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constraints of customary morality. Nietzsche’s vision in this important aphorism,
and the means by which he thinks this vision can be pursued is supported, we suggest, by preceding aphorisms in book five of the text. Second, we explore how
Nietzsche’s vision of humanity as future-oriented and self-creating is taken up once
again by him in his later, No-saying, writings.
The fifth and final book of Dawn opens with an aphorism that carries the epigraph, “In the great silence” (D 423). This epigraph situates humanity within the
natural world: as Nietzsche goes on to suggest, Nature, in contrast to the noise of
the city, is silent.5 In the remainder of the aphorism, Nietzsche unpacks the complexity of humanity’s situation as conscious, yet embodied, and embedded within
the natural world. In order to do so, Nietzsche develops a quasi-Cartesian meditation, the details of which we will unfold shortly, which prompts us to grapple with
the problem that even while humanity is part of the natural world, our dependence
on language and on reason — and on the differing perspectives that language and
reason enable — makes our situation difficult for us to grasp fully. This difficulty,
in turn, affects our comprehension of the future and of our relationship to it.
The aphorism begins with the narrator of the aphorism leaving a city, and going
down to the sea. We learn that by the sea “we can forget the city,” because here “all
is silent!” According to the narrator, neither the sea, the sky, nor the “crags and
ribbons of rock descending into the sea” can speak; faced with their collective
silence, a “prodigious muteness” that is “beautiful and terrifying” suddenly overcomes us and “swells the heart.” Of their heart, which as a part of the body is
hence more obviously and immediately a part of the natural world, the narrator
tells us, “it’s growing stiller yet and my heart swells again: it is startled by a new
truth; it too cannot speak.” The narrator contrasts the silence of Nature with the
clamor of humanity, which is represented by the faint tolling of the Angelus bell
in the city “at the crossroads of day and night” at which the meditation takes
place. Similarly, the narrator juxtaposes the “mute beauty” and “bound tongue” of
Nature with the speech and thought of humans.
Initially, the narrator projects hypocrisy and malice onto Nature’s silence, which
seems to them to “ridicule” humanity. But as they are drawn further into Nature’s
silence during the course of this meditation, the narrator acknowledges that, “I
am not ashamed to be the ridicule of such powers.” In acknowledging this, the
narrator begins to reintegrate their individuality into the perspective of silent
Nature. Their heart (rather than their reason) gradually adopts the perspective of
Nature’s silence; as the narrator remarks, “it joins in the ridicule whenever a
mouth cries out into this beauty” and “begins to enjoy its own sweet malice of
silence.” Yet even so, the wisdom of Nature remains less accessible to the narrator’s consciousness, as they explain: “I come to hate speech, even thought: don’t I
hear behind every word the laughter of error, wishful thinking, delusion? Mustn’t
I ridicule my own compassion? Ridicule my ridicule?”
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
The meditation in Dawn 423 concludes in two ways. First, the narrator’s rational
self complains at Nature — the sea and the evening — for being “terrible mentors”
and for teaching “the human being to cease being human!” Second, the narrator
poses a series of questions about what it is that Nature is trying to teach humanity,
speaking of humanity’s relationship to Nature. As the narrator puts it, “Ought he
to sacrifice himself to you? Ought he to become as you are now, pale, shimmering,
mute, prodigious, reposing above oneself? Sublimely above oneself?” These questions are not answered, but are left for readers to engage with for themselves.
Throughout the meditation in Dawn 423, Nietzsche contrasts the perspectives
of the natural with those of reason and of embodied rationality, and he also plays
with the tensions between them by means of language. Similarly, Nietzsche plays
with perspectives: while we might tend to assume on an initial reading of the
aphorism that it is Nietzsche who is speaking to us, it is not at all clear that this
assumption is a safe one. If we consider the perspectives that Nietzsche identifies
in Dawn 423, we notice that they include the perspectives of reason, the heart, and
Nature (here comprised of sea, sky, and rocks) — in other words, both sub-self
and extra-self-perspectives — as well as including the perspectives of an “I,” a
“he,” and a “we.” The “I” is not necessarily being used to refer to Nietzsche himself, and neither is the “he.” And, when Nietzsche refers to “we” in the aphorism,
there is a question about to whom he is referring, or from what perspective the
first-person perspective in the aphorism is speaking: initially we might assume it
refers to some specific group of humans here, now, but it also potentially refers to
a possible future version of humanity. When a series of “Or?” questions are
directed to silent Nature at the end of the aphorism, the first-person perspective
incorporated within the aphorism emerges as clearly distinct from the narrator
who commences the aphorism: the questions are whether “he” should sacrifice
himself to Nature, and whether “he” should become as “you,” Nature, are now. It
is important to notice that the questions in this part of the aphorism are not
whether “I” should do so — such a distinct “I” having identified itself as willing
to be an object of ridicule for Nature earlier in the aphorism. What seem to be
obvious distinctions, or set of dualisms, at the start of the aphorism — city/beach,
civilization/nature, reason/heart, self/other, land/sea, earth/sky, past/future —
are slowly undermined by the shifting perspectives that the reader moves
through during their engagement with the text of the aphorism, and through
this engagement, a possible future subject position is opened up. The reader finds
their sense of subject positions to be already in a state of flux. This of course
mirrors the drive psychological account of the subject that Nietzsche develops in
Dawn, and which we discussed in greater depth in Chapter 6.
The use of a meditation format in this aphorism is, we suggest, deliberate on
Nietzsche’s part, and significant to the project of understanding the means by
which Nietzsche’s vision of a future-oriented humanity might become possible.
