Affective Aporetics : Complementary Contradictions in the Interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1971, Wolfgang Muller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Muller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Lowith and Martin Heidegger, Muller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Muller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Muller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Lowith, in order to confirm Muller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” ( BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Muller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought.

PhaenEx their very opposition.But again and again what Nietzsche tries to articulate into a unity ultimately breaks apart.(5)   Oppositions, in other words, "belong together as complementary"; the task of a Nietzschean philosophy of contradiction would be to promote contradiction "toward emergence of the highest man" (Müller- Lauter 7).
In this paper, beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter"s account of Nietzsche"s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche-Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith-in order to confirm Müller-Lauter"s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche"s thought. 2 Indeed, contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming that enables the subject to be revealed as a "multiplicity" (BGE §12) and a "fiction" (KSA 12:9[91]).Following Müller-Lauter"s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power (5), this paper interprets Nietzsche"s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life, rather than in terms of logical incoherencies or ontological inconsistencies.I will argue that against the backdrop of nihilism, the "self" (and its related placeholder the "subject") becomes the psychophysiological battle-space for the struggle and articulation of contradiction in Nietzsche"s thought.
As I will attempt to chart in the following pages, the intensification of nihilism (a process of decadence and degeneration) will be forced to play out on the plane of the subject, which Nietzsche, broadly speaking, conceptualizes as the deployment of "instincts" in the physical and metaphysical evolution of the human willing animal.The body-and "soul" for that matter-Nandita Biswas Mellamphy becomes the landscape and theatre of the war both of and for the instincts.The affirmation and not the resolution of contradiction at all levels of reality both dissolves and transforms the human organism in fundamental ways, translating it anew.In this process of "translation" (BGE §230), the "self" is played out to its finality and overcome, becoming the battleground for the dramatization and exhaustion of the human animal and its ideals.For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism becomes inextricably intertwined with the problem of willing to such an extent that the overcoming of nihilism will require the vigilant and violent dissolution of the willing ego and the affirmation of non-willing."Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without sense or aim, but inevitably returning, without a finale in nothingness: "the eternal return"" (TNR 386, see also KSA 12:5[71]).
For interpreters such as Karl Löwith, the paradox of willing the non-willed could not be made coherent in Nietzsche"s thought; the contradiction is, in the final analysis, too contradictory.Yet, if we agree with Müller-Lauter that contradiction must be affirmed rather than annulled or resolved in Nietzsche"s thought, then it becomes possible to re-interpret this seeming impasse as, for example, interpreted by Löwith.Through the dramatization of contradiction qua strife at the level of bodily, organic, psycho-physiological existence, Nietzsche prepares the political and philosophical "prelude" for a "philosophy of the future" which initializes the metamorphosis of the animal human into the Overhuman (Übermensch).I conclude with the idea that contradiction is in fact the operative dynamic of Nietzsche"s thought and far from being a return to some authentic or original state, the eternal recurrence can be understood as a dynamic and violent process of individuation in which the human animal literally undergoes a psycho-physiological mutation, a playing-out that leads both to the death of PhaenEx one form of existence, and to what Nietzsche hopes is the genesis of a new übermenschlich configuration of self-organization.
Let us begin by posing the problem of will to power and eternal recurrence.Among modern German interpreters of Nietzsche-in particular, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and   Wolfgang Müller-Lauter-the question of contradiction (and the extent to which it compromises Nietzsche"s philosophy as a whole) has revolved around reconciling the logical tension between the two central concepts of Nietzsche"s thought: will to power and eternal recurrence.For Strauss, Löwith, and Müller-Lauter (to name only a few of the German interpreters interested in this question), the tension between these two concepts mirrors the tension, more broadly, between Nietzsche"s "negative" or "critical" philosophy on the one hand which requires the smashing of idols (e.g., the devaluation of all current ideals and values), and his "affirmative" philosophy on the other which necessarily entails the acceptance of all ideals and values.
Articulated within this overarching framework, Strauss, Löwith, and Müller-Lauter all examined the extent to which the project and path of "nay-saying" could be reconciled with its opposite, the eternal affirmation of all things.As I will show, each interpreter gave a different answer.
