needs to be overcome. Happy to elaborate but note that the Ubermensch is already mentioned as Z’s ideal prior to his encountering the idea of the eternal recurrence, and it doesn’t seem like the idea is part of his convalescence. I also think you can read Part IV as being about overcoming the idea, or anyway not taking it quite so seriously.
I don’t know where you are getting the thing about mass suicides. Maybe it’s true, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.