CHAPTER SEVEN: The Innocence of BecomingTwo of the most central ideas of Nietzsche's thought, the Will to Power and eternal recurrence, attempt to describe the world process, the occurrence of world, in a new way. Nietzsche interpreters and scholars have sought to reconcile or at least relate these two ideas to each other in a way that yields a coherent world-view. Thus, for example, Karl Lowith found eternal recurrence to be essentially of Greek origin whereas the Will to Power has its roots in Christianity. In attempting to syncretize a goal-oriented process with one that simply repeats itself, Nietzsche was trying to bring back the Greek idea of repeating cycles of nature based, however, on the Judeo-Christian foundation of an irreversible, one-time course of history, ultimately an impossible and self-contradictory enterprise. Martin Heidegger attempted to fit Nietzsche into the metaphysical tradition as its completion by seeing in the Will to Power the essence of things and in eternal recurrence the existence of things. Heidegger did not see a contradiction between the two ideas but regarded them, so to speak, as different aspects or dimensions of the world, something that Nietzsche did not do.
The Will to Power and eternal recurrence are not the subject of this chapter, but they do lead into our topic without having been explicitly related to it by Nietzsche himself. The innocence of becoming stands singularly unrelated to most of Nietzsche's other main ideas, and thus it cannot be seen as a contradiction to any of them; nor can it be neatly fitted into the metaphysical tradition, let alone be regarded as its completion.
I am not playing these three ideas, the Will to Power, eternal recurrence, and the innocence of becoming, against one another with the intent of ending up with the innocence of becoming as the winner of some kind of competition; nor am I dumping them in the same metaphysical pot (which would almost have to be a cauldron). The first procedure would be a bad kind of "difference"; the second a bad kind of "identity." (Not only infinity is bad.) What I want to do is to inquire into what Nietzsche was talking about when he characterized the Will to Power as a new interpretation of all occurrence.
"Under the not un dangerous title, 'The Will to Power,' a new philosophy or, speaking more clearly, the attempt at a new interpretation of all occurrence should find expression." [1]
The innocence of becoming is another, less-developed dimension of that same attempt at a new interpretation of all occurrence. I shall try first to deal with becoming and what it is free from for Nietzsche, and then turn to the idea of innocence, which will then lead me to the ideas of the child and of play. If I can scratch the surface of all this, I shall be more than content.
BecomingThis is the more familiar aspect of Nietzsche's idea of the innocence of becoming because he wrote about becoming from the very beginning and never lost his preoccupation with it nor his desire to vindicate and justify it. Briefly stated, he wanted. to think becoming free of at least two things: (1) free of the relation to an existent ground, any kind of "being," outside the process of becoming, whether this be the Platonic Form or the witnessing creator god, an (2) free of subordination to any final aim or goal, whether this be salvation or some kind of nirvana, free, in fact, of any goal anywhere at all. The "positive" side of these two things, in Nietzsche's own words, what becoming is not free from, but for, would be (1) there is nothing outside the whole, outside this world; this world itself, as it is, is "perfect" in a nonmoral sense and has no further need of anything, and (2) Nothing exists primarily for the sake of anything else. In short, the world. is neither imperfect nor subordinate. Let us briefly try to clarify these two points further.
It is generally well known that Nietzsche rejects anything beyond or outside of this world. I am not so much concerned here with the whole Judeo-Christian morality issue as with the character of the world process. I shall get to the "human," if not ethical, dimension of the innocence of becoming when I get to the question of innocence as such. I do not mean to posit some kind of Cartesian dualism here. For Nietzsche, everything is in a state, no, a process, of becoming. More precisely expressed, everything "is" becoming. What "is," becomes. Innocence, on the other hand, applies to conscious beings and to the human dimension of the world. A tree is neither innocent nor guilty. Of course, Nietzsche also means by innocence that this world is all right as it is, that there is no Platonic or Judeo-Christian standard to judge and condemn it; but the philosophical dimension of this points, again, to a conscious being trying to evaluate the meaning of all this, to the human dimension. As we go further, we shall find that becoming and innocence get harder and harder to separate.
