The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light

by Keith Ansell-Pearson

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 30 (2005) 1-21 The purpose of this essay is to provide a reading of Nietzsche's first sketch of the thought of the eternal return of the same in order to illuminate some crucial, if often neglected, aspects of his figuration of the Übermensch, which I prefer to translate as 'overhuman'. This sketch from August 1881, which has consequences for our reading of some crucial parts of Nietzsche's oeuvre, foregrounds the specific set of problems that inform Nietzsche's conception of a new, postmetaphysical humanity and that gets played out in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is possible to identify in Nietzsche's texts several configurations of the overhuman. I will focus on the following two. The first is the figuration we find at work in the free-spirit trilogy (1878–82), where the overhuman denotes the change in the human that is called for with respect to the new tasks that confront modern humanity, such as the incorporation of truth and knowledge (GS 110), the purification of our opinions and valuations (HH 34, GS 335), and the renunciation of the first and last things of metaphysics (HH chapter 1, GS 285). The second is the figuration we find in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), where the overhuman denotes the human being that stands in a new temporal relation to existence and the earth (the first figuration continues to be fully at work in the text). When Nietzsche posits the overhuman as the 'meaning' (Sinn, sense and direction) of the earth, he has in mind a postmetaphysical human being. The extraordinary nature of this being is what we encounter in Nietzsche's first sketch of the thought of eternal return. The doctrine of the eternal return of the same is always bound up in Nietzsche with the fundamental problems that need to be addressed concerning the fate of modern human beings.

22 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

Keith Ansell-Pearson joined Warwick's Philosophy Department in 1993 and has held a Personal Chair since 1998. He did his graduate studies at the University of Sussex. He has presented lectures around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. In 2013/14 he was Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the Humanities at Rice University.