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To understand this point, a comparison between Nietzsche’s approach to writing
this meditation and that of Descartes is instructive. As Isabelle Wienand has
pointed out, there is precedent for drawing attention to a similar pattern between
Nietzsche’s writing and that of Descartes, particularly with respect to subjectivity,
and particularly to subject positions or perspectives.6 According to Wienand, a
sense of the self remains important to Nietzsche for the purpose of writing philosophy from the first-person perspective: as she puts it, the ich may involve “different and even contradicting identities” yet it nonetheless “exists as a constitutive
instance” for Nietzsche.7 In comparing Nietzsche’s use of the first-person perspective in the 1886 Prefaces to Dawn and The Gay Science with that of Descartes in his
Discourse on the Method, Wienand contends that, like Descartes, Nietzsche does
not simply present autobiographical details; instead, he adapts an account of his
solitary life to the emergence of his writing in these texts, as he discusses his own
psychological process of tunneling into “the foundations” (D Preface 2).8 By
repackaging some of his life events according to the key thematic concerns of
texts such as Dawn in his Preface to the text, Wienand suggests, Nietzsche is drawing our attention to one way in which the act of engaging in philosophy can be
transformative of human existence.9
While Wienand’s concern is with the Preface to Dawn rather than with Dawn
423, we think that her analysis of how Nietzsche uses the constitutive ich or self
in his writing to facilitate transformative experience through philosophical
engagement can be applied to Dawn 423, and that doing so illuminates how this
aphorism is constructed to function as a transformative meditation. The aphorism
is transformative in two senses. In the first sense of transformation, the switching
of subject positions from one constituted subject position to another in the aphorism encourages the reader to adopt distinct subject positions, first a present subject position, and second, a future possible subject position. In the second sense of
transformation, this readerly activity of subject position shifting has a real effect
on readers as a group, not merely as individuals: through the act of shifting readerly perspectives from present to future, the conceptual possibility of an alternative future subject position is translated into actual being, which we incorporate
into ourselves and thereby transform ourselves.10
Here, a concern might be raised that transformative experience cannot depend
on something so small and seemingly impactless as the experience of reading an
aphorism. We might tend to envisage transformative experiences as profound and
significant and indeed many transformative experiences are so, such as a bereavement or a serious, life-changing injury. In recent work, L. A. Paul has defined a
transformative experience as an experience that teaches you something new that
you could not have known before having the experience, and that changes your
“subjective value for what it is like to be you, and changes your core preference
about what matters.”11 Reading an aphorism seems unlikely to result in similar
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
transformation. People are very unlikely to read philosophical writing that they do
not understand or follow fully, and the dizzying shifts in perspective in Dawn 423
may simply bewilder many readers. Moreover, even if the aphorism is followed
carefully and is grasped by its readers, it is not clear how this would result in any
meaningful transformation, either of an individual or of a large group or species.
However, we think it is important to notice that, in Dawn, Nietzsche allows that
“small doses” of experience, including those that may seem almost insignificant
to us, may ultimately prove to be importantly transformative over time (D 534).12
As Nietzsche puts it, “If you want to effect the most profound transformation
possible, then administer the means in the smallest doses, but unremittingly and
over long periods of time!” He warns against exchanging our values “head over
heels” and instead supports a slower, more careful, and patient approach to transformation (D 534). He elaborates on the same theme in his discussion of learning
in which he contrasts Michelangelo’s view of himself as naturally talented
compared with Raphael, from Michelangelo’s perspective, as a mere learner;
Nietzsche cautions us against the “envy and pride” that characterizes the “pedant”
Michelangelo here, and points out that talent is a name for “an older piece of
learning, experience, practice, appropriation, absorption” and that the person
who learns “imparts talent to himself” (D 540). And in an earlier aphorism, he had
prescribed “[s]low cures” for chronic diseases of the soul that arise not through
“onetime gross offenses,” but “through countless unnoticed little acts of negligence”
(D 462). As he suggests, the cure for such chronic diseases “cannot come about by
any means other than to resolve, once again, on countless little offsetting exercises
and to cultivate unwittingly different habits” (D 462).
All these cures are slow and persnickety; also, anyone who wants to heal his
soul should reflect on changing the smallest of his habits. Many a person
has a cold, malicious word to say for his environment ten times a day and
doesn’t think anything of it, especially because, after a few years, he has
created for himself a law of habit that from now on compels him ten times
every day to sour his environment. But he can also accustom himself to
doing it a kindness ten times! (D 462)
Hence, for Nietzsche, transformation is explicitly a slow process that is dependent
on small actions rather than on gross ones.
In constructing Dawn 423 as a meditation, Nietzsche creates an important space
for his readers, in which diverse possible futures for humanity literally open up and
are brought, potentially at least, into accessible being in and through us. Reading the
meditation, readers have an opportunity to decide on our responses for ourselves. For
instance, readers are presented with the opportunity to grapple with whether or not
they would be willing to sacrifice themselves to Nature, with how they might respond
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to Nature’s silence, and with the question of whether they find the city or the sea
more engaging and attractive. Nietzsche leaves it to readers to determine whether or
not they should become as the sea and the evening — which the narrator describes
as those “terrible mentors” — are now: “sublimely above oneself?” (D 423). The
questions with which the aphorism concludes enable readers to decide whether or
not they should inquire toward a possible future in which the “human being” has
been taught by the sea and the evening “to cease being human!” (D 423). What would
it mean, we might wonder, to cease being human? What would we then become?
Independent readerly engagement with such philosophical questions can be — and
critically, whether we like it or not or intend it or not — transformative.
