unseen. Nevertheless, history is irreversible. N’s admiration for the Greek mode of life does not entail a belief that one could return to that mode of life; the problem rather is to generate a future mode of life that has learned from the Greeks but within the inescapable conditions of modernity. Thus, for example, the ‘rebirth’ of tragedy discussed at the end of BT is not the elimination of the Socratic, but the invention of the ‘music-making Socrates’. It follows that historical understanding itself may face limitations: indeed, N goes so far as to claim at TIAncients that the Greeks are ‘too foreign’.
holy, Saint, sacred
[Heil, and other constructions founded upon it – it is the same root word to indicate someone canonized as a ‘Saint’.] There are two main issues here. The first is N’s account of the nature of the Saint; the second is N’s revaluation of the concept of the holy.
The Saint – either someone canonized, or saint-like behaviour – is will to power directed back upon the self, often ascetically, an instance of great self-overcoming. Insofar as we think morally and believe in opposites, then the Saint represents a miracle (BGE47). This ‘miracle’, N suggests, is simply a misunderstanding of the nature of apparent ‘opposites’. Because of its miraculous quality, saintliness is ascribed to an external influence (the divine). This is the ‘new power’ N discusses at BGE51 (and see the analyses at D14, 62). At WC3, N argues that for the people saintliness is needed; for philosophers, though, the saint stops short precisely at the point where the philosopher’s ideal opens. That is to say, holiness is a misunderstood self-overcoming, the misdirected ideal of which is ascetic.
Especially in Z, N uses the concept of holiness in a positive manner, as another way of describing the basic acts of a healthy and powerful will to power, especially insofar as it has taken the overhuman as its goal. Thus, both the ‘no-saying’ of the lion transformation and the ‘yes-saying’ of the child transformation are termed ‘holy’ (Z1.1). Similarly, the ideals of a people (Z1.15), or
laughter (Z3.16.6, Z4.13.18, 20). Not surprisingly, this revalued
sense of holiness is linked to the divine, in N’s sense of the gods as human ideals; thus, in an allusion to the divine blessing of a
marriage, Zarathustra says ‘Such a will and such marriage I call
holy’ (Z1.20). Insofar as science is a late form of the ascetic ideal, art – in which ‘precisely the lie makes itself holy’ – is its true opponent (GM3.25) because it deifies life.
home
Heim, Heimat. The notions of not being at home, or not having
a single home, are alternative ways of discussing the concepts of the untimely or the wanderer. For examples, see Z2.14, BGE44, GS377. N’s ideal of a home is expressed at Z3.9 ‘The Return Home’: it is solitude, where one no longer needs to wear masks or ‘mix up’ one’s language.
Homer
Assuming that there was a single author of the Iliad and Odyssey named Homer, he would be a great narrative poet of the early Greek period, and creator of the genre of the epic. Thus, in BT, N contrasts Homer (Apollonian) to both the lyric (Dionysian) and tragic poets (both drives, and see H2.219). At GM3.25, N contrasts Homer and Plato: the former the deifier of life, the latter its ‘slanderer’. Homer is thus an exemplary figure in the Greek attitude to morality (i.e. of what N calls ‘master morality’: see H1.45), to constraint (H3.140 – see discipline), and to the gods as ideals and a Greek sense of happiness (GS302). For this same reason, the rediscovery of the pleasures of Homer is something we owe to our historical sense, that which permits us understanding of other cultural systems and values (BGE224).
honesty
The English term ‘honesty’ is the most common translation of both Ehrlichkeit and Redlichkeit – the former has overtones of being honourable or noble, while the latter is related to reden, to speak, and thus is more akin to truthfulness. More rarely, N will use Rechtschaffenheit, which contains the idea of law or right in
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a legal sense – this is a particularly common word in AC. Again, ‘honesty’ is a plausible translation, as is ‘integrity’, and given the context of AC, N probably intends to reclaim from Christianity the concept of ‘righteousness’.