With the emphasis on becoming, the innocence of becoming means that there is no unchanging being beyond or outside the world of becoming; and thus becoming is "guilty" of, is lacking, nothing. This means that "reality" is not somewhere else, not in an eternal, unchanging Form such as Beauty or the Good, nor in an afterworld or a backworld. The existence of the Platonic Form had meant that man could never achieve perfection, it was simply unavailable to him. He could only strive after it, but never actually attain it. When we look at the historical transformation of Platonic being in Christianity, the situation gets more complicated and more ominous. What Nietzsche objected to about the Christian god becomes more concrete when we consider the two ways in which God died. We leave out the less serious statement that he laughed himself to death. After all, Zarathustra says that when gods die, they always die many kinds of death, an echo of Shakespeare's line about cowards. On the one hand, God died of his pity for man, and on the other hand, we killed God. In reality, these two statements are not as contradictory as it might seem at first glance, but inherently complementary and reciprocal. In the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled "Retired," Zarathustra explains to the old retired pope, who had been looking for the first person Zarathustra met when he came down from his mountain, the old saint, that God's love for man had become his hell and ultimately had led to his death when he saw that it was man, not Christ, who hung on the cross. At a later meeting, the old pope shows that by now he already knew this (at their earlier meeting he did not yet know it) by further explaining that God grew weary of the world and of willing and one day suffocated from his excessive pity. The fact that God grew weary of the world and willing indicates that Nietzsche not only has Christianity and the Christian God in mind here, but also and perhaps more important Schopenhauer and his interpretation of Buddhism. For although pity or compassion is a Christian virtue, it is the Buddhist virtue without which even the greatest wisdom is utterly useless.
Zarathustra then goes on to explain that, before God died, he had taken revenge on his creatures. "Too much didn't turn out for him, this potter who didn't finish his apprenticeship! But that he took revenge on his pots and creatures because they turned out badly, that was a sin against good taste." [2]
We have three forms of "god" in this section. Nietzsche seems to be demoting the Christian God to a kind of Platonic demiurge by saying that he had not finished his apprenticeship. Then he is saying that the God of the Old Testament took revenge on his creatures because they disobeyed him. Zarathustra remarks: Why did he not speak more clearly or give us better ears? And finally, as the God of the Old Testament grew old and turned into the God of the New Testament, he despaired of his botched-up handiwork and suffocated from pity.
Before going on to how we killed God, a short remark about God's suffocation is appropriate. This should remind us of the shepherd, and later Zarathustra himself, into whose throat a snake had crawled. The shepherd was choking on this snake, on "all the heaviest and blackest things." Zarathustra tried to pull the snake out of his throat in vain. Then "it cried out of him," bite the head off! The shepherd did this and lept up transformed, "no longer man." The shepherd choked (wurgte) on something foreign that entered into his very body. In contrast, God suffocated (erstickte) from lack of air. I am not sure exactly what this means; I only want to point it out.
I now turn to the question of God's being killed. Now the emphasis of the question shifts from that of God being unable to live to that of man being unable to endure that this kind of God should live. What about God was so unbearable to man? And to which man was this God so unbearable that he killed him?
The man who killed God was the ugliest man. The German word for ugly means literally, "hateable" (hasslich). Zarathustra finds him in a valley of the realm of death, a valley where snakes go to die. He feels that he has been there before, which gives the whole scene an uncanny cast. Something is sitting in his path, something barely human, something unspeakable. Zarathustra is overcome with shame and quickly averts his glance. Then there sprang up from the earth a gurgling and rattling like the sound of water gurgling and rattling through clogged-up water pipes at night. From this noise finally arose a human voice asking the question: What is revenge on the witness? Finally the voice asks: Who am I? Suddenly Zarathustra realizes who the man is; he is overcome with pity, falls down, but gets back on his feet and speaks to him. "You are the murderer of God! You could not bear him who saw you -- who saw you constantly through and through, you ugliest man! You took revenge on this witness!'" The ugliest man answers:
"But he -- had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything, he saw man's depths and grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness.
His pity knew no shame: he crawled into my dirtiest corners. This most curious, over-intruding, over-pitying one had to die." [3]
But far from feeling any kind of triumph over his deed, the ugliest man can hardly bear what he has done. In this he is reminiscent of an earlier figure in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the pale criminal who can scarcely live with the idea of what he has done.