According to Nietzsche, transformative experiences based on small cures and
slow doses are ones that lay down in us “a new nature” (D 534).13 Nietzschean
transformative experiences need not be sudden or enormous: they are doses to
which we can more easily become accustomed (D 534). As Ruth Abbey has
pointed out, drawing on Nietzsche’s thinking in Dawn 553, quotidian minutiae —
small daily acts of self-care — are undervalued, despite their importance to caring
effectively for the self.14 In the aphorism upon which Abbey draws to develop this
claim, Nietzsche questions whether his philosophy is anything more than a translation of a “constant concentrated drive” for particular things — specifically,
“mild sunshine, cleaner and fresher air, southerly vegetation, sea air, quick repasts
of meat, eggs, and fruit, hot water to drink, daylong silent wanderings, little
speaking, infrequent and careful reading, solitary living, pure, simple, and almost
soldierly habits” — into “reason” (D 553). While Abbey’s analysis rightly directs
our attention to Nietzsche’s emphasis on quotidian minutiae and the transformative significance of these, we think it is helpful to add to her reading by
emphasizing that Nietzsche is also focusing attention on the relationship between
body, environment, and philosophy more generally in his analysis of transformation, beyond the case of a single individual. It is not only the single reader who can
be transformed but also, eventually, humanity. Nietzsche points out in this
aphorism that “loftier sublimities” of other philosophies may too be nothing more
than “intellectual detours for these kinds of personal drives,” and grounds the
aphorism in the question of where “this philosophy” is heading (D 553). His
example of a butterfly’s “secret and solitary swarming” on the “rocky seashore,”
like the beach of Dawn 423, is instructive with respect to the case of humanity as
a whole. While we stand watching it, the butterfly is flying about, unaware that it
“only has one day yet to live” and that “the night will be too cold for its winged
fragility” (D 553). While we could imagine a philosophy for the butterfly, Nietzsche
suggests, it will not be “mine” — and why not? Because the butterfly can already
fly, unlike ourselves. To be like the butterfly and capable of a philosophy we could
imagine for it, humanity would have to learn to fly — to adopt subject position(s)
that go beyond its current position.
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
With this point on the meditation format and the transformative potential of D
423 in mind, the set of questions directed toward Nature in the aphorism can
therefore be drawn together by a single thread: futurity. To address humanity’s
potential for becoming future-oriented, Nietzsche also employs the metaphor of
flight — of soaring above humanity — in an earlier aphorism from book five of
Dawn. Discussing how the increasing comprehensibility of the world makes it
less solemn, Nietzsche considers how a change in perspective on humanity and its
future might make a hint of future virtues accessible to us:
Perhaps we view ourselves and the world more slightly because we started
thinking more courageously about it and ourselves? Perhaps there will be a
future in which this courage of thought has swelled so large that, as the
absolute height of arrogance, it feels itself to be above people and things—
in which the wise person, as the most courageous of persons, views himself
and existence as the farthest beneath him? This species of courage, which
is not far from being an excessive magnanimity, has been heretofore lacking in humanity. (D 551)
One important point in this discussion is that courage, understood as a virtue tied to
the future, allows us to soar above our current perspective on ourselves and human
existence. Wisdom among a group that had passed beyond the constraints of customary morality involves forms of virtue that are not customarily moral, but that have
ethical significance through how they orient us toward a possible new future. The
challenge for us is to become capable of experiencing the relevant moral emotions,
and thus becoming capable of practicing an ethic based upon such virtues. Nietzsche
uses the example of poets to illustrate how this mode of self-creation would work,
remarking that, “if only the poets longed to become what they once were supposed
to have been: — seers, who recounted to us something of the possible! … If only they
wanted to let us experience in advance something of the future virtues!” (D 551). He
suggests that we might take control of access to future virtues “out of their hands”
and create it for ourselves, by means of courage that would allow us to soar above
ourselves, as the butterfly swarms (D 551, 553). Nietzsche’s position here responds to
a problem of pseudo-egotism that he had identified in an earlier aphorism, in which
a phantom ego and abstract misunderstanding of the human being are perpetuated
among us all by a “fog of opinions and habituations” that is only altered by “individuals with power (like princes and philosophers)” (D 105). No individual member of
the majority affected by this fog, Nietzsche claims, has access to “any self-established,
genuine ego” that they could juxtapose with the “common, pallid fiction” of humanity “and thereby destroy” that fiction (D 105). Through virtues such as courage, and
through taking on the transformative role played by the poet–seer for ourselves, such
a self may become possible for us in the future (D 553).
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The final aphorism of book five, and of the text of Dawn as a whole, 575, returns
us to book five’s opening meditation on the future relationship between humanity
and nature (D 423). As with earlier aphorisms that first imagine our flying, and
then suggest a mechanism by which we can fly, Nietzsche’s use of the symbolism
of flight is significant. This final aphorism is entitled “We aeronauts of the spirit”
(Wir Luft-Schifffahrer des Geistes). As Duncan Large has pointed out, the aeronauts in the aphorism are flying an “air-ship,” and their flying out over the sea
indicates “how close is their kinship to their more earthbound, or at least
sea-bound mariner-cousins.”15 The aphorism begins by noting that, even while all
the brave birds that fly out into the farthest distance are unable to go on at a
certain point, we cannot infer that an immense open space was not laid out before
them (D 575). All that can be inferred is that these brave birds had flown as far as
they could have flown.
The same point on flying as far as one is able applies, Nietzsche holds in two
earlier aphorisms, to all our great teachers and predecessors, who eventually
come to a stop, and often with weariness. For example, Nietzsche uses the image
of a horse and its rider to illustrate the shame associated with the weariness of an
“exhausted thinker before his own philosophy” (D 487). While philosophy, the
“beautiful steed,” is animated and paws the ground, because it “yearns for a ride
and loves the one who rides it,” its rider — the philosopher — is too tired even to
swing themselves into the saddle (D 487). It is not that there is no more space
available to great teachers and philosophers in which they might pursue further
inquiry, but rather that they have already traveled as far as was possible for them:
philosophy, the beautiful steed champing at the bit, can be ridden further — but
by someone else. And, as Nietzsche also points out in a detailed discussion of
philosophy and old age, it becomes possible to tell when a thinker is “very tired,
very near his sunset” when he “wants to turn himself into a binding institution for
the future of humankind” (D 542). At such a point, the thinker “altogether cannot
endure the terrible isolation in which every forward and forward-flying spirit
lives” (D 542). Instead, the thinker seeks community; as we know from our earlier
analysis of Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality, the community in question
is a limiting one, because the thinker seeks now to “enjoin” humanity to “limit
independent thinking” since “it tortures him not to be able to be the last” thinker
(D 542). As he summarizes the situation of the thinker at the sunset of their philosophical life:
By canonizing himself, he has also posted above him his own death certificate:
from now on his spirit may not develop any further, its time is up, the clock hand
falls (D 542). In his analysis of these aphorisms, particularly Dawn 542, Paul
Franco has contrasted contemplation and action, and has suggested that, for
Nietzsche, what is under discussion in these parts of Dawn are “threats to the
contemplative life of the thinker and knower.”16 As Franco goes on to point out,
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
this analysis is complicated by Nietzsche’s discussion of the practical, which
identifies the dependence of practical people upon the thinker who determines or
even sometimes decrees the “savoriness” of things. The influence of thinkers, as
Nietzsche claims, is such that practical people “would scorn their practical life
should we scorn it” (D 505).17 While Franco is certainly right to emphasize
Nietzsche’s understanding of the power that philosophy has in the practical realm,
we disagree with Franco’s suggestion that Nietzsche identifies a threat to the contemplative life. Rather, in light of Nietzsche’s thinking on transformation, we suggest that Nietzsche accepts that there are limits to the capacities of individual
philosophers to pursue any particular philosophical inquiries (including ones
commensurate with Nietzsche’s own project in Dawn) and that these individual
limits need not necessarily inhibit the future of philosophy itself. As soon as the
thinker can no longer tolerate any kind of transformation, their capacity for philosophizing is at an end. However, this does not mean that philosophy itself — or
indeed humanity — ends with such a thinker.
