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Nietzsche and Anaximander The Innocence of Becoming, or Life Without a Mortgage Gary Shapiro
Nietzsche's vision of what philosophy is, has been, and might become is indebted to the figure of Anaximander, the first Greek philosopher said to have put his thoughts into writing. As I hope to show, such talk of indebtedness is highly problematic, an insight that Nietzsche achieved in part by meditating on this enigmatic figure "at the boundary stone of Greek philosophy." While beginning with a deep fascination, he eventually makes it his task to overcome both the metaphysical and moral philosophy (to employ much later terms) that Anaximander inscribed in the Western tradition. Beginning with his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers, reaching a point of intensity in Zarathustra's account of philosophy as a form of madness, and presupposed in the Genealogy's argument that thinking in terms of credit and debt is the oldest stratum of human thought, the Milesian philosopher haunts Nietzsche's writing and thinking. This essay explores these three crucial moments of his engagement with an emblematic thinker of Greece's tragic age. As a preliminary, in order to get a sense of the importance of Anaximander for Nietzsche's project of thinking "the innocence of becoming [die Unschuld des Werdens]," let us consider Nietzsche's articulation of this last phrase, which he employs at least twelve times in his writings. Perhaps the fullest development of this idea is in Twilight of the Idols, so I quote at length: Today ... when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt (Schuld) and punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is no more radical opposition than the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with "punishment" and "guilt" [Schuld] by means of the concept "moral world order." Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics .... (T "The Four Great Errors" 7) Why should becoming not be thought innocent? Why suppose it involves guilt or debt? Anaximander appears to offer an answer. So let us read the one sentence said to survive from his writings. In Nietzsche's version and
Nietzsche and Anaximander 87 commentaries, it is an exemplary positing of a "moral world order." The quotation is provided by Simplicius, the 6th-century CE commentator on Aristotle. I provide it both in Nietzsche's German translation and in an English version of that translation (later we will have to consider the Greek text and an apparent omission in Nietzsche's version): Woher die Dinge ihre Entstehung haben, dahin miissen sie auch zu Grunde gehen, nach der Notwendigkeit; den sie miissen Busse zahlen und fur ihre Ungerechtigkeiten gerichtet warden, gemass der Ordnung der Zeit. Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time. The relevant words of Simplicius' presumed quotation in Greek are Kata t6 XPEffiv . Oi8o6vat yap aÂľta OtKTJV Kat ticnv aA.t..r1A.01cr Kata tTJV tou xp6vou ta~tv
"Enigmatic proclamation of a true pessimist, oracular inscription [Orakelaufschrift] over the boundary stone of Greek philosophy: how shall we interpret you?" 1 Nietzsche asks in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG). The boundary stone is so old, so oracular, so enigmatic, that a few words should be said about its source. Simplicius, a 6th-century CE commentator on Aristotle's Physics, attributes the sentence to Anaximander, adding "as he says in somewhat poetic language." It is Simplicius's comment on the style of the sentence and his attention to its specific wording that lead scholars to believe that he is quoting directly rather than paraphrasing. On Nietzsche's reading, Anaximander appears to say that any form of separate, individual existence, any coming to be, whether in the form of flourishing, decay, or dull persistence, is a presumption, an injustice that must be made good by its eventual death, disappearance, or destruction. Becoming or coming into being is never innocent on this account. So if Anaximander does embody the beginning of Western philosophy, if this first thinker of the arche or principle has (as Nietzsche will suggest) formulated the arche of philosophy itself, then he is indeed the perfect foil for another thinker who will declare the innocence of becoming. Perhaps there is nothing more central to Nietzsche's entire body of thinking and writing than his attempt to free human beings from a powerful sense of guilt, indebtedness, and a rage against the ravages of time. Although Anaximander has left us at most one sentence, along with later testimonies about his views and (what we would now call) scientific researches, for Nietzsche he casts a giant shadow over twenty-five hundred years of thought. A large shadow is a sign of influence, but it may also obscure something significant. And Nietzsche was always an analyst of shadows, as well as the self-designated celebrant of the "great noon."
88 Gary Shapiro
Anaximander Among the Pre-Platonic Philosophers
In the early 1870s, Nietzsche gave a series of lectures on "The Pre-Platonic Philosophers" at the University of Basel, where he was a professor of Greek and Latin philology. Nietzsche was working with his own questions of where he was to situate himself with respect to the demands of philology and philosophy. This was not just a question of institutionally overt disciplinary practices, but an indication of the turbulence of his emerging vocation. The material in these lectures, full of detailed references and quotations, was later rewritten in a more accessible form known in English as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. 2 Given conventional categories (which are more recent than many suppose), it may seem eccentric that Nietzsche includes Socrates in this group, rather than separating him from the "pre-Socratics." At the time that Nietzsche wrote, the "pre-Socratic" rubric had not been firmly established, and we will see reasons that he found his chosen narrative parameters to be illuminating. In the lectures, it is clear that Nietzsche regards Anaximander as a greater thinker than Thales, traditionally the first Greek philosopher and regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. As he wrote to his friend Erwin Rohde, "I treat Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides as the main figures in that order ... I name Thales as the forerunner of Anaximander" (PPP185). Very briefly, for now, Nietzsche takes Anaximander to be the deeper thinker because he goes beyond Thales's claim that all is water to ask what the source or origin of water is. Anaximander names it as the apeiron, or the Unlimited. The Unlimited is truly originary (not merely first) because it is the ever-productive source of whatever emerges into a specific form or identity. Unlike Thales and Anaximenes,_ he is not simply a theorist of the elements, but a philosopher seeking their ground. Nietzsche is quite clear about the distinction between temporal priority and order of rank: The quest for philosophy's beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels. (PTG 30) Now let us look more closely at the aspects of Anaximander's thought that Nietzsche finds especially striking.