Recall that for Nietzsche every form of morality places restrictions and constraints on a culture insofar as the cultivation of a new perspective of life requires an organized and organizing system of behaviour.Essential to the task of legislating, then, is the imposition and usurpation of one perspective over others, which necessarily involves selection and exclusion.If, however, all perspectives are selections that necessarily include and exclude material, then how can we understand Nietzsche"s claim that the highest type is one who says "Yes" to all things?
The problematic to emerge from Nietzsche"s perspectivism concerns the seeming antithesis between the equally important projects of critical or negative philosophy ("nay-saying") and of Nandita Biswas Mellamphy affirmative philosophy ("yes-saying").For all three German commentators-despite their interpretive agreements and disagreements-a key to uncovering the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence involves understanding the correspondence between negation and affirmation, and even more importantly in coming to terms with how the highest type engages in both "nay-saying" and "yes-saying." According to Strauss, there is a danger inherent in Nietzsche"s definition of will to power itself which leads to an explicit renunciation of the very notion of eternity.Understood within the important context and role played by "nihilism" in Nietzsche"s thought (e.g., the devaluation of current historical values), Strauss (following Heidegger) maintains that will to power becomes interpretable almost entirely within the terms of Nietzsche"s "negative" or "critical" philosophy, which privileges the capacity and imperative of human willing to negate decadent and nihilistic values through a historical process in which man seeks to become "master and owner of nature" (WIPP 55).Negation and negative philosophy involve primarily mastering nature and, "as the act of the highest form of man"s will to power, the Vernatürlichung of man, is at the same time the peak of the anthropomorphization of the non-human, for the most spiritual will to power consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be" (Strauss, SPPP 189).Hence, "modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicisms, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity" (Strauss, WIPP 55).As I will explain below, Strauss"s corrective to this seeming anti-thesis between the radical historicity entailed by will to power and "eternity" will consist in his attempt to argue that the doctrine of eternal recurrence emerges naturally from the historical devaluation undertaken by the will to power. 3 -PhaenEx According to Karl Löwith, the inherent meaninglessness of Nietzsche"s cosmological view of eternal recurrence clashes with the imperative of will to power to create meaning in the world.On the one hand, Nietzsche conceives of eternal recurrence from a physical and cosmological perspective in which eternity is characterized as the relation of forces inherent in nature (Dionysian "flux," in other words).From this cosmological perspective, all activities of anthropos are ultimately returned to the goal-less, valueless, and meaningless recursivity of all phenomena.On the other hand, Nietzsche conceives of eternal recurrence as a superabundant act of the will that gives to humanity a new goal, a "new categorical imperative": "live in every moment so that you could will that moment back over and over endlessly" (Löwith xxv).Löwith contends that a dualism emerges in Nietzsche"s work which poses the following quandary: how can (and why should) one will what must necessarily happen anyway?He asserts that the question remains speculatively (and therefore logically) unanswerable, and thus locates an irreconcilable paradox between Nietzsche"s elaboration of the will to power and eternal recurrence, one that ultimately destroys any possible unity between the two concepts. 4cording to Müller-Lauter, whose interpretation is both distinct from that of Strauss (e.g., will to power and eternal recurrence are unified) and of Löwith (e.g., will to power and eternal recurrence, despite Nietzsche"s intentions, are irreconcilable), the impulsional body is the nexus or complex of hidden events of which the historical conflict between various states of will to power are configurations and dramatizations: The resulting conflict of the drives or forces is thus the condition of all events.This conflict can never come to a standstill, "for every drive also incites its counterdrive" ... Each of these drives feels itself impeded or promoted, flattered, with regard to every other one; each has its own law of development (its rise and decline, its tempo, etc.) ... In their "For or Against" (WP §481), in "the competition between affects" (WP §618), alliances form and break apart again; rulers replace one another; the subject-point leaps around.( 13) 5 Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Müller-Lauter here focuses on what French interpreters of Nietzsche (Bataille, Klossowski, Foucault, Deleuze, to name a few) have tended to emphasize most vigorously: subjectivity, identity, self-consciousness are all epiphenomena of a more fundamental, "pre-individual" procession of disparate events held together by "the antagonism of a multiplicity of forces" (12-13).In this sense, the body is already a kind of "social structure composed of many souls" (BGE §19), and always an ongoing procedure of contestation and codification: it is a conflict between impulses that impose themselves on other impulses and out of which emerges a feeling of the "self" that becomes conscious and then codified and communicated through language.This "body politic" is the material upon which the various expressions of self-organizing organic processes coalesce, including the organization of the differing intensities of drives, and their multiform translation in cultural, social, historical values and institutions.