The connection between transformational capacity and humanity’s future is
further clarified by Nietzsche in Dawn 575. It is perhaps a law of life, Nietzsche
claims in this aphorism, that the tiredness and old age of the thinker will also
come to be the case with us, “with you and me” (D 575). However, Nietzsche also
contends that we can derive sustenance, and even consolation, from the fact that
other birds and other spirits could, and in some cases will, fly further than we
shall be able to fly ourselves. As he puts it:
This our insight and assurance [Gläubigkeit] vies with them in flying up
and away; it rises straightaway above our head and beyond its own inadequacy into the heights and looks out from there into the distance, sees the
flocks of birds much more powerful than we are, who are striving to get to
where we were striving toward and where everything is still sea, sea,
sea! — And where, then, do we want to go? Do we want to go across the
sea? Where is it tearing us toward, this powerful craving that means more
to us than any other pleasure? Why precisely in this direction, toward precisely where heretofore all of humanity’s suns have set? Will it perhaps be
said of us one day that we too, steering toward the west, hoped to reach an
India — that it was, however, our lot [Loos] to shipwreck upon infinity? Or,
my brothers? Or? [Oder, meine Brüder? Oder?] (D 575)18
The point that Nietzsche is making with respect to the future here is not that we
must reach a particular location, but that we may hope to fly. Like courage, hope
emerges here as a future virtue that can help us adopt a different perspective with
respect to ourselves and to humanity as a whole: with courage, we can fly above
ourselves, and with hope, we may aim to fly as far as we are able to fly. Other birds
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may indeed be more powerful than us, and may fly further than we can: their
flight does not mean that our own flight is not worthwhile. Were we to fly, then we
might glimpse more of the possible futures that, though hope and courage, may
yet become accessible to humanity. It is important to note that Nietzsche does not
consider humanity’s future-orientedness to be singular: in an aphorism that imagines a possible future in which humans submit only to laws that they themselves
have laid down and according to which they judge and sentence themselves,
Nietzsche joyfully exclaims at there being “so many futures still to dawn” (D 187).
Human future-orientedness is plural, and its possibilities multiple.
The meaning of the “Or?” questions that Nietzsche poses at the end of this
aphorism requires clarification, particularly with respect to Nietzsche’s thinking
on futurity.19 As Matthew Meyer notes, the “Or” with which Dawn 575 ends is
inconclusive.20 However, given what we have already seen of the hope and courage with which Nietzsche characterizes humanity’s potential future-directedness
in book five of Dawn, this lack of conclusivity is both interesting and necessary to
Nietzsche’s project in this text. Nietzsche’s own discussion in Ecce Homo points
out that Dawn is the only book of his that concludes in this way: “This book
ends with an ‘Or?’ — It is the only book that ends with an ‘Or?’” (EH “Books”
Daybreak 1).21 The “transvaluation of all values,” where the author seeks “the new
dawn,” is grounded in the “Or?” that is posed to us at the end of this text
(EH “Books” Daybreak 1).22 In other words, inconclusivity is itself the conclusion
that Nietzsche develops through Dawn: the future of humanity is not fixed, but is
rather open to us. On this issue, Ernst Bertram has pointed out that:
The moment of this extreme, unsettled inner “Or?” finds its classical
expression perhaps in the last sentences of Dawn, which are also, simultaneously, a classic example of his mastery of the end…no matter from which
direction we approach him, even Nietzsche’s mighty torso always rounds
out his intellectual silhouette with a final “Or?” just as all of his works from
the Birth to Ecce finish in the doubling of such an Or. Hardly any of them,
however, do so with such calm pride, such regal surrender, such masterly
confidence in the face of all “Beyonds” as Dawn.23
Bertram’s suggestion here is that the “Or?” questions at the end of Dawn 575 are
necessary; this is partly because these questions are genuine ones for Nietzsche’s
readers, and partly because his readers’ search for a response to these questions
can admit of no resolution, at least not until humanity reaches a point of completed knowledge with all “suns” discovered and thoroughly explored. This possibility involves an infinitely long durée; and it is from this immense expanse of
time that Nietzsche derives his confidence in humans’ capacity to reach ever
toward a future that is comprised of what Bertram calls “Beyonds.”24 As in the
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
case of the meditation in Dawn 423, Nietzsche’s orientation toward humanity’s
future in Dawn 575 is positive, since the possible future that opens up there is
filled with possibilities, and as such may be faced with hope and accessed
through courage.