Writing It may seem obvious that philosophers put their thought into writing and typically into prose. However, Nietzsche's lectures on the pre-Platonics are bookended by the figures of Thales and Socrates. The first left no writings that any ancient author mentions, let alone records, while the second was deeply suspicious of the written medium; Plato famously details Socrates's animadversions in the Phaedrus. Early in his lectures, Nietzsche cites the
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testimony of Themistius on Anaximander's book "On Nature [physis]": "[he] was the first of the Greeks whom we know who ventured to produce a written account on nature. Previously writing in prose was cause for criticism and was not customarily practiced by the earlier Greeks" (PPP 31). No less originary than Anaximander's thought was his writing. We might say that he dared to bring his "books" into being, while foreseeing that they, like all particular existences, must tragically disappear. Nevertheless, so far, a few traces still remain. It was this written form, Nietzsche avers, that set a series of questions for the next generations of Greek thinkers, having to do with how things arise, change, and perish. In PTG, Nietzsche is even more emphatic about the power of inscription. While we have an image of Thales (stories and doxography), Anaximander actually speaks to us: he "writes exactly as one expects a typical philosopher to write when alienating demands have not yet robbed him of his innocence and naivete. That is to say, in graven stylized letters, sentence after sentence the witness to fresh illumination, each the expression of time spent in sublime meditation." Citing the one (presumably) surviving sentence, Nietzsche characterizes the written thoughts as having a "lapidary impressiveness" (PTG 45). We could say that Anaximander discovered the true medium of philosophy. Nietzsche is not explicit about what the "alienating demands" are that can handicap a philosopher's writing. We can imagine that he is speaking of demands to satisfy religious or political authorities, to preserve one's life by self-censorship of unconventional teachings, meeting the requirements of a patron or institution that employ the thinker, or needing to sustain oneself by marketing one's teachings and skills (from Sophists to university professors). All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academies, custom, fashion and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness. Our philosophy stops with the sigh "if only" and with the insight "Once upon a time." (PTG 38-9) On Nietzsche's account (supported by more recent scholarship), the term "philosopher" did not yet exist in Anaximander's time. His predecessor Thales was one of the Seven Sages or sophoi of Greece, and Nietzsche relates sophos to sapio (Latin) and several Greek words that indicate taste, in the sense of sharp and acute taste and knowledge; at this stage, "philosopher" does not yet denote wisdom in the sense that involves quietude and asceticism, but not productive activity or techne (PPP 8). So a philosopher, to use the term retrospectively, is an individual who will speak and write in a way that sharply gives a specific, unexpected twist to linguistic and conceptual norms. Just a few years after his lectures, Nietzsche was writing in his Unmodern Observations about what he saw as the execrable taste of
90 Gary Shapiro writers like D.F. Strauss, Eduard von Hartmann, and other contemporaries. They are so vulgar and opportunistic, flattering the low taste of their time, that their work, as Nietzsche demonstrates, can be read as self-parody. In contrast what the early Greek philosophers invented "was the archetypes of philosophical thought. All posterity has not made an essential contribution to them since" (PTG 31). Knowing Nietzsche's later development, we think of his own writing, both prose and poetry, and his claim to have mastered a unique range of literary styles and forms (EH "Books" 4). More specifically, we should think of his command of the aphorism, which can be seen as a hyper-development of the sayings (often misleadingly designated fragments) of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and others. Writing is not and can never be a transparent medium for transmitting thought. Language always presupposes a given structure of habits and customs, even a metaphysics; as a philologist, Nietzsche emphasizes the last in Beyond Good and Evil when he writes of the different notions of action and subjectivity built into the grammar of the Inda-European and Ural-Altaic languages (BGE 20). Philosophical writers should absorb the lessons of Anaximander and Heraclitus. While drawing on common linguistic resources, they will produce texts strikingly at odds with convention, texts that provoke readers to interrogate their own prejudices and supposed knowledge. They will write "for all and none," using their sharp taste to recruit a few thoughtful readers. Zarathustra's speech "On Reading and Writing" expresses this intensely: Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one's own blood. Write with blood, and you will discover that blood is spirit ... Whoever knows the reader will do nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers and the spirit itself will stink. (Z I 7) The concatenation of blood, spirit, and a discerning sense of smell recalls Nietzsche's understanding of sophos as sharp taste, a taste sharp enough to be cruel. And here we might recall the etymological connection of cruelty with cruor (Latin: blood). Nietzsche is sometimes described as an aphoristic writer. While I have argued elsewhere that it would be a serious failure of taste (in his sense) to describe all of his texts as collections of disconnected aphorisms, he does have a deep attraction to the form: "Aphorisms should be summits; and those to whom they are addressed should be tall and lofty." 3 Not only does Nietzsche see Anaximander's aphoristic writing as exemplary- on the basis of a single example!-but the very form of the aphorism calls to mind Anaximander's originary thought. An aphorism is above all something bounded and limited; it constitutes itself (with the author's help) as an individual, bounded text with a specific horizon (horismos). Every language worth speaking or writing has the capacity for indefinite