Both of these accounts of the death God show that his pity either killed him or moved someone else to kill him. He died. Now there is no longer an everpresent, existing ground outside the world watching it. There is nothing outside the world. And this gives back to the world its wholeness its self-sufficiency, its "innocence." The world is not to be punished because it does not measure up to being. There is no being. The world is lacking nothing. "Reality" is not somewhere else, it is right here in this world.
We now turn to point two about becoming, that it is free of subordination to any final purpose or goal, to any goal at all. When we say that becoming, that the world process has no goal, is this not tantamount to nihilism, to the "uncanny guest at the door?" Must we not then say with the soothsayer in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that "everything is empty, everything is the same, everything was"; or in another formulation, "everything is true, everything is permitted?"
Not at all. The seeming paradox is that the absence of goals is so far from being nihilism that the very opposite is the case. It is the imposition of goals on becoming from without that led to the imminence of nihilism. The arch target Nietzsche has in mind here is the Judeo-Christian (and Persian) conception of history as the struggle between good and evil with the resultant triumph of good over evil. Something is intended, aimed at with history, that is, the defeat of evil. Whereas in our first point an eternally existing ground provided the standard by which to judge, condemn as guilty, and ultimately to punish the realm of becoming, in this second point the realm of becoming is again degraded and devalued to a means. It loses its intrinsic value. Nihilism threatens us because becoming, which is all there is, has value only for the sake of something else, again, for some static goal that, for Nietzsche, does not exist. This somehow reminds us of a Kafka story (there is more than one version) of a man who is summoned to a door and told to wait to gain admittance. The door, which has a guard, is meant only for him. He does not know why he has been summoned or what he has done. He spends his whole life waiting there, is never admitted, and finally dies.
Having stated that the absence of goals is not what Nietzsche means by nihilism, which is an historical phenomenon that we cannot and need not go into here, let us try to see what is positive about this absence. What, for Nietzsche, is the opposite of being goal oriented and having a purpose? The obvious answer would seem to be aimlessness, but that would be nihilism. No, the opposite of goal orientation or, if you like, teleology in general, is Necessity. This might sound a bit strange at first until we get a closer look at what Nietzsche means.
The question now arises of what, if any, kind of structure becoming has for Nietzsche. If he rejects teleology, does this then land him in some kind of mechanistic determinism? Apart from some of his so-called proofs for eternal recurrence, which do approach a kind of mechanism and which are not representative of the highest philosophical level of his thought, Nietzsche also rejects mechanism, along with teleology. We have not gone into this rejection of determinism and efficient causality in general because it has less direct bearing upon the innocence of becoming than do the concepts of an eternally existent ground and of purpose and goal. The alternative structure of becoming or the world process that Nietzsche offers to teleology and mechanism is play. As with his precursor Heraclitus, there is an obvious link between play and the child or innocence. We shall come back to this question when we speak of innocence. We shall also have to deal with the question of the relation of play and necessity. On the surface, they do not seem to be compatible.
We stated that the opposite of goal orientation or teleology was necessity. Nietzsche's conception of necessity is not deterministic, but is rather closer to Spinoza for whom necessity and freedom were identical. Necessity is inner necessity as opposed to being compelled by some external force. Nietzsche's attempt to affirm eternal recurrence, to affirm everything as it is, by being willing to repeat it exactly as is, gives expression to this inner necessity.
Becoming, free of purposes and goals, is pure. In the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled "Before Sunrise," Zarathustra addresses the heaven as the pure one, the abyss of light: "'To throw myself into your height -- that is my depth! To shelter myself in your purity -- that is my innocence!''' [4]
In contrast to the section "On Immaculate Perception," which, in addition to being an obvious parody of the Bible, is chiefly a rather devastating criticism of Schopenhauer's will-less contemplation, Nietzsche is speaking with intense seriousness about what stains the purity of heaven. '''Together we learned everything; together we learned to climb up over ourselves to ourselves and to smile cloudlessly: -- cloudlessly to smile down out of light eyes and miles of distance when constraint and purpose and guilt steam beneath us like rain.''' [5]
What can stain the pure heaven are passing clouds, the clouds of good and evil and of these half-and-halfs who can neither bless nor curse. Zarathustra states that he would rather sit in a barrel under closed heavens, rather sit in the abyss without a heaven, than see the light-heaven stained by passing clouds. He concludes,
It is truly a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: "Above all things stands the heaven accident, the heaven innocence, the heaven chance, the heaven high spirits."