Müller-Lauter goes on to make an observation concerning the tension between
Nietzsche"s philosophies of negation and affirmation.According to him, Nietzsche"s description of the most extreme form of nihilism contains two incompatible goals and thus reflects two incompatible human natures, leading to two distinctly separate lines of development for the highest type: on the one hand, greatness consists in "philosophizing with a hammer," which is constituted primarily by the absolutization of one"s perspective against all other ideals.On the other hand, greatness consists in the unrestricted acceptance of all ideals; far from requiring negation (that is, selection and exclusion), this affirmation necessitates the unmitigated recognition of all perspectives.The tension between both visions of the Overhuman is expressly characterized as the antithesis between two subjective dispositions: one, in its preoccupation with achieving and maintaining strength, wants not to acknowledge ideals different from its own; the -128 -PhaenEx other, in its ability to assimilate all counter-ideals, does not resist any knowledge.The strong type is characterized by negation, and the wise type by affirmation. 6ller-Lauter"s examination tackles the tension between Nietzsche"s philosophies of negation and affirmation with an examination of will to power, understood as the subjective characteristics or dispositions necessary to accomplish the overcoming of nihilism.He argues that Nietzsche"s emphasis on "perspectivism" as the basic condition of all life (BGE Preface) establishes that will to power in all existence-not simply in that of man-perceives the world from its own viewpoint: "there is nothing beyond "the totality" of the differently construing power-centers" (Müller-Lauter 62). 7Once this perspectivism is connected to the idea that there are "many kinds of "truths"," and consequently that there is "no truth" (KSA 11:34[230]), the history of morality turns against itself and leads to nihilism (while simultaneously discovering that nihilism was always at the heart of the moral impulse).The result, contends Müller-Lauter, is that all values and ideals associated with morality are devaluated and ultimately destroyed.
Thus the overcoming of nihilism and of morality overturn the historical conquest of the weak and inaugurate the dominion of the strong individual (Müller-Lauter 64-5).The strong individual exerts his power as a "breeding agent"; his will effects the "strengthening of the strong," while simultaneously shows itself to be "paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary" (KSA   11:25[211]). 8By living through the "whole of nihilism to the end," the strong willed individual-"the perfect nihilist"-will leave nihilism behind, "outside himself" (KSA   12:10[192]).Müller-Lauter points to Nietzsche"s claim that the overcoming of nihilism will lead to the condition in which "pleasure in saying No and doing No" will emanate from "a tremendous strength and tension derived from saying Yes" (KSA 13:11[228]).Ultimately, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Müller-Lauter finds a fundamental and necessary tension between the two versions or visions of the Nietzschean Overhuman: Neither the multiplicity of names intended to suggest that there are many forms of ascendant humanity, nor the unity of the goal aspired to of producing the Overman, can hide the fact that in Nietzsche"s portrayals two different tendencies are locked in conflict, mirroring the incompatibility of their contradictory natures.(73) To "philosophize with a hammer" connotes the subjective disposition of the commanderlegislator who must direct "the will of millennia by giving direction to the highest natures" (KSA   11:25[355]) and determine the frontier of possibilities within which his own ideals will exist and rule.Yet the other subjective disposition oriented toward wisdom consists in the unrestricted acceptance of all that is and was; far from requiring negation, this affirmation necessitates the recognition of all other ideals.While both types are concerned with power, the wise type necessarily loses power the more he affirms and absorbs conflicting counter-ideals, rendering him "terribly delicate and fragile" (KSA 10:39 [7]).The more manifold he is, the more fragmented and precarious his self-integration becomes (Müller-Lauter 75, 77).The ramification of this tension for Nietzsche"s vision of the "future philosopher" is that "if one of the two modes of behavior overcomes the other, the result is either rigidity or the loss of self in the multiplicity of what could become real" (Müller-Lauter 70).