Nietzsche and Anaximander 91 variation, as we know from both structuralists and post-structuralists. Like the individual beings that issue from Anaximander's Unlimited, aphorisms are unique ways of shaping, structuring, giving sense and tone, to the resources of a language. To this extent, Anaximander with his one surviving sentence, is one of the significant inspirations of Nietzsche's own philosophical writing and stylistics. Thinking Anaximander may not be the first philosopher, on Nietzsche's account; that honor can go to Thales, as in the tradition. Yet he may lay claim to being the first originary thinker, indeed, one of the very few in history. What makes him originary is his refusing to take for granted such notions as Thales's conception of water as the primal stuff out of which everything is formed. Thales may have emancipated himself from myth and image in thinking, such as we find it in Homer, Hesiod, and other poets. Still, he assumes the fundamental status of water, as if no questions could be sensibly asked about how it comes to be, how it transforms itself into other elements and things, and how these might eventually pass away or revert to water. Anaximander went further than his fellow Milesian by seeking a fundamental principle or arche, not simply a chronological beginning. The apeiron, Nietzsche observes, anticipates the Kantian thingin-itself as "something that cannot be given any actual predicate from the actual world of Becoming" (PPP 33 ). "This was the incredible leap of Anaximander!" Nietzsche exclaims. It is not merely infinite in quantity or extension, as most earlier philosophers and scholars (including Aristotle) had supposed, but unlimited in the sense of escaping all determinate characterizations. It can be "designated by human speech only as a negative" (PTG 47). It is Anaximander's genius to stand at that intersection of thought and language that allows him to mark their farthest reach and their limits by acknowledging our own inability to impose limits. We might say that Anaximander invented metaphysics, although we would be speaking anachronistically, since even Aristotle's so-labeled writings were apparently being marked out simply as the texts that come after his books on Physics. No doubt inspired in part by the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche dismisses later thinkers and scholars, beginning with Aristotle and the Aristotelians, who argue about what sort of matter or stuff the ape iron consists of. Anaximenes is supposed to have said it is air. Or is it intermediate between water and air? Air and fire? For Nietzsche, such questions show a failure to grasp Anaximander's leap of thought. Thales had managed to think that everything is one, but all he is recorded as saying is that everything is water. "Thus, Thales had seen the unity of all that is, but when he went to communicate it, he found himself talking about water!" (PTG 45).
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Being and Becoming Consider once more the single sentence of Anaximander, in Nietzsche's version: Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time. The sentence seems to say that existence itself is an outrage, a transgression, an unjustified emergence or eruption from a primal condition or foundation that should never have been disturbed. Consequently, any such emerging thing must pay the penalty for its injustice by death, destruction, or disappearance. It is the law of time itself that dictates and enforces this. We-and everything else-cannot escape paying our dues simply for being. There is a preliminary question to ask about the accuracy of this translation (omitting even more complex questions about whether the sentence has been accurately transmitted from the 6th century BCE). It has been noted that the currently received version of the saying includes an additional word, allelois; including it would lead to a phrase such as "pay penalty to one another." In partial defense of Nietzsche, we can note with Greg Whitlock, editor and translator of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, that earlier editions of Anaximander's text had also omitted this word. While it was restored in a critical edition of 1838, throughout the 19th century, writers, including Nietzsche, continued the omission (PPP 192). While restoring "to one another" does indeed make a difference in how we read the saying, there is no reason to think that Nietzsche was being willful or arbitrary in producing his version. Later we will ask whether the omitted "to one another" implicitly returns over a decade later in the Genealogy's analysis of the apparently universal debtor/creditor relationship. In PTG Nietzsche quickly refers us to Schopenhauer, "the only serious moralist of our century," who "charges us with a similar reflection": The proper measure with which to judge any and all human beings is that they are really creatures who should not exist at all and who are doing penance [Busse zahlen, the same words as in Nietzsche's translation] for their lives by their manifold sufferings and their death. What could we expect of such creatures? Are we not all sinners under sentence of death? We do penance for having been born, first by living and then by dying. (PTG46) Especially in PTG, Nietzsche suggests that while Anaximander and Schopenhauer may not be logical in expanding a core moral judgment about the value of human life to cosmic dimensions, they are driven to this by an