N accuses those who espouse morality of being dishonest (even and especially when they tout ‘honesty’ itself as a virtue; H1.52–3, 65, H2.32, 56, D84, GS319, TISkirmishes42). Honesty, especially honesty towards oneself, is a virtue that can lead to philosophical growth (H3.37, D167, 370, 556). At D370, this honesty means waging an agonistic campaign against yourself and your thoughts in the interests of truth (see Z1.10). At GS110, honesty is part of a speculative account of the genesis of the drive for truth. Zarathustra calls it the ‘youngest of the virtues’ (Z1.3, see ‘On Truth and Lies’ and Z4.13.8). N appears to associate honesty with the concept of intellectual conscience, a ‘conscience behind your “conscience”’ (GS335, AC12). Likewise, the cruelty of intellectual conscience in its ruthless pursuit of truth can be called honesty but, given that the will to truth is only one element within the will to power, this is a bit too pretty and showy a word (BGE230). Such a ruthless honesty carries dangers, however, such as the ‘nausea and suicide’ mentioned at GS107, the literally bloodless
specialization of the ‘conscientious in spirit’ (Z4.4), or becoming
‘saints and bores’ (BGE227). Honesty is thus in a cyclical partnership with art and beauty, as its convalescence, and likewise with mischievousness or laughter. Honesty is not simply a question of truthfully relating what one knows or feels, but rather a process of critically evaluating these things, for they may be dishonest, the product of errors, misinterpretations, or surreptitious values (e.g. morality – see BGE5). Likewise, honesty is not just an intellectual process, but also a set of practices or experiments (e.g. the ‘small marriage’ at Z3.12.24, even asceticism ‘as long as it is honest’: GM3.26). Accordingly, honesty as part of one’s task is compatible with dishonesty or evasion (e.g. BGE289–90). Eventually, honesty becomes ‘instinct and passion’ – that is to say, an aspect of a mode of life (AC36).
It is important to realize that honesty in N’s sense is not incompatible with a certain inscrutability of the self. The point is made at BGE227 and again at GMP1 (and compare GS335). What is at stake here is an ontological or existential sense of honesty, rather than an epistemological one. For all that critique
and interpretation of morality, religion and psychological states can achieve, knowledge and self-awareness are tools not goals. So, honesty as freedom from dangerous deceptions, values and mistakes, and as the practice or discipline of so freeing oneself, likewise also my health, and the alignment of my mode of life with the nature of life – none of these are the same as ‘knowing oneself’. N is a ‘riddle’, but not one that he feels in the least compelled to solve (BGE281). Instead of self-knowledge, he aims for a ‘faith’ or ‘certainty’ concerning himself; N writes that ‘the noble soul has
reverence for itself’ (BGE287). ‘Reverence’ translates Ehrfurcht,
which has a common root with Ehrlichkeit (see discussion above); and thus ‘honesty’ here means that the noble soul finds itself noble and worthy of respect (see discussion under veneration). Similarly, at EHClever9, N claims that the process of becoming who you are involves a certain necessary lack of self-insight, so that the ‘governing “idea”’ should grow inside. He calls this ‘selfishness’. The analogy is with pregnancy.
honour
See veneration.
hope
Hoffnung. Hope is so easily ‘hope for a beyond’ – that is, something
that positively requires the discrediting of knowledge and reason (AC23) and the rejection of ‘this life’. This is N’s take on the myth of Pandora’s box. Hope alone remained in the box after all the evil had been released; but this hope is not the salvation of the human but rather the worst curse, for it ‘protracts the torment of men’ (H1.71). As with a projected ideal, a hope is a product of the health of one’s mode of life. Accordingly, at GSP1, N describes his illness circa 1880 as patient, severe, without hope – refusing the hope for a beyond that normally accrues to illness. Then, in his convalescence, he is ‘attacked by hope’; but now, a hope that is within the compass of what is. This same contrast is found in Z, between ‘all those who do not want to live, except they learn
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(Z1.8). The hope for a Dionysian future that N first put forward in BT is one that he has ‘no reason to take back’ (EHBT4).