Although Müller-Lauter acknowledges that Nietzsche intends these two antithetical dispositions to be constitutive of the highest type, the solution to the question of exactly how both strength and wisdom can simultaneously lead to the increase of power remains unanswered.
Müller-Lauter therefore concludes that it is not possible to bring these two antithetical elements of will to power into successive historical sequence."The fact remains that the great man is strong or wise.Only alternation of the two types of greatness could perhaps be made plausible in PhaenEx this way, but not their approximation, not to mention their amalgamation" (Müller-Lauter 78).
From this, he reasons that the doctrine of eternal recurrence cannot be obtained from the characteristics of the violent or strong Overhuman but rather follows logically from the manifoldness and "radical self-understanding" of the synthesizing wise type (Müller-Lauter 86).
In the final analysis, he acknowledges that although Nietzsche"s belief is that when pushed to the extreme, both forms of Overhuman will converge into one, both remain irretrievably separate to the extent that the meaning of the eternal recurrence "remains insurmountably split into a duality" (Müller-Lauter 121).
As distinct from Löwith"s critical conclusion that duality irremediably splits Nietzsche"s thought in two (which he considers a kind failure and perhaps a sign of "willing abdication" on Nietzsche"s part), 9 in Müller-Lauter"s framework (which concludes with a study of experimental embryologist Wilhelm Roux"s influence on Nietzsche), we see that Nietzsche"s "philosophy of contradiction" becomes emblematic of an inner psycho-physiological struggle which is continuously ongoing in the developmental mechanics of all organic life.Contradiction becomes the necessary motor of "nature" (or becoming) not only at the cellular level of organic evolution (i.e., Roux"s work aimed to demonstrate that Darwinian evolution operated at the cellular level), but also on the pre-individual, bodily, proto-subjective plane of what I have here called a war of and for the instincts.Müller-Lauter"s conclusion that "two different tendencies" are "locked in conflict, mirroring the incompatibility of their contradictory natures" and consigned to "alternation" rather than "approximation" or "amalgamation," 10 helps to establish that not only are will to power and eternal recurrence mutually implicative concepts, but also intensive and immanent ones 11 in that their contradiction produces tensions that are actively embodied by -131 -Nandita Biswas Mellamphy subjects that are in the process of becoming. 12In this sense, the dynamics of ongoing contradiction would be necessary to this metamorphosis of bodily states.
Of the contemporary interpreters that acknowledge the centrality of bodily metamorphosis in Nietzsche"s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams clearly articulates the connection between the philosopher"s ability to create new values and the crucial experience of bodily transformation that is a precondition for the transvaluation of values. 13 The body"s psycho-physiological dynamics become the emblem for Nietzsche"s polemics of contradiction, as well as the will to power"s dramatization of conflict, destruction, and generation in the theatre of life.Cultural innovation in modernity-the path through which Dionysus can enter the modern world-is now rooted in the body that "goes under" rather than in the German nation. 14Zarathustra regards all values as narrative interpretations or "parables" that record the history of bodily states of elevation (Gooding-Williams 118-9); in particular, Platonic-Christian values represent the bodily history of the ascetic ideal (the extirpation of passions). 15Gooding-Williams" point is that the possibility of the creation of new values-and -132 -PhaenEx therefore the overcoming of Platonic-Christian values-will require the transformation of the states of the body: the creation of new values cannot be effected apart from self-overcoming as the creation of new selves, that is, of new bodily states of elevation (Gooding-Williams 119).
The paramount importance of Zarathustra emerges from this presumption: that the eternal recurrence becomes the crucible of all Nietzsche"s hopes for genuine philosophy; more pointedly, the eternal recurrence holds the key to what Nietzsche considers to be the only possibility for creating (and thus redeeming) the future of humanity.