Nietzsche and Anaximander 93 almost irresistible tragic pessimism concerning the human. The unjustified extension would itself be an instance of the hubris that the sentence attributes to all beings. It is "human, all too human," as Nietzsche will say a few years later. Nietzsche's response to Anaximander in these early writings presents the latter as the first originary philosopher. Sharing Thales's emancipation from myth, image, and divine genealogy or narrative, he understood the implicit monism of Thales's reported claim that all is water. Nietzsche reconstructs Anaximander's thought as the realization that whatever the principle of being is, it must be something other than specific beings or even apparently universal elements. This must be something unlimited, not anything that arises and passes away. Thus, he posed metaphysical questions that provoked the other pre-Platonic giants, Heraclitus and Parmenides. Why is there a multiplicity of things and why are they continually produced? Why is there (continuously} something rather than nothing?-as later thinkers like Leibniz and Heidegger have phrased it. Anaximander was able to provoke such questions because he wrote of the Unlimited in a way that took account of the limits of language itself. In addition to the distinguished figure he must have cut as astronomer, geographer, and colonial pioneer, he articulated his thoughts in lapidary sentences of resonant words, like the one surviving saying. Nietzsche credits the tradition that he "displayed a truly tragic pride in his gestures and customs of daily living" (PTG 49). Finally, he raised the question of being and time in a way that made it absolutely imperative for thinking persons to come to terms with what we might now call, adopting a later vocabulary, the meaning of our finitude. At this point, Anaximander's thought can appears to coincide with Schopenhauer's greatest insights, although Nietzsche only gestures at the genealogy that would link the apeiron to Kant's thing-in-itself, and to Schopenhauer's will. Perhaps most intriguingly, Nietzsche alludes briefly to the idea, attributed to Anaximander by tradition, that countless worlds emerge continuously from the apeiron. He refers to this as a "mystic possibility eternal coming-to-be can have its origin only in eternal being" (PTG 50). In PPP he is more explicit, rejecting the view of some ancient and modern commentators that the many worlds exist simultaneously. Correct are those propositions that guarantee that the world is destroyed, that the sea gradually wanes and dries out and that the earth is gradually destroyed by fire. Hence this world perishes, yet Becoming does not cease; the next world coming to be must also perish. Thus, countless worlds exist. (PPP 37) We can speculate that wrestling with this idea was one stimulus for Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence and his intention to stamp becoming with the form of eternity. Yet while in Anaximander's vision, each world
94 Gary Shapiro must pay a penalty for its presumption in existing, the succession of worlds or cycles in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is free of guilt. The process exemplifies the innocence of becoming-becoming without debt, penalty, or mortgage.
Zarathustra's Anaximander: The Signature of Philosophical Madness In Thus Spok(! Zarathustra, Nietzsche's fictional teacher gives a long discourse on humans' attempt to revenge themselves on time. Eventually, he will offer an antidote to this disease of revenge in the thought of eternal recurrence. The talk is first sparked by Zarathustra's meeting with a hunchback as he is about to cross "the great bridge" (a bridge to a deeper insight, perhaps? He will first articulate the idea of eternal recurrence a few chapters later, when he speaks "On the Vision and the Riddle"). The title of this chapter, "On Redemption [Von der Erlosung]," already announces that it has to do with paying debts and being released from them. "Er/Osung" denotes both moral and economic redemption; one can be said to redeem oneself from moral or religious sin, as one can be said to redeem a monetary debt or a pawned watch. Both Anaximander's Greek and Nietzsche's translation employ words that can designate both moral guilt and a debt of money, goods, or services, to use our more recent terms (Greek: tis is; German: Busse; English: penalty/dues/debt). The dramatic situation is set up by Zarathustra's dialogue with the hunchback, who entreats him to make right his disability and those of others. The situation is obviously reminiscent of Jesus's miracles of healing in the Gospels (which occupy more space there than his moral teachings). The supplicant tempts Zarathustra with the idea that he could seize this fleeting opportunity by the forelock (alluding to the ancient figure of winged kairos who must be caught in this way as he flies by). Refusing this plea, Zarathustra makes several progressively deeper observations. First, he says that even folk-wisdom testifies that those with disabilities like the hunchback's would not be wellserved by miraculous healing; their spirit is so entwined with their bodily conditions that a cure would rob them of their spirit. Second, turning to his disciples, he argues that it is not only those who are visibly and physically deformed who are injured. The human scene appears to him as a battlefield of fragmented individuals, with loss, atrophy, or elephantine enlargement of their talents and aptitudes. All are in need of redemption by the hunchback's standard. "'I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcher-field.'" Third, Zarathustra launches into a more philosophical discourse which begins by noting that apparently all humans are resentful of the ravages of time, whether discernible on their bodies or not. All feel that injuries have been done to them, that time has marked them irreversibly, if only by robbing them of their best moments (see "The Tomb Song").