Karl Löwith has also drawn attention to the enigmatic character of the reference
to “India” at the end of Dawn 575.25 Löwith explores some of the interpretative
questions that this reference raises: Is Buddhism not for Nietzsche, along with
Christianity, a nihilistic religion? How do we square with Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce
Homo that Dawn is a great Yes-saying work, which contains no negative words
(EH “Books” D 1)? Moreover, why is the epigraph to the book — “there are so
many dawns that have not yet broken” — referred to as Indian? The interpretation
Löwith gives in response to these questions is highly speculative, and focuses on
Nietzsche’s insistence on the need for the No as well as the Yes. In a reversal of the
Christian meaning of the expression “By this sign (cross) you will conquer,” which
heads Dawn 96, Nietzsche is suggesting that the conquest will take place under the
sign that the redemptive God is dead. Buddha is a significant teacher, because his
religion is one of self-redemption, and self-redemption is a valuable step along the
way of ultimate redemption from reliance upon religion and from God. As Löwith
points out, in his notebooks of the mid to late 1880s, Nietzsche takes Christianity
to task for having devalued the value of nihilism as a great purifying movement in
which nothing could be “more useful or more to be encouraged than a thoroughgoing
practical nihilism [Nihilismus der That]” (NL 1888 14 [9]).26 The lie of the immortal
private person and the hope of resurrection serve to deter the actual deed of
nihilism, namely, suicide. This explains why in his “Lenzer Heide” notebook on
European nihilism Nietzsche is keen to construe eternal recurrence as “the most
extreme form of nihilism” and why he holds that “a European Buddhism might
perhaps be indispensable.”27 The No-doing precedes the Yes-saying as its purifying
precondition. Humanity must become more Greek again, “for what is Greek was
the first great union … of everything Oriental and on just that account the
inception of the European soul, the discovery of our ‘new world’.”28 As Löwith
claims, “the continuation of the revived discovery of the old world is ‘the work of
the new Columbus’.”29 Thus, at the end of Dawn, Nietzsche heads “west,” to where
the sun sets, in order to reach an “India” in the east where the sun arises anew as
eternal Being and life.
The hopeful search with which the text of Dawn concludes in aphorism 575 was
soon reopened by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. As Keith Ansell-Pearson has
pointed out, the first three books of The Gay Science were initially envisaged by
Nietzsche to be a direct continuation of his work in Dawn.30 These three books are
particularly concerned with the incorporation of truth and knowledge; one prime
example of this is Nietzsche’s posing of the following key question: “To what extent
can truth stand to be incorporated? — that is the question; that is the experiment”
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(GS 110).31 Nietzsche returns to a vision of the future characterized in terms of
infinite possibility, which he had initially developed in Dawn, as part of his engagement with the problem of incorporation of truth. In so doing, he uses the sea as a
metaphor for a new infinite, offering readers both encouragement and warnings
about the range of possibilities that it incorporates. For example, in discussing a
new horizon of the infinite, Nietzsche writes:
We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges
behind us — indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind
us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean — to be sure, it does
not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries
of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite
and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. (GS 124)
In addition to his use of the sea as a metaphor for both the infinity of the future and
humanity’s orientation toward this future, Nietzsche also draws upon the metaphor of flight to elaborate on this continuation of human development. He had
deployed this metaphor in Dawn to similar effect using the example of flying by
birds (D 575) and by a butterfly (D 553), as we discussed earlier. As Nietzsche continues, “Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe,
when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom — and there
is no longer any ‘land’” (GS 124). The infinity that the bird encounters when freed
from factors such as land that constrain the limits of flight is not easy to imagine —
the point of this example is to highlight our imaginative constraints and, like the
poet who is a seer, prompt our imaginative engagement with such possibility.
Nietzsche’s interest in an infinite future continues in the fourth book of The Gay
Science. For example, the connection between his conception of the future as infinite, and as open to humanity, is evident in his fable of the madman who announces
the death of God (GS 125). He makes similar use of sea exploration as a metaphor
for the infinity of the future, and for humanity’s self-orientation toward it, in a
discussion of preparatory human beings who are capable of self-legislation: there,
Nietzsche calls on humanity to “live dangerously” by sending their ships “into
uncharted seas” (GS 283). And Nietzsche calls for new philosophy, for philosophy
that is for the “unhappy,” the “evil,” and also for the “exceptional human being”; he
urges philosophers to “embark” in order to discover other worlds (GS 289). The
fifth book of The Gay Science also attends to the future using a sea metaphor to
capture the sense of the future as infinite, and of humanity as orienting itself
toward this future. According to Nietzsche, “we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel
as if a new dawn shone upon us” upon hearing the news that the old god is dead;
the “horizon appears free to us again” and “at long last, our ships may venture our
again.” (GS 343). As Nietzsche suggests, for the philosophers and free spirits, the
death of God means that “all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted
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again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an
‘open sea’” (GS 343). The “new ‘infinite’” that unfolds and is unfolded by humanity
following the death of God, according to him, incorporates an infinite plurality of
interpretations of an open “perspective character of existence” (GS 374).
Dawn is also known to have influenced Nietzsche’s thinking with respect to his
production of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Referring to a letter from Nietzsche to
Franz Overbeck of April 7, 1884, Loeb has pointed out that Nietzsche privileges
Thus Spoke Zarathustra over the works that precede it, including Dawn.32 In this
letter to Overbeck, in referring to Dawn and to The Gay Science, Nietzsche remarks,
“I have found that there is hardly a line in them that cannot serve as introduction,
preparation and commentary to the above-mentioned Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
It is a fact, that I have composed the commentary before the text.”33
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche continues to use the sea as a metaphor for
the new infinite that is opened up to us by increasing orientation toward an
infinite future. In an important example from book two, Zarathustra declares:
Behold, what fullness is about us! And from out of such overflow it is beautiful to look out upon distant seas.
Once one said “God” when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have
taught you to say: Superhuman.
God is a supposition: but I would that your supposing might not reach farther than your creative will.
Could you create a God? — Then do not speak to me of any Gods! But you
could surely create the Superhuman.
Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But into fathers and forefathers
of the Superhuman you could re-create yourselves: and may this be your
finest creating! (TSZ II “Upon the Isles of the Blest”)34
Here, as in the case of The Gay Science, Nietzsche uses the sea metaphor to indicate an infinite future, and, in his notion of humanity looking out onto distant
seas, suggests that we can orient ourselves toward that future and creatively will
toward it, from our current state of humanity and toward the Superhuman. Here,
however, Zarathustra’s declaration clarifies that the “we” mentioned in The Gay
Science 343, namely “philosophers and free spirits,” is not the “we” of a distant
future. By positing humanity as “fathers and forefathers of the Superhuman,”
Nietzsche points to a developmental trajectory for humanity, in which humanity’s
travel toward an infinite future in which it will have overcome itself will be
gradual and, by virtue of its intergenerational nature, slow.35 This is commensurate with Nietzsche’s thinking on transformation in Dawn, again as discussed
earlier in this chapter.