When read in tandem with the "Three Metamorphoses" in Zarathustra, the Overhuman"s task does seem to include both negation and affirmation, namely in terms of the metamorphosis from the bodily states or stages of the "Thou shalt," to the "I will," and finally to the "I am" (Part I).The three metamorphoses refer to the three states or stages that must be crossed on the way to the Overhuman: the camel, the lion, and the child.The camel represents the stage of asceticism in which the spirit is sufficiently free to be dissatisfied with the present conditions of the world.
In the second stage, the lion represents the overcoming of the camel"s dependence on moral values; but the lion, in its attempt to say "I will," must still contend with the dragon "Thou shalt," the moral law.The lion overcomes the camel not only by seeking freedom, but also by creating a freedom of the spirit through the exercise of that scepticism necessary for the devaluation of all previous moral values (the sacred "No").The lion is not yet capable of transvaluation, and must himself be overcome by the third and final stage, the sacred "Yessaying" of the child.
The various stages of this philosophical (psycho-physiological) metamorphosis may help to elucidate the philosopher"s relationship to the seemingly antithetical tasks of negation and affirmation.In the first camel-dragon stage, the devaluation of current historical values will Nandita Biswas Mellamphy entail that the philosopher engage in a nomothetic political project in which the highest values of society are selected, bred, and reproduced.But by itself, negation only involves the exercise of the nay-saying hammer by the strong and mighty type; therefore to reach the final stage of affirmation (the sacred "Yes"), the strong man must also become the wise man.Müller-Lauter admits that Nietzsche intends for this transformation to occur: The two incompatible factors rely on each other.The strong man can only remain strong and become stronger if he becomes the wise man who not only has the multifarious contradictions outside himself but assimilates them into himself.And the wise man will be lost in the perspectival contradictions and suffer losses in form and strength, if he does not commit himself to the exclusive guidance of the one ideal.( 77) Decidedly contrary to the positions of both Löwith and Müller-Lauter, Strauss, by juxtaposing Nietzsche and Plato, suggests that at the peak, affirmation emerges naturally from out of negation through the philosopher"s love for eternity, the source out of which affirmation necessarily arises found in the innermost depths of the philosopher"s soul.Love vindicates negation and again becomes the guiding light of philosophy: the negation of life that was a byproduct of critical philosophy is ultimately vindicated by the philosopher"s most profound love.
Strauss concludes from this that the notion of eternal recurrence emerges naturally from the doctrine of will to power.According to Strauss"s Note to A Plan of Good and Evil, love of eternity as the tragic fatum of man unifies negation and affirmation, such that "the doctrine of the will to power is a vindication of God, if a decidedly non-theistic vindication of God" (195).Thus, as Lampert claims in his reading of Strauss, eternal return belongs to Nietzsche"s thought as its affirmative culmination: life is lovable as it is.Strauss"s little essay depicts that inner logic of love in his own chosen sobriety, with constant reference to philosophy"s other great erotic, Plato.Is Nietzsche"s thought a relapse into Platonism?Philosophy cannot avoid such a relapse.Philosophy is a lover"s passion for the greatest of beloveds.( 56) PhaenEx Love, of the Nietzschean kind (which Strauss in this essay juxtaposes with Platonic love), embodied in the philosopher of the future qua "complementary man" (the one in whom contradiction and cruelty is spiritualized), in whom the rest of existence is justified (BGE §207), reconciles the negation of nature and its highest affirmation.