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What would true redemption be? How can all accounts finally be settled? The most fundamental problem is the human sense of imprisonment, its conviction that the past has marked us forever, that '"the will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time's covetousness, that is the will's loneliest melancholy.' " Time is greedy. We hear an echo of Anaximander's saying, in which the ordinance of time inexorably demands payment of the penalty. It is the loneliest melancholy, a melancholy that is generally implicit and inarticulate, a suffering that perhaps expresses itself for most humans in their frequent interior monologues beginning "if only ..."and nostalgically looking back to the vanished "once upon a time." This condition rises to tragic expression and statement only in the tragic formulations of heroic solitary thinkers like Anaximander and his philosophical descendants. No longer blaming the gods, their family, neighbors, or cities, no longer lamenting the misfortunes of chance, they comprehend the will's situation in terms of the ultimate relation of Being and Becoming. Zarathustra's and Nietzsche's response depends on comprehending the depth of this insight and putting into words (at least) the project of overcoming it. Redemption can now be defined in terms that do not involve a necessary surrender and sacrifice "according to the ordinance of time": To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all "it was" into a "thus I willed it" -that alone should I call redemption. In Zarathustra's long discourse (addressed still to his disciples), he does not yet lay out his own prescription-eternal recurrence and amor fati-for redeeming the will. The next two chapters tell us of his reluctance to utter his most significant thought. The silence will be broken only a little later, as he recounts the vision and riddle that seized him on his sea voyage. For now, he explains the way in which inarticulate resentment and vengefulness become increasingly embedded in human attitudes, practices, and institutions. Beginning as mere folly, this disposition goes on to acquire spirit, and eventually crystallizes as madness. At the conclusion of this extraordinary narrative, I believe, he paraphrases the crucial sentence of Anaximander to demonstrate the mad revenge fantasy of philosophy. There are several stages in this development which should be considered. Zarathustra is offering a story. He explains a temporal process in which humans turn their passions against time itself. We might say that he constructs a genealogy of Anaximander's thought that shows how it establishes itself and resonates down through the centuries. I quote at length: This indeed, this alone, is what revenge is: the will's ill will against time and its "it was." Verily, a great folly [Narrheit] dwells in our will; and all men are under a curse insofar as this folly has acquired spirit [Geist].
96 Gary Shapiro The spirit of revenge, my friends, has so far been the subject of man's best reflection; and where there was suffering, one always wanted punishment too. For "punishment" is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself. Because there is suffering in those who will, inasmuch as they cannot will backwards, willing itself and all life were supposed to be-a punishment. And now cloud upon cloud rolled over the spirit, until eventually madness preached, "Everything passes away; therefore everything deserves to pass away. And this too is justice, this law of time that it must devour its children." Thus preached madness. "Things are ordered morally according to justice and punishment. Alas, where is redemption from the flux of things and from the punishment called existence?" Thus preached madness. (Z Il:20)
Let us consider these modalities of the revenge against time one by one. Earlier in the same lengthy speech, Zarathustra described the will as a prisoner, struggling in vain against the imprisoning irreversibility of time (we might be reminded here of Pascal's image of humankind as a collection of prisoners awaiting their execution while watching others being killed off one at a time). He adds that "every prisoner becomes a fool [Narr]." Prisoners grasp at straws and hope for miraculous pardons or reprieves. Perhaps some imagine that death will liberate them from their suffering, and a few might attempt to hasten their deaths through self-destruction. Other fools lash out at whatever or whomever they can, aiming at the satisfaction of revenge. Unlike the very few. prisoners who might successfully escape from jails of stone, steel, and concrete, none of these fools can free themselves by such actions. Foolish rebellion and resistance to the "ordinance of time" only intensifies "wrath and displeasure [Ingrimm und Unlust]." Foolishness is self-defeating. Foolishness is not the only option. While the prisoner's great foolishness dwells in his will, it may acquire spirit [Geist]. What does this mean? Some readers might be puzzled by Nietzsche, the great critic of religion (it seems) speaking of spirit. As elsewhere in his work, his perspective on Geist is one based in immanence. Spirituality, as Nietzsche understands it, is a mode of self-organization that permits complex adjustments, experiences, and new forms of thought and behavior. At times, Nietzsche suggests that spirituality can arise even in the inorganic world. 4 Consider the analogy of the prisoner again. Some prisoners move past foolish rebeJlion and revenge fantasies to accepting their own responsibility; they come to engage in what we now call a mindful practice of working on themselves. They might adopt a religion that encourages meditation, self-reflection, and disciplinary practices (yoga, "personal growth," and so on). It should sound strange that Nietzsche calls this acquisition of spirit "a curse for everything human." He seems more