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This same slow orientation of humanity toward an infinite future, along with a
trajectory of development along which humanity might move, is also addressed
by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.36 There, Nietzsche is clear that humanity
can move beyond free spirits. He distinguishes between free spirits and very free
spirits or philosophers of the future (BGE 44). According to him, philosophers of
the future “will not be free spirits merely, but something more, higher, greater,
and fundamentally different, something that would not go unrecognized or misidentified” (BGE 44). As Amy Mullin has shown, Nietzsche’s philosophers of the
future may be distinguished from free spirits by means of several key characteristics.37 According to Mullin, the philosophers of the future will have developed a
taste for what is good for them, and this taste is what separates them out from free
spirits; in addition, the philosophers of the future have the capacity to command
and to legislate values, and to organize themselves and wider society (BGE 211).
In the activity of knowing, Nietzsche suggests, the future philosophers are creative: “their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is law-giving, their will to truth
is — will to power” (BGE 211).38 As Matthew Meyer has observed, the philosophers of the future are also described in Beyond Good and Evil 42 as “attempters,”
notably similarly to Nietzsche’s description of future inquirers who have the courage to make attempts and to make mistakes (D 501).39
As Mullin also points out, the same distinction between free spirits and philosophers of the future is held to by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he
suggests that philosophers of the future use “a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (GM III 12).40 Nietzsche’s claim
that philosophers of the future develop commanding and law-giving capacity,
which as we have seen is a consistent claim of his in Dawn, is also a core part of
his analysis in On the Genealogy of Morals. In On the Genealogy of Morals II.2, the
sole aphorism in which the figure of the sovereign individual appears, Nietzsche
explicitly returns his readers’ attention to the view that he had developed in Dawn,
namely that humans have made themselves uniform via customary morality. As
he writes, the task of breeding a responsible animal — an animal with the
prerogative to make promises — involves, “first making man to a certain degree
necessary, uniform, a peer among peers, orderly and consequently predictable”
(GM II 2). This has been accomplished, Nietzsche claims, by making use of
customary morality:
The immense amount of labour involved in what I have called the “morality of custom”, the actual labour of man on himself during the longest
epoch of the human race, his whole prehistoric labour, is explained and
justified on a grand scale, in spite of the hardness, tyranny, stupidity and
idiocy it also contained, by this fact: with the help of the morality of custom
and the social straitjacket, man was made truly predictable. (GM II 2)
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
According to Nietzsche, society and customary morality are not an end in themselves:
they are merely a means to cultivating the “sovereign individual,” a figure that
Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals as an end to a process: the “ripest
fruit on the tree” of the “actual labour of man on himself” during his “whole prehistoric labour” (GM II 2).
In Dawn, Nietzsche describes humanity as being still engaged in the process of
cultivating such individuals. For instance, he gives the example of substitute conscience, writing that, “One person is another person’s conscience: and this is particularly important if the other has none otherwise” (D 338). Similarly, Nietzsche
points out that we do not often encounter “pangs of conscience” in prisons and
penitentiaries, but rather “homesickness for the old, wicked, beloved, crime” (D
366). He sounds a warning note with respect to the feeling of gratitude, remarking
that we suffer from one grain too much “of grateful sentiment and piety” like “a
vice” and through it, fall prey to “an evil conscience” (D 293). And Nietzsche illustrates a tension between passion for knowledge on the one hand, and an evil conscience that “pricks and prods and incites you” against it on the other, which can
lead to a state in which we choose enthusiasm over reason, saying to ourselves,
“now I have conquered my good conscience” (D 543).41 Over time, this tension
produces a dominant instinct. By virtue of being able to be responsible, this
instinct dominates the sovereign individual as the culmination of humanity’s process of cultivation, as Nietzsche contends:
The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the
consciousness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny,
has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct: — what will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he
needs a word for it? No doubt about the answer: this sovereign human
being calls it his conscience (GM II.2)
Humanity’s self-cultivation produces a sovereign individual that is ruled by a conscience; Nietzsche adds to his description of this figure by claiming it is “like only
to itself,” that it has “freed itself from the morality of custom,” and that it is “an
autonomous, supra-ethical [übersittliche] individual (because ‘autonomous’ and
‘ethical’ [sittlich] are mutually exclusive)” (GM II 2). In his remarks on On the
Genealogy of Morals in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche points out that conscience as discussed in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is not “the voice of God
in man,” but that it is rather “the instinct of cruelty turned backwards after it can
no longer discharge itself outwards,” and thus he claims it as “one of the oldest
substrata of culture” (EH “Books” GM).
The meaning and function of Nietzsche’s figure of the sovereign individual
remains a point of contention in the available scholarly literature; however, we
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suggest it is worthwhile to consider this figure against the background of
Nietzsche’s discussion of subjectivity and futurity in Dawn. First, a brief overview
of the scholarly debate on the figure of the sovereign individual is warranted.