But unlike Müller-Lauter"s suggestion that even this synthesis must necessarily break apart, the emphasis of Strauss"s interpretation is on elucidating Nietzsche"s claim that "noble nature replaces divine nature" (190-1). 16While Strauss admits that "the philosopher as philosopher belongs to the future and was therefore at all times in contradiction to his Today," the philosopher as "complementary man" is one in whom the tension between the radical scepticism of will to power and the affirmation of eternity is reconciled (Strauss, SPPP 200).As a culmination of the historical process, the innermost nature of the philosopher is also revealed to be, in itself, an affirmation of nature. 17We might understand the process by which this happens as follows: the ascent up the pyramid of social existence necessitates a complete abjection of all matters related to eternity in order for the philosopher to free his will from all dogma.And yet, once the will has rid itself of all faith in dogma, in order not to fall back into a nihilism of the will (willing nothingness), the will must show its ultimate strength in an act of willing in the absence of all negation and negatives: willing as affirmation.In other words, the will for the first time wills actively rather than reactively (that is to say, against other counter-ideals): "the Vernatürlichung of man presupposes and bring to its conclusion the whole historical process-a completion which is by no means necessary but requires a new, free creative act.Still, in this way history can be said to be integrated into nature" (Strauss, SPPP 189).Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Although Strauss takes pains to distinguish Nietzsche"s conception of love and truth from that of Plato, his argument hinges on the suggestion that it is indeed Platonic love that may be the ghost in the Nietzschean machine (so to speak): Is beloved eternity divine merely because it is beloved?If we were to say that it must be in itself lovable, in order to deserve to be loved, would we not become guilty of a relapse into Platonism, into the teaching of the "good in itself"?But can we avoid such a relapse altogether?(SPPP 195)   Strauss will show in his reading that if the entirety of Beyond Good and Evil was, as Nietzsche stated, a great project of "nay-saying," that in the final moment, as man stands at and embodies the peak of the pyramid, he will have to finally say "Yes"-an "unbounded Yes to everything that was and is, i.e., the affirmation of eternal return" (SPPP 199, 203).The "complementary" nature of the philosopher reflects Strauss"s conclusion that it is in the philosopher"s willing of eternal recurrence that the rift between philosophy and religion is healed.According to Strauss then, Nietzsche rightly reveals that in the nobility of the philosopher-the complementary man-"philosophy and religion, it seems belong together-belong more closely than philosophy and the city" (SPPP 190).
What Strauss misses between his account of the radical historicity required by the ascent of the philosopher (which amounts to an oblivion of eternity) and the teaching of the eternal recurrence that emerges from it, is an explanation of the crucial role of self-sacrifice in the teaching of the Overhuman.Quite contrary to Strauss"s assertion that "Nietzsche does not mean to sacrifice God for the sake of the Nothing" (SPPP 194) the willing of nothingness is the precondition for the teaching of eternal recurrence because, as Löwith remarks, "only the man who has overcome himself can also will the eternal recurrence of all that is" (55).The thought of the eternal recurrence that arises from thinking pessimism to the depths leads to the most life-PhaenEx denying possibility thus envisaged by the philosopher: the temptation to self-destruction; "[t]he search for self-eternalization is in a perverse way at one with the temptation to self-destruction" (Löwith 58).The completion of the project of nihilism as such seems to require the self-sacrifice of the philosopher to the most extreme form of nihilism, a bodily battle in which the instincts struggle against one another to the threshold of transmutation.
With the death of God, the devaluation of current historical values will lead the philosopher to a historical impasse: a moment will come in which the task of negation will itself require that the philosopher negate himself and his own ideal.At the "peak," the philosopher"s transmutation from strong to wise necessitates a deadly experimentation with the most abysmal thought: "What Zarathustra "knows" but cannot will is that one can voluntarily destroy one"s existence; whereas later, in the sight of life, he knows that life recurs precisely in sacrifice" (Löwith 67).This is the philosopher"s sacrifice, and it is consistent with Zarathustra"s explanation that in order to climb upward, the philosopher must necessarily experience "going under." 18In his climb up the mountain, Zarathustra realizes that in the end, one experiences only oneself ... I stand before my final peak now and before that which has been saved for me the longest.Alas, now I must face my hardest path! ... But whoever is of my kind cannot escape such an hour-the hour which says to him: "only now are you going your way to greatness!Peak and abyss-they are now joined together" ... "And if you now lack all ladders, then you must know how to climb on your own head" ... "Before my highest mountain I stand and before my longest wandering; to that end I must first go down deeper than ever I descended."(Nietzsche, TSZ II)   Löwith contends that it is the sacrificial core of the teaching of the Overhuman that catalyzes the transformation between nihilism and the redemption of life.At the pinnacle, the "strong" type would need to will the dissolution of his own will to power.In this regard, Nietzsche, according to Löwith, thinks through the same existential question posed by those such as Kierkegaard (e.g."to be or not to be," 157).The general intention to kill oneself, however, is Nandita Biswas Mellamphy not what Nietzsche means by "free death."Freedom toward death as the necessary criteria for willing the overcoming of nihilism is only available to the one who has first travelled the path of negative philosophy, the one who has already destroyed all faith and belief in present human morality.In this terrifying prospect, the philosopher, by fulfilling the task of negation to its most extreme conclusion simultaneously affirms the nothingness left in its wake.Negation thus gives birth to the most profound affirmation of nihilism, through which, finally, the philosopher is able to overcome nihilism and thereby undergo the transformation from strong to wise.Nietzsche himself points to this inevitability: Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation.It wants rather to cross over to the opposite of this-to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection-it wants the eternal circulation-the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements.The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence-my formula for this is amor fati.(KSA 12:10[3], 13:16[32]) .