Nietzsche and Anaximander 97 tolerant of the prisoners' foolishness than of their spirit. Perhaps the thought goes something like this. The foolish rebel is still exercising will and recognizes his condition as oppressive. The spiritualized or "born again" prisoner accepts confinement (of the body and the will) and devises ways of living within it. He acquires the spirit of revenge. Nietzsche gives his most detailed analysis of the spirit of revenge in On the Genealogy of Morality. Growing from the foolish ressentiment of those too powerless to exact actual revenge, the spirit of revenge (as in "slave morality") begins to invent a narrative that assigns blame, believes in eventual punishment for the "evil" and reward for themselves, the "good" who refrain from evildoing. After laying out this distinction in the Genealogy's first essay, Nietzsche traces the variations and heritage of this virus of ressentiment in his dissections and vivisections of religions and moralities. In the extreme development, they believe that they themselves are to blame for their own suffering. Worst of all, this spirit of revenge can lead to madness (Wahnsinn). Let us read once more Nietzsche's paraphrase of Anaximander, carefully placed in quotation marks to indicate, as Simplicius did, that someone actually said this: "eventually madness preached, 'Everything passes away; therefore everything deserves to pass away. And this too is justice, the law of time that it must devour its children.' Thus preached madness." Clearly, Zarathustra wants us to understand this as a citation. It is very close to his earlier translations of the famous saying. The main difference is the metaphor of time devouring its children, which draws on the ancient myth of Kronos's pedo-cannibalism. So Zarathustra has presented a series of intensifications in the human rage against time: folly, the spirit of revenge, madness. Now, if Anaximander has the primary position that Nietzsche attributes to him in the earlier writings we have examined, if he is the truly originary thinker who provokes the responses of the other great pre-Platonic giants, Heraclitus and Parmenides, then the Wahnsinn attributed to this thought is not simply an individual, idiosyncratic psychic disturbance, but can be taken as a sign of the derangement of philosophy itself. It is not simply a thought or a disposition, but a public teaching and preaching. This impression is intensified when we recall Nietzsche's earlier suggestion that the deep history of philosophy from Anaximander to Schopenhauer is dominated by this idea. As Zarathustra develops his critique of the thought, the preaching of madness sounds increasingly like Schopenhauer's doctrine that the only form of redemption available to humans is abandoning the will. Nietzsche's alter ego sees this as a completely consistent consequence of Anaximander's "preaching," and at the same time a confirmation of the extremity of philosophy's madness: "Can there be redemption if there is eternal justice? Alas the stone It was cannot be moved: all punishments must be eternal too." Thus preached madness. "No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone by punishment? This, this is what is eternal in the punishment called existence,
98 Gary Shapiro that existence must eternally become deed and guilt again. Unless the will should at last redeem itself, and willing should become not willing." But, my brothers, you know this fable of madness. As long as we continue to will, we will suffer. Every new deed brings suffering. Every satisfaction is temporary and simply leads to further desires that embroil us in a hopeless, endless series of such desires, a bad infinite with no terminus. Nietzsche saw this madness flourishing in the late 19th century, not only in the growing popularity of Schopenhauer's thought itself, but in its vulgarization in writers like Eduard van Hartmann, whom he wittily skewered in his Unmodern Observation on history. In his preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche voices his fear of a Euro-Buddhism that would draw on these teachings. I expect that the reader is familiar with Zarathustra's radical response to the teachings of madness, summarized in his claim: I led you away from these fables when I taught you "The will is a creator." All "it was" is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident-until the creative will says to it "But thus I willed it." Until the creative will says to it, "But thus I will it, thus shall I will it." This foreshadows the teaching of eternal recurrence, which Zarathustra will not fully embrace until he has arrived home on his mountain top and endured the ordeal from which he awakes in "The Convalescent." His answer to Anaximander and the madness of philosophy perhaps involves a twist on the Milesian's teaching of "countless worlds." By willing the continuous and recurring production of all that I am, have been, and will be, existence will no longer be a punishment. Fully realizing and teaching this will finally free Zarathustra to die. He repeatedly anticipates his own death in Nietzsche's narrative. Why does he hold back? I suggest that his hesitation can be understood in terms of Anaximander's dilemma. He must come to a place where he knows that his death is not simply a punishment for his existence, and he cannot reach that place until he has achieved a different understanding of Being, Becoming, and Will than that imposed by the madness of more than two millennia of philosophy. Following Paul Loeb's original and convincing arguments, I believe that "The Seven Seals," the final chapter of Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, marks the place and time of the hero's death (the title alludes to the seven seals which are broken atthe end of the world in the Biblical Apocalypse). This may seem counter-intuitive for two reasons. On the one hand, the narrative seems to continue with Part Four, where Zarathustra is alive and well. On the other, the tone of "The Seven Seals" is rhapsodic, celebrating his effortless gliding through and over limitless expanses of sea and sky and his "marriage" with eternity. On the first point, Paul Loeb has plausibly suggested that Part Four, which was added later and printed privately, can be taken as an interlude in the preceding action or a supplement
Nietzsche and Anaximander 99 whose placement resembles that of the Greek satyr play, which followed the presentation of three tragedies. 5 Second, Zarathustra has good reason to celebrate his death once he has liberated himself from the madness of philosophy and can will his recurrence.