"By chance -- that is the oldest nobility of the world, I gave it back to all things, I release them from their bondage under purpose." [6]
We shall have to attempt to think necessity, play, and chance together in our second section. To conclude this section, we must briefly comment on what Nietzsche objected to about purpose and goal on a more individual level. He is, of course, not denying the general purposiveness of much human activity, but rather polemicizing against living one's life for the sake of some future goal. If I live my life for the sake of some future goal, whether it be some kind of worldly success or reward in heaven, I simply lose my present reality. I am not where I am. Not only that, I am then living a relation to an abstraction, to an idea, if not an image, and cut myself off from what is right in front of me. If I do this, there is absolutely no path leading to a direct affirmation of what is, which is Nietzsche's primary concern as opposed to the spirit of revenge or wishful thinking (Wunschbarkeit, das Mochten). "The meaning of becoming must be fulfilled, attained, completed in every moment." [7]
InnocenceInnocence is an important idea in poetry, literature, theology, and in a few philosophers, such as, for example, Kierkegaard, who gives a very subtle and masterful analysis in The Concept of Angst. The way most people use the term innocence is to designate a state of some kind of ignorance or lack of experience of something (an innocent girl, an innocent gambler). These two related meanings of innocence show innocence as a kind of basically untenable "not yet," a something that must be lost in the normal course of things. To be innocent would be to remain the same, if this is at all possible. Beyond these two meanings of innocence lies the more morally slanted one of not guilty. When we say that he was innocent of the crime, this does not mean that he did not know about the crime, but that he did not commit it. As the word formation shows, innocence seems to be primarily a privative concept: someone is lacking some kind of knowledge, experience or guilt.
Basically, Nietzsche starts out pretty much following this direction of thought. As we saw in the first section of this chapter, he wants to free becoming from the internal burden of goals and purposes. Gradually, the concept of innocence assumes a more important role in his thought, although this role is not made very explicit. The concept is always there, but it is never made central. Often it crops up as a phrase, as something he wants to "prove." It also occurs in a few places in his outlines for future "work" along with seemingly unconnected phrases, such as the will to suffering, chance, the creative, lightning.
Because we can safely assume that the framework for the question of innocence for Nietzsche is not theological, the question arises as to the context in which innocence makes its appearance. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the context and development of innocence, on the concept of the child and, finally, on play.
The initial context for the concept of innocence is an absolutely central one that runs throughout all of Nietzsche's writings: the relation between knowledge or consciousness and life. This context is very clearly articulated in an early work entitled "The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," the second of the Untimely Meditations. In this essay, Nietzsche is talking in the larger context of culture, but also in the narrower context of the individual. Thus, history has the dual meaning of a people's consciousness of its cultural roots and of an individual's consciousness of his own past, as the basis for possible action. In this essay, history basically means for Nietzsche "consciousness of the past." The question raised in the essay is, How does consciousness serve or hinder life? The main "value" here is life, not consciousness. This is quite consistent with Nietzsche's later views.
I quote the first section of the essay:
Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again; and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, for he is proud of being human and not an animal and yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal, neither bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say -- but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent; so that man could only wonder. [8]
The animal has no consciousness of the past or, for that matter, of the future either. It lives totally in the moment, in the present. Thus, it is neither bored or in pain (the two poles of Schopenhauer's life scale of feeling open to man); it is happy. Nietzsche goes on to say that the animal is unhistorical; it is every moment fully what it is. The same is true of the child "which as yet has nothing past to deny, playing between the fences of past and future in blissful blindness." [9] Man regards this happiness with envy "because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal ... yet he wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. " [10] One is tempted to say, "Aye, there's the rub." Man wants the happiness of the animal, but he wants it without the limitations of the animal. This factor of being "more" than the animal also applies to the child. The child's play "must be disturbed; only too soon will it be called out of its forgetfulness. Then it comes to understand the phrase 'it was,' that password with which struggle, suffering and boredom approach man to remind him what his existence basically is -- a never to be completed imperfect tense." [11]
Briefly stated, Nietzsche discusses three kinds of life in this essay: the historical, the unhistorical, and the suprahistorical. The historical is subdivided into three kinds: the monumental (concerned with the future), the antiquarian (concerned with the past), and the critical (concerned with the present). The suprahistorical man does not see the meaning of life in the historical process, but for him "the world is complete and achieves its end at every single moment." This is Nietzsche's early vision of the overman. The suprahistorical man is above history; he lives in the present moment and is thus not conscious of self. This he shares in his own way with the animal and the child. The whole issue of innocence turns on what is meant by this phrase, in his own way. For obviously we cannot go back to being the animal, and we should not wish literally to remain children.