But unlike Strauss for whom Nietzschean love converges with Platonic love, for Löwith, the sacrificial core of the teaching of the Overhuman ultimately confines Nietzsche"s conception of the will to the very Christian source he wishes to eliminate.Löwith ultimately finds Nietzsche"s thought of eternal recurrence unsuccessful because it splits "the world of becoming and the world of Being" into two extreme divergences that cannot be logically co-existent (170).
What is identified as an irreparable duality in Nietzsche"s thought by Löwith, when translated into the terms of Müller-Lauter"s framework of contradiction, can be interpreted as the necessary conflict between will to power and eternal recurrence that is fundamentally dramatized as the war of bodily, subjective instincts.As part of this violent playing-out, the most active expression of human will to power consists in the paradoxical affirmation of non-willing (and the concomitant assassination of the very will to power in question).From contradiction emerges the PhaenEx possibility of metamorphosis which, on the one hand will entail the destruction (dissolution) of the present subject-point, and on the other hand will generate a new network of instincts and existents.The extent to which an organism can endure such metamorphosis will serve to distinguish the merely higher types from the highest, or more precisely, the "human-all-toohuman," from the "Overhuman."In the final portion of this discussion, I will re-construct the process by which this metamorphosis might be initialized.
As Nietzsche recounts in The Genealogy of Morals, the political and historical problem of nihilism becomes intensified and reified in modernity as the problem of willing (GM III 28), which subsequently becomes the hallmark of the human, and in due course becomes a symptom of its decadence as well as the active battleground for its overcoming.If for Nietzsche nihilism is a situation in which the will is at its most decadent (the "unhealthy" body according to Zarathustra) and thereby unable to interpretively and sensuously orient or relate itself to the world, it is also the situation in which the will renders its ability to experience the world impotent by projecting its hopes into a "beyond" that cannot materially be experienced by the body.One of the most nihilistic features of Christian morality is the erroneous belief that "death" (tied to the belief in the resurrection of the body) can be experienced and can therefore redeem life.This metaphysical abstraction strips the will of its raison d'être and also deprives the active will of fulfilling its function of integrating the various drives that make up the healthy body.By placing all its hope in an abstract existence of life after death (the eternal life promised by the Christian god) which cannot possibly be an experience of will to power, the Christian will deprives itself of the very essence of human existence, that is, the will"s activity of experiencing and creating meaning in this world (AC §43).PhaenEx How does the step to annihilate the will lead to a translation back into life (contrary to Löwith"s assertion)?And how does contradiction bring about a metamorphosis?If we agree that Löwith is correct in his assertion that a crucial step would have to be to "will the dissolution of the will," then this step also reveals an antinomy: the completion of the project of negation-the last step of logical world-denial-would also require negation of the "will to the dissolution of the will." 19This is the paradoxical historical moment of correspondence between radical negation or scepticism (in the act of willing the eradication of the will) and the radical negation of negation (the last step of logical world-denial is the negation of the will to eradicate the will) that could catalyze metamorphosis.Precisely at the moment in which the philosopher makes the most fundamental existential commitment to "will the dissolution of his own will" as the necessary task to complete the project of negative philosophy, an antinomy surfaces that this self-sacrifice (this will to deny life) itself requires negation.The consequence of the antinomy is a pyscho-physiological transmutation (rather than simply a "thought-experiment").The experience of this antinomy is, I suggest, the experience of eternal recurrence.