Recently, Paul Katsafanas has argued that the sovereign individual is free from
customary morality [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] under which, as Nietzsche had pointed
out in Dawn, all human communities have lived up until the present (D 14).42
Katsafanas claims that, for Nietzsche, where unfree individuals need external
commands to help them regulate their behavior, free individuals such as the sovereign individual from On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 can self-regulate without
dependence on conventional morality, thus “employing [their] own standards in
determining what’s worth doing.”43 In contrast, Brian Leiter has argued that in On
the Genealogy of Morals II 2 Nietzsche is essentially making a joke by giving the
sovereign individual a particularly pompous name — given that its sole skill lies
in promise-making and that the figure is parodic.44 Moreover, according to Leiter,
even if the sovereign individual feels responsible, they are not responsible for epiphenomenalist reasons, since, according to him, consciousness takes no part in
the production of action.45 Katsafanas challenges Leiter’s epiphenomenalist
account of Nietzsche, and suggests that Leiter’s reading of the figure of the sovereign individual as parodic is under-supported by the textual evidence available in
On the Genealogy of Morals II 2.46
An earlier line of critical engagement with the view that the sovereign individual is the culmination of Nietzsche’s approach to ethical agency is provided in
work by Lawrence J. Hatab and by Christa Acampora. Hatab contends that the
sovereign individual’s characteristic of autonomy is the legacy of moralization (or
customary morality), not freedom from it.47 As part of this, Hatab observes that
the sovereign individual’s conscience, in seeking to take responsibility for keeping
promises, runs counter to one important end of the second essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals: seeking to replace an ideal that prevents one from loving
one’s fate. Acampora agrees with Hatab, and she also suggests some additional
concerns, of which two are particularly significant for our purposes here. First,
one does not find such an emphasis on promise-keeping anywhere else in
Nietzsche’s work as we find to be presented in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 — a
single aphorism. Acampora suggests that therefore treating the sovereign individual’s radical autonomy as Nietzsche’s culminating thought on ethical agency is
under-supported by the available textual evidence. Second, Acampora points out
that Nietzsche anticipates a future for humanity in On the Genealogy of Morals
and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which the overcoming of “the human” is anticipated, and that Nietzsche therefore does not call on us all to become sovereign
individuals, as that is a human “fruit already borne.”48
Katsafanas treats Acampora’s view as being similar to Leiter’s view.49 However,
this does not capture what Acampora is actually claiming — Acampora does not
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share Leiter’s epiphenomenalist commitment, as is indicated by her mention of
the self as composite in the passage from her essay quoted by Katsafanas. As
Acampora puts it, the “real problem of sovereignty draws us toward more deeply
exploring how we might reconcile Nietzsche’s appeals to creative wilful activity
with his critiques of subjectivity and the key ideas about identity and causality
that are crucial for the conception of sovereign individuality.”50 Her view thus
seems much more in line with Katsafanas’ own framing of the will and the self
than Katsafanas himself allows. Acampora’s account also gets at something that
Katsafanas also emphasizes — the idea of human selves as aspirational for
Nietzsche.51 This is, as we discussed in earlier chapters, a position that is evident
in Dawn. And, as we have shown in our discussion of futurity in book five of
Dawn, evidence in the text of Dawn and in subsequent works turns out to support
Acampora’s position with respect to the sovereign individual of On the Genealogy
of Morals II 2.
Nietzsche’s remarks on a “possible future lawgiving” in Dawn 187 is of particular relevance here. In this aphorism, Nietzsche contrasts the present, in which
criminals cannot self-legislate and must be punished by laws established and reinforced socially, with “the criminal of a possible future” (D 187). Of this future
criminal, who is able to turn themselves in and set their own sentence for their
wrong-doing, Nietzsche writes:
he is exercising power, the power of the lawgiver; he may have transgressed at some point but through his voluntary punishment he elevates
himself above his transgression; through candor, greatness, and calmness
he not only wipes out his transgression: he performs a public service as
well (D 187)
The future criminals, Nietzsche claims here, submit only to a law that they have
made themselves. While we are not these future criminals, we may aspire to
become the self-legislators that they are. Relatedly, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also
finds much to praise about self-legislators, as Loeb has pointed out, for instance,
in the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra I “On The Three Transformations” and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra II “On Self-Overcoming.52 In the first, Nietzsche lauds the
spirit-child who becomes a self-propelled wheel and is able to “will its own will,”
whereby “the one who had lost the world attains its own world.” In the second,
Nietzsche discusses the burden of command, identifies commanding in positive
terms as “[a]n experiment and a risk,” and describes how the living puts itself at
risk in order to become “judge and avenger and sacrificial victim” for the sake of
its own law.
To further substantiate our claim on self-legislators as initially grounded in
Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn, recall Dawn 560, in which
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Nietzsche emphasizes that we have freedom to cultivate drives, explicitly our own,
and human drives more generally.53 Notice that Nietzsche attends to humanity as a
species in this aphorism, not only to humans as individual selves. Nietzsche’s concerns about how humans are affected by customary morality, and with improving
humanity, is also an explicit concern of his in the second essay of On the Genealogy of
Morals. While in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 Nietzsche grounds his discussion of
the bad conscience in work on customarily morality from Dawn, in On the Genealogy
of Morals II 19, he discusses bad conscience as an illness like pregnancy, claiming that
it is an illness from which humans suffer, but there must at some point be an end to it:
according to him, bad conscience is not a condition that can be permanent. Moreover,
Nietzsche considers in On the Genealogy of Morals II 24 how a redemptive type of
human that would perhaps be liberated from bad conscience might still be made possible. According to him, this type or spirit would be strong, and would be further
strengthened by hardship, displaying a more robust, “great” health than current types
of humans. As Acampora suggests, Nietzsche anticipates developmental points for
humanity and for human selves that reach beyond the sovereign individual of On the
Genealogy of Morals II 2; she points out that we might therefore productively reimagine the sovereign individual, even at its stage of development, as “realizing or manifesting its sovereignty as an on-going process.”54 An understanding of humanity as
open to future development and self-overcoming is already evident in Dawn, as we
have seen, both in Nietzsche’s account of the individual self and in his approach to
humanity’s slow orientation toward an infinite future, and its own self-overcoming.
Therefore, when set against the background of Nietzsche’s specific concerns in
Dawn and with the development of those concerns across his later works, the preponderance of the textual evidence supports the side of the debate on how best to
interpret the sovereign individual developed by Hatab and by Acampora.
Nietzsche’s specific interest in the infinite future and humanity’s orientation
toward such a future, the developmental trajectory that he envisages for free spirits
who become very free philosophers of the future, and whose development is ongoing and intergenerational, is expanded on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra into a development toward the possibility of the Superhuman. As Hatab and Acampora have
shown, the sovereign individual is thus best understood as a culmination of customary morality’s effects on humanity, not as the end point of agency for Nietzsche.