The possibly disruptive role of consciousness is a central theme in much of late nineteenth century literature. Whereas earlier writers had seen human consciousness as the very culmination of the whole of nature, some nineteenth century writers began to discover the crippling effect of a certain kind of self-consciousness. One of the most powerful examples of this can be found in a piece by Heinrich von Kleist, "The Marionette Theater." In a few pages Kleist portrays three episodes involving a marionette, a young man, and a bear, respectively. The first episode talks about the dance and shows how a jointed doll, with no consciousness, far surpasses in grace any human dancer who is more earthbound and cannot totally merge his consciousness with his body. Some of that consciousness remains, Kleist says, in his left elbow. The second episode describes a beautiful young man who happens, Narcissuslike, to see his own image reflected in water as he is standing in a certain way. The image reminds him of a well-known Greek statue, and he becomes enamored of that image of himself. He tries to repeat the stance but cannot. From that day on he loses all of his charm and grace. Once he became conscious of his grace, he lost it. The third and last episode describes a man fencing with a bear who is unbeatable. Not only does the bear parry every thrust, what is most remarkable, he never budges when the man feints or tries to trick him. Kleist concludes that no human opponent could have matched the bear in that. The best state in life is to have either no consciousness at all (the jointed doll) or at least no self-consciousness (the bear) or else the infinite consciousness of a god. We humans are, as Pascal already noted, in the middle.
If consciousness, particularly self-consciousness, is conceived as a potentially disruptive force, the question arises as to what kind of attitude or awareness is productive for life. We find the germ of an answer to this question in the third Untimely Meditation.
Let us think. Where does the animal cease, where does man start? That man, the only one nature cares about! As long as someone desires life as he desires happiness he hasn't raised his glance beyond the horizon of the animal; he only wants with more consciousness what the animal seeks in blind impulse. But we all do this for the most part of our lives. Ordinarily we don't get beyond animality; we ourselves are the animals who seem to suffer meaninglessly.
But there are moments when we understand this. The clouds scatter and we see how we, together with all of nature, press on toward man as toward something that stands high above us. Shuddering, we look in that sudden brightness, around us and backwards; the refined beasts of prey are running there and we with them. The monstrous restlessness of men on the great desert of the earth, their building of cities and states, their waging of wars, their restless collecting and dispersing, their running all over the place, learning from one another, their mutual trickery and stepping on one another, their screams of need, their howl of pleasure in victory -- all of this is a continuation of animality; as if man should purposely be retarded and betrayed of his metaphysical propensity. [12]
All of man's activity has been a continuation of animality. But in the moments when we understand that we ourselves are the animals who seem to suffer meaninglessly, we see that everything, ourselves included, is striving for something more than this animality so broadly conceived. Notice that what Nietzsche is critical of about animality is not anything sensuous but frantic activity and competitive struggle, thus, a kind of human corruption of the animal.
This is, again, Nietzsche's early vision of a higher type of man. In the well-known three metamorphoses of the spirit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this higher type gets formulated as the outcome of a developmental process from the camel, the load bearing spirit, to the lion, who in saying no to duty creates freedom, to the child. "The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a holy yes-saying." [13]
The child is innocence. This is an idea not unfamiliar to us. We find it in the poets, particularly Wordsworth and Blake. What can we say about the child that could further our understanding of innocence? In what does the innocence of the child consist?