Anaximander and the Oldest Social Relationships: Nietzsche's Genealogy Debtors and Creditors So far, I have considered Nietzsche's understanding of and response to Anaximander's saying in the translations and paraphrases that he has provided. Yet, as noted earlier, these omit one word, allelois, perhaps best rendered as "to one another." The omission is probably not deliberate, but we have no way of confirming this. Nietzsche not only omits the word in the texts examined so far, but ignores its implications. Including allelois in the sentence would lead to this reading: "Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty to one another and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time" [my emphasis]. Nietzsche's engagements with the saying, so far, seem to assume that penalties are simply exacted from each individual existent, that the account is settled for each one with its passing away. If anyone or anything could be said to receive the penalty on this reading it would be the Unlimited itself. This would cohere with Nietzsche's development of the idea of an infinite unpayable debt to the Christian God (in the Genealogy's second essay). Yet it would not do justice to the saying's apparent teaching on justice: all individual beings must pay their debts or their dues to one another. However, it is this phrase that perplexes recent scholarship on Anaximander. I will not enter its controversies, but I will hazard a suggestion as to how Nietzsche may be responding to this aspect of the famous saying. Whether with specific intent or not, Nietzsche recognizes the pervasiveness of a debtor/creditor economy in the Genealogy. The feeling of guilt, of personal obligations, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship (Personen-Verhaltnis), that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first measured himself against another ... ; here it was that the oldest kind of astuteness developed; here, likewise, we may suppose, did human pride, the feeling of superiority in relation to other animals, have its first beginnings. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) still expresses something of this feeling of self satisfaction: man designated himself as the creature that measures values, evaluates and measures, as the "valuating animal as such." (GM 11:8; compare Z 1.15)
100 Gary Shapiro Nietzsche describes the earliest forms of human thought and practice as involving a measured exchange in which one person (might it be a group?) must pay a debt, that which is owed, to another. The debt might be paid in terms of money, a specified amount of produce, showing respect "owed" to a sovereign, or by suffering a certain degree of cruelty inflicted by the creditor. Eventually, Nietzsche will explain how the creditor-debtor economic and social structure is absorbed and transformed in the worship of tribal ancestors, the emergent authority of the community or state, and the figure of the absolute God of monotheism. For Nietzsche, the human itself is understood as debtor and creditor. It is surprising that Nietzsche's philosophical etymology of "Mensch" ("human")-almost Heideggerian in its daring, however opposed to Heidegger in its content-has generally escaped notice. Appealing to Sanskrit (manas) rather than Greek to uncover an original meaning, he extends the critique of measure involved in Zarathustra's withering condemnation of the "last humans" with their regulated, insured, and securitized lives. 6 Is Nietzsche finally paying more attention to the "to one another [allelois]" that he had (we suppose) inadvertently or even carelessly omitted from his first translations? Could there already be an implicit recognition of the allelois in Zarathustra, in so far as the speech "On Redemption" sees the entire human scene as a battlefield, a site of contests that kill and maim? Such conflicts arise when some feel that they have not been given what they are owed (land or respect for example). Does Zarathustra's paraphrase intentionally fail to provide some recognition of the "to one another"? The question may be poorly posed, since Zarathustra is not claiming the sentence as Anaximander's, and he consistently praises the creative power of giving meaning, and retaining independence from scholarly or institutional interpretation. In any case, the Genealogy's analysis begins with the debts humans owe to one another, and depicts the human condition as defined by relations of credit and debt. To assume or be born into economic debt (I'll presuppose an initial distinction between economic and moral debt, which Nietzsche will complicate) is most obviously to take on an obligation concerning property, products, or service, whether paying a home mortgage or annually turning over a share of one's crops to a feudal lord. Monetary debt is only one form of owing; in Nietzsche's economic anthropology, taxes logically precede money. Slightly less obvious is the fact that in taking on a debt one has mortgaged one's future. You must pay your debt, usually on a schedule of some kind, and that means arranging your life so as to make repayment possible. Clearly (as is evident from cases like "underwater" mortgages and extreme student debt), such mortgaging of the future may engulf all or the best part of a life. Repaying is not only amortizing the debt (finally killing it) but can also be a form of "slow suicide" (to borrow a term from "On the New Idol"). As the song has it, sometimes it feels like "I owe my soul to the company store." Debtor/creditor relations are generally asymmetrical. Nietzsche
Nietzsche and Anaximander 101 nowhere adopts the naive idea that the primal relation of creditor/debtor begins with virtually equal participants, as in certain crude, barter-oriented theories. As Nietzsche well knew, and as more recent commentators emphasize, Miletus-the city of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes-was a commercial hub and a busy port. The sage Thales was known for his acute business sense, as in the anecdote that has him cornering the olive oil market by drawing on his meteorological research. Historians of philosophy frequently observe that this business atmosphere helps us to understand how Anaximander could have used concepts such as debt, penalty, exchange, and restitution to explain both the cosmos and human affairs. When the debt is internalized as guilt, an internalization that Nietzsche takes to be an inevitable consequence of civilization, then redemption becomes more fraught. And as civilization's power increases and the internal debt becomes infinite in magnitude and an infinite god becomes the universal creditor, the lender of last resort, the debt/guilt will be redeemed only through a free act of the creditor-"redemption." Nietzsche calls this way of thinking madness. When history becomes the story of contracting such debt or incurring such guilt, it becomes "world-history," a unifying theme to the human story hinged on the question of redemption. Short of such redemption the world is in a fragile, unstable state. As one of Nietzsche's touchstones, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it in opening his essay on "Gifts," possibly with a nod to Anaximander: It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, and be sold. 7