The sovereign individual is free and self-determining, to be sure, but it is not the
self-legislator that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra praises.55 As Loeb points out, in light of
Acampora’s account and his own reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the sovereign
individual is insufficiently responsible and autonomous compared with
Zarathustra, or with “the Superhuman” in which humanity has overcome itself.56
In Dawn, as we have seen, Nietzsche consistently encourages us to engage
imaginatively with customary morality, and to explore the consequences of doing
so for ourselves and for humanity as a whole. This project entails engagement
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with a broad range of questions: what might human life involve, if it were to
become free from the prejudices and fears that stem from customary morality?
And what kinds of creatures could humanity become, if the campaign against
morality were to succeed? As part of his campaign against morality in Dawn,
Nietzsche prompts us to reach beyond the present to possible futures, and to
engage in shaping possible futures in and through ourselves. In developing this
project, Nietzsche encourages us to engage in transformation of ourselves, and
through this, transformation of humanity as a whole. Nietzsche does not claim
that this transformation should be sudden or violent; he clearly suggests that such
transformation will be based upon small, though consistent, changes over a long
period of time. He prods us to engage critically and creatively with the future, and
to raise fresh questions about our future directedness.
In discussing the philosophy of the future in Beyond Good and Evil, Loeb has
pointed out that Nietzsche means to refer to both (i) the prospect of a philosophy
about the future, and (ii) a new kind of philosophy that will arrive in the future.57
Another key part of this project, as Loeb acknowledges, involves Nietzsche in
encouraging us to “expand our conception of what philosophy can be and should
be.”58 Given the connections that we have traced out between Beyond Good and
Evil and Dawn, another of the questions prompted by Nietzsche’s project in Dawn
must involve what approach to philosophy is best to get humanity from where we
are now to what humanity might become. While the pursuit of such radically new
philosophy might be considered problematic and transgressive from the perspective of a discipline still affected by customary morality, from the perspective of the
possible futures that Nietzsche seeks to open up, it is possible to concur with
Loeb’s assessment that Nietzsche’s “futuristic visions” constitute his “most distinctive” contributions to philosophy and to metaphilosophy.59 As we have suggested, while Nietzsche continues to explore these questions — and to spark our
engagement with them — in later texts, we suggest that it is important to appreciate that he proceeds with this work within the clearing created by the campaign
against morality that he first sets into motion in Dawn.
Notes
1 Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019), 241.
2 Paul S. Loeb. 2018. “Nietzsche’s Futurism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49(2):
253–59.
3 Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Thought, Life,
and Work,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 15.
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
4 Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche.” In his recent book, reading
Nietzsche’s free spirit works as a dialectical Bildungsroman, Matthew Meyer
has made three distinct claims: (i) that the free spirit works form a unified
whole; (ii) that significant connections can be drawn between the free spirit
writings and Nietzsche’s later writings; and (iii) that Beyond Good and Evil
foreshadows a philosophy of the future that may be found in the “Dionysian
comedy” of Nietzsche’s 1888 works. See Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works,
29, 241.
5 See also Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle
Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 81.
6 Isabelle Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective: Nietzsche’s Use of
the Cartesian Model,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João
Constâncio, Maria João Mayer Branco, and Bartholomew Ryan (Berlin and
Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 49–64.
7 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 61–62.
8 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 58.
9 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 58.
10 On Nietzsche as a philosopher of transformation, and particularly on incorporation of truth and on self-knowledge as core parts of Nietzschean transformation,
see Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 24, 72, 167.
11 L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17.
12 Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience,
Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29.
13 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 25.
14 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 102.
15 Duncan Large. 1995. “Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus.” Nietzsche-Studien
24: 171.
16 Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle
Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 98–99.
17 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 98–99.
18 Translation modified. Cf. KSA 3, 331.
19 Franco rightly points these Or? questions out as significant, but does not explain
the nature of their significance. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 98–99.
20 Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, 154.
21 Translation modified.
22 Translation modified.
23 For further development of these points see Large, “Nietzsche and the Figure of
Columbus,” and also Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche. Attempt at a Mythology, trans.
Robert E. Norton (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2009), 237.
24 Bertram, Nietzsche. Attempt at a Mythology, 237.
Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond
25 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans.
J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 113.
26 KSA 13 221; WP 247.
27 NL 1885, 35[9]; KSA 11 512; WP 132. See also NL 1885, 35[82]; KSA 11 547; WP
1055: “A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic nihilism, can
under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher — as a
mighty pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes degenerate and
decaying races to make way for a new order of life, or to implant into that which
is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end.”
28 NL 1885, 41[7]; KSA 11 682; WP 1051.
29 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans.
J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press,
1997), 115.
30 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 83. See also Franco, Nietzsche’s
Enlightenment, 100.
31 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 83.
32 Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 207.
33 KSB 6, 496; Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 207.
34 Translation modified.
35 Translation modified. On the overcoming of humanity see Loeb, The Death of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219.
36 See also Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.”
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32.
37 Amy Mullin 2000. “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit.” Journal of the History of Philosophy
38(3): 383–405.
38 Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, 245.
39 Bamford, “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting,” 23.
40 Amy Mullin, “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit,” 401–03.
41 Translation modified. On the passion for knowledge as a distinctive feature of
Dawn, see Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 91.
42 Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the
Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171.
43 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 226–8, 230.
44 Brian Leiter, “Who Is Nietzsche’s ‘Sovereign Individual’?,” in Nietzsche’s On The
Genealogy Of Morality: A Critical Guide, ed. Simon May (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
45 Leiter, “Who Is Nietzsche’s ‘Sovereign Individual’?”
46 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 222–24.
47 Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in
Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
48 Christa Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We
Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2,” in Critical Essays on the Classics: Nietzsche’s On
the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Christa Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2006), 151–56.
49 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 223.
50 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity.”
51 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 200.
52 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225.
53 Rebecca Bamford. “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free
Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield
International, 2015), 85–109.
54 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” 155.
55 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225. On the sovereign individual,
see also Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 265.
56 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225.
57 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 257.
58 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 259.
59 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 259.