It seems that there are two possible directions or poles to the child. We can say that, like the animal, the child is totally what it is. It is not divided, ambivalent, torn in different directions; it is wholly immersed in its being. But this total absorption can work two ways, depending on whether the child is opaque or transparent to its world, cut off from the world or open to it. There are children for whom the whole world is their ego; nothing else exists but their wants, demands, desires. This kind of child has not yet collided with the demands of the world or of anyone other than itself. It is simply opaque to what is outside of itself. After all, it is only a child, and for a time can get away with this attitude until it is forced to learn about something or someone outside of itself. Perhaps, or ideally, this kind of child is fairly rare. Then we have the child who is transparent to its world. This kind of child has not developed a sense of ego; it is blissfully lost in whatever it is doing, and there is nothing else in the world for it than just that. The child is a totality; it is not split, divided, or ambivalent; it cannot dissimulate or deceive. Whereas the motto for the camel was "thou shalt," and the motto for the lion was" I will," the motto for the child is "I am."
Nietzsche even uses the child to characterize God in a reference to Heraclitus' fragment about the world power being that of a child. "The phenomenon 'artist' is still the most transparent; -- to see through it to the basic instincts of power, nature, etc.! Also those of religion and morality! 'Play,' the useless as the ideal of him who is overfull of strength, as 'childlike.' The 'childlikeness' of God, pais paizon." [14]
The kind of childlikeness and innocence that we are talking about cannot be a pristine state; rather it must be something inevitably lost and then regained. As charming as children are, they do not represent an adult ideal exactly the way they are. No one can go through life without ever becoming aware of evil, deceit, and danger unless they are blind, deaf, and dumb in both senses of that word. As Kierkegaard pointed out in The Concept of Angst, innocence must be lost because otherwise one would forever be in danger of losing it. One would spend one's life on the brink of losing one's innocence. It is somewhat like catching the measles; once that is over with, one is immune and can forget about the whole thing. In his own version of a dialectic, Kierkegaard explains that we can speak of innocence only after it has been annulled (aufgehoben). Innocence comes into existence as that which was before it was annulled and now is annulled. In other words, it makes no sense to speak of a concept without reference to its opposite, to speak of an enduring innocence without reference to its potential loss. Similarly, a child is not aware of its innocence; if it is, it has already lost it.
Why is the child so important for Nietzsche? Why is it the highest of the three metamorphoses of the spirit? In contrast to the camel and the lion, who also have their function in the scheme of things, it is only the child who can create something new. Because the child is "innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a holy yes-saying," it is unencumbered by the weight of the past. To be what we called transparent to the world means to be able to respond to what is there at the moment without thinking about self or what happened before. Preoccupation with causes and reasons why looks too much into the past; preoccupation with goals and purposes looks too much into the future; both modes of relating lose the present. It is the child who becomes or, rather, is what it is doing. Surely this is a mark of creativity, the focussed concentration on something to the exclusion of all distractions, to the exclusion of everything else. For the child, this is natural; for the artist, it is the result of discipline and practice.
The child is innocent in all three meanings of the word that we mentioned before. There is a great deal that it does not know, there are many things of which it has no experience, and it is guilty of nothing. To regain the quality of childlikeness -- not childishness -- means to know and to have experienced many things, but not to dwell on them, not to get stuck in them, become obsessed with them, or cling to them. What is fruitful about knowledge and experience, as Nietzsche points out in "The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," is that they show us human possibilities. What was possible at one time, a Shakespeare or a Mozart, could be possible again in a new way. Thus, historical consciousness, knowledge, or experience do not have to have a paralyzing effect on us, although for Nietzsche they usually do, and the disadvantage worries him more than the use encourages him.
Real innocence is innocence regained. Nietzsche does not spell out for us in "The Three Metamorphoses" why the innocent child is the only one who is able to create. What is the connection between innocence and creativity? We know that as long as the will harbors the spirit of revenge in itself, as long as the will feels a counterwill against time and its "it was," it is powerless really to do anything, let alone create something new. Indeed Zarathustra says that man's best contemplation hitherto has been this spirit of revenge. Nietzsche shows us many "uncreative" figures in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for example, the magician who can only act, but who is disillusioned with himself and must finally say "I am not great." I want only to mention one of the phenomena that stand in opposition to the creative child: the phenomenon discussed in the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled "Immaculate Perception." The target here is, again, Schopenhauer, who sees redemption and release from the hopelessly insatiable Will to Live in will-less contemplation of Platonic Ideas instantiated in art. We cannot get into the whole issue of Nietzsche's relation to Schopenhauer here, but we can highlight the question of creativity by referring to the imagery in this section of sun and moon. The pale moon is sterile, it even borrows its own light from elsewhere. It only lies there on the horizon, appearing to look without desire, doing nothing. Zarathustra speaks to the moon, chiding it for lacking "innocence in desire." The immaculate one, the pure knower, can never give birth even if it lies broad and pregnant on the horizon; it does not even nurture anything. In contrast, the sun loves the earth and the sea and approaches them with its glow. The love of the sun is innocence and the desire to create. Zarathustra asks, "where is innocence?" and answers, "where the will to create is. And whoever wants to create beyond himself has the purest will." [15] Thus, we see that innocence does not mean staying the same, remaining as you are, but precisely the opposite; innocence in desire lies in the will to transcendence, to create beyond oneself.