According to many French interpretations of Nietzsche, the experience of eternal recurrence is not simply a releasing of the "pleasure principle" but the terrifying transgression of the boundary delimiting a "normal" state from a pathological one. 20George Bataille calls this antinomic moment the experience of an "extreme limit" and an inner collapse, the moment in which the salvation (qua metaphysical solace) promised by self-sacrifice turns into its opposite, the profound recognition of the absence of salvation (27).According to Bataille, the putting to death of God is a sacrifice which, making me tremble, allows me yet to laugh, for, in it, I succumb no less than the victim (whereas the sacrifice of Man saved).
In fact, what succumbs with God, with me, is the bad conscience which those who sacrificed had in turning away from sacrifice.(154) PhaenEx moment to emerge in the post-nihilistic history of Western humanity: the overcoming of Christian morality is revealed in the affirmation of a new valuation of sensuous eternally-earthly existence.Willing death is revealed, for the first time, as practically and theoretically untenable because death cannot be experienced (it is a cessation of the individual"s will to power, but not of the will to power of all life).Death is an abstraction because only life can be experienced.
For Nietzsche, I would conclude, this is the consequence of the experience of eternal recurrence that initiates the genesis of a truly new subjective disposition, the transmutation of the strong man into the wise (to use Müller-Lauter"s categories) or the Übermensch.What is revealed in this experience of negating the "willing of the dissolution of the will" is Nietzsche"s most profound faith in and hope for the possibility of affirming existence: nihilism-the belief in the "nothingness" of existence-is fundamentally and ultimately untenable.In the negation of the highest individual"s last will to annihilate his own will (his own life) emerges the realization of the eternal inexhaustibility of life as will to power.

Notes
1 The author would like to thank the editors of PhaenEx, especially Chloë Taylor, Tracey Nicholls, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and instructive comments, as well as Dan Mellamphy for his suggestions on the title and the fragment from Heraclitus found at the beginning of this paper. 4As Löwith notes "The tension and the contradiction within this postulated correspondence between the finite existence of the willing man and the eternal Being of the world that wills itself produce the problematic conflict in the willing of the eternal recurrence.Only within this conflicting correspondence can Nietzsche on the one hand think that man moves the whole of -143 -Nandita Biswas Mellamphy nature if he is completely mankind, and on the other hand adhere to the view that in the whole of what is, man is a mere "accident" and altogether a natural fatality.Or, summarized in a single sentence of two words, "ego-fate," namely the fate of the eternal recurrence.This sentence, too, on being unfolded, signifies something twofold, conflicting, and self-contradictory: … Put in moral terms: I am responsible for everything"s being there and being as it is, and there is no being there that would be responsible for its being as it is and its being there.The contradiction between both sets of assertions could only be nullified and brought to a non-contradictory correspondence if Nietzsche succeeded in flying beyond all going, going over, and going under, into the innocence of heaven.(191-2) Pointing to Nietzsche"s Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, Gooding-Williams argues that although Nietzsche had envisioned in these earlier works the possibility of a Dionysian renewal in modernity through various media, for example the German nation, the later philosophy confronts a contradiction between the identity-less, boundary-less ephemerality of the Dionysian experience as outlined in The Birth of Tragedy, and the necessary national delineation of a German identity required to reclaim modern European culture (as developed in Beyond Good and Evil and later; 104).As a result, a conceptual shift takes place and Nietzsche comes to believe that new-values creation finds its origin in the bodily Dionysian experience of "goingunder" in Zarathustra.

2
The present argument is part of a larger work in which I explore these questions in considerable detail.See The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism.Palgrave: Macmillan, 2011.3See Strauss and Lampert.