Conclusion

Self-Overcoming as an Impossible Ideal

Self-overcoming is the impossible precept at the heart of Nietzsche’s romantic ethics of perfectionism. Like Coleridge’s ideal poet who ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity’,³¹⁹ Nietzsche’s ideal free spirit will, through discipline and cultivation (Zucht and Züchtung), construct an order of rank within his soul and so overcome himself and his fate. Nietzsche is no ideal poet, however, and Part IV of his epic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by revealing the rank disorder that obtains within his soul, proclaims the vanity of self-overcoming.

Zarathustra signally fails to overcome his decadent past, and the single unequivocal cause of his failure is psychological determinism. The fundamental structure of the human psyche is not susceptible to change, and memory, which retains its psychological history as ineluctably as a rock retains its geological history, serves as a constant reminder of this fact. Nietzsche, like Zarathustra, is an ambitious artist and within the tragic terms of his artist’s metaphysics, self-overcoming is simply an affectation of style. There is no overcoming; Zarathustra knows it, Nietzsche knows it, and anyone with a modicum of intellectual integrity knows it. There is only an overwhelming, of one affect by another, driven by an inexorable will to power.

Nietzsche’s philosophy stands or falls with the efficacy of self-overcoming. Man can only become an innocent child of becoming if he can overcome his past and embrace the eternally recurring present; man can only become a lover of fate if he can overcome his fate; man can only become an Übermensch if he can overcome man, but man can only overcome man if he can overcome his proud and deceptive consciousness. Man can only become a dancer on the edge of the abyss if he can overcome his abysmal pessimism (soothsayer); man can only become sovereign over himself if he can overcome his plebeian values (two kings); man can only become a lover of knowledge if he can overcome his will to divine truth (conscientious man of spirit); man can only become an artist of abundance if he can overcome his penitential spirit (sorcerer); man can only be faithful to himself if he can overcome his faith in the ascetic ideal (last pope); man can only become a stalwart of intellectual conscience if he can overcome his shameful and pitiful bad conscience (ugliest man); man can only become a true giver of gifts if he can overcome his hunger for requital (voluntary beggar); and finally, man can only become the epiphanic noonday sun if he can overcome the shades of his shadow-self (shadow).

If, however, as this book claims, self-overcoming is an impossible ideal, and becoming what one is but an eternal recurrence of the same, then it is ‘high time’ that Nietzsche’s entire philosophical output underwent serious re-evaluation.

319. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.

Texts and Translations

I have relied primarily on Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA), eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), but have also consulted the translations listed below. In all references to Nietzsche’s works, the numbers refer to sections, not pages.