Staying the same, remaining as you are can never be an ideal of any sort for Nietzsche. What is so fruitful about staying exactly as you are? Obviously not very much. Thus, the stereotypical concept of innocence, that of remaining unknowing and inexperienced, is totally inapplicable here. If life is what must ever surpass itself, then man, as the form of that life most capable of transcendence, must surpass himself most of all. Nietzsche is speaking of the innocence of becoming, not of a state. Perhaps this is a dimension where his transvaluation succeeds. Perhaps he did not succeed metaphysically in subverting the Platonic framework of the realm of being and the realm of becoming. But -- and this is more important if our prime concern is not metaphysics, reversing metaphysics, deconstructing metaphysics or whatever -- he does go somewhere existentially by showing that innocence lies not in clinging to a precious, pristine state, but rather in change, transformation, even at times, loss, relinquishing something, destruction, going under.
In the intriguing, cryptic aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes, "Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy, around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes -- what? perhaps a 'world'?" [16] Whatever else this aphorism is suggesting, it is saying that from a certain kind of figure follows a certain kind of world. We might ask what kind of world follows from the child. This will bring us back to our initial question of the innocence of becoming as a new interpretation of all occurrence and thus to the conclusion of this chapter.
Simplifying Nietzsche -- and this is in a sense doing an injustice to the richness and complexity of his thought, we could say that the Will to Power is basically a teleological interpretation of the occurrence of the world; the will is constantly striving to overcome new obstacles, to attain new goals. In some versions of eternal recurrence, particularly the attempts to "prove" it, eternal recurrence comes off a basically mechanistic. Finite force and infinite time are the constituents; the only role consciousness plays in this version of eternal recurrence is to pose the initial threat of being overwhelmed and crushed by the thought of repeating one's life down to the tiniest detail for all eternity. The innocence of becoming lends itself neither to a teleological nor to a mechanistic interpretation of the occurrence of the world, but points rather to play. What becomes around the child? The answer to this question has to be play. In contrast to mechanism, which, in addition to being deterministic, is basically for Nietzsche a product of the instinct of revenge, [17] and to teleology, which subjugates present reality to some distant, nonexistent goal, play is the highest instance of free activity. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: "I know of no other way to deal with great tasks than play; this is, as a sign of greatness, an essential presupposition." [18] And a note from the Nachlass reads, "new form of superiority: play with the holy." [19]
Play is diametrically opposed to the kind of playacting in which the actor indulges, a play that is totally geared to being observed and to show. But, above all, play is antithetical to the spirit of gravity who, among other things, would teach the child that self-love and self-affirmation are forbidden. In play, the child is free to create the new because it is unfettered by the past and not enthralled with the future. It plays in the magic of the present.
In conclusion, a word about the relation of play, necessity, and chance. These three are not as far away from each other as they might seem at first glance; in fact, they are very close. As for Spinoza, necessity for Nietzsche is inner necessity as opposed to being compelled from without and is therefore freedom in the true sense. Chance Nietzsche takes in the literal sense of what falls to one (in German, Zufall). "You speak falsely of events and accidents (chance). Nothing will ever happen to you but your own selves. And as for what you call 'chance,' you yourselves are what falls to you and falls upon you!" [20] To formulate it very succinctly, we could say that for Nietzsche necessity is the play of chance. This is expressed quite clearly in a Nachlass fragment: "Glorification sub specie aeterni -- the highest fatalism, but identical with chance and the creative." [21] This was one of Nietzsche's visions of a new interpretation of all occurrence: the innocence of becoming.