Nietzsche's theologico-political deconstruction of Christianity is well known. He offers another, if less obvious yet complementary perspective on the human condition as a debtors' prison in which we are always already "paying our dues" or "doing time." In this perspective, it is not only Christianity, that odd confluence of Rome and Judea, which enforces and institutionalizes the unredeemable debt/guilt. Philosophy itself (at least the main lines of its history and practice), which we might have looked to for liberation from religious illusion, turns out to be complicit in deforming the sense of futurity by interpreting the very fact of human temporal existence as involving a debt that can be repaid only through the debtor's destruction. Nietzsche's phrase "die Unschuld des Werdens," designating a condition of freedom, is usually translated as "the innocence of becoming." More to the point for our purposes is "becoming without a mortgage." Nietzsche described the crisis of his and our time as a crisis of debt. "I live on my own credit," he wrote in Ecce Homo, presumably meaning that his entire life was a promissory note that could be redeemed only by the posthumous success of his thought (EH, Preface 1). In On the Genealogy
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of Morality, usually considered his most systematic book, he constructs a narrative explaining how human beings have come to be overwhelmed individually and collectively, internally and externally, by a sense of debt so great that it could be repaid only through a miracle. Nietzsche's well-known analysis of the priests (credit officers of psychic debt, themselves indebted) and of the transformations of the ascetic ideal (various ultra-long-term credit plans) are developments of his political economy of debt and credit. Without retracing the entire story, let us recall some of its steps. Debt (Schuld) is at first a simple but pervasive social and economic fact. This primordial debt is already inscribed in all forms of exchange and in all social bonds. The human, the Mensch, Nietzsche says, is the one who measures, drawing on an etymology from the Sanskrit manas (I am told by scholars that this derivation is not impossible). This measuring is a measuring of debt. Once measured, a debt might be repaid in various ways; if no money or acceptable objects are available, ancient law allowed that the creditor might torture or mutilate the debtor to gain what was deemed to be an equivalent amount of cruel joy. As a result of the amazing and catastrophic change by which humans came to live in relative peace, they adopted a morality that restricted their instincts, forcing them into an internalized life in which they were responsible to a higher power for transgressions and even temptations to transgression. This was the first "great event" in what Nietzsche calls "major history" (Hauptgeschichte). The newly civilized measured their own guilt and indebtedness, making bumbling efforts to repay the constantly increasing debt that is civilization's price, finally concocting the mad religion of Christianity, in which the holy one sacrifices himself to redeem (er/Osen) the debt, another term that migrates from elemental economics to spiritual religion. Yet this repayment- comes to be seen as generating a new debt to the redeemer, and so we spiral into greater and irredeemable indebtedness and guilt. Debt and debt management shape political time. While much of Nietzsche's argument in the Genealogy is well known, exploring it with an emphasis on the question of debt or guilt (Schuld) demonstrates how they contribute to his earth-oriented challenge to "so-called world-history." Nietzsche's understanding of history as a process of the production, accumulation, and accounting of debt is a theory of how the debt machine constructs a future restricted to training and disciplining humans to make restitution. It is a theory of time, ultimately of theologico-political time, and one, he claims, that has infected the philosophical tradition from its beginnings. The church comes to see Schuld as irredeemable without Christ's intervention. Yet the redeemer (Er/Oser) finally serves only to remind us of the enormity of the debt, and those who have not glimpsed the Nietzschean Unschuld des Werdens, or "unmortgaged becoming" will die still "owe their soul to the company store." If Nietzsche repeatedly revisits Anaximander and the first recorded sentence of Western philosophy, he does so in order to offer us a way out of our millennia-old debt crisis.
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Notes 1. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG), trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, 1962), 45-46. 2. The text of lectures is now available in English as The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (PPP), ed. and trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana, 2001). 3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Reading and Writing." 4. Cf. KSA 13.37, 11.157, 11.255. 5. Paul Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge, 2010). 6. Heidegger's explication of Anaximander's saying is fascinating in its intention to eliminate all economic concepts from the sentence. See "The Anaximander Fragment" in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi (New York, 1975). Heidegger uses the term Spruch which is probably best translated as "saying" rather than "fragment." I have attempted to diagnose Heidegger's complex reading in "Debts Due and Overdue: Beginnings of Philosophy in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Anaximander" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley, 1994). 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, ed. Douglas Crane (New York, 1990), 303.
Works Cited Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First and Second Series, edited by Douglas Crane. New York: Library of America, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. "The Anaximander Fragment." In Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Loeb, Paul. The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated by Marianne Cowan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. - - - . The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, edited and translated by Greg Whitlock. ¡ Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Shapiro, Gary. "Debts Due and Overdue: Beginnings of Philosophy in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Anaximander." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Richard Schacht, 358-375. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.