[In the following essay, Soderholm explores the connection between Byron's character Manfred and Nietzsche's Uebermensch, suggesting that Manfred is a hate-poem aimed at several people in England, particularly Byron's wife, Lady Byron, and his sister, Augusta Leigh.]

In the Romantic heroic tradition, a strain of rebellion runs from Byron's rogues gallery of Promethean heroes to Nietzsche's Uebermensch. A philosophy of radical individualism, best exampled in the “metaphysical rebel” of Camus, keeps this strain alive in the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell was so impressed with Byron's contribution to this form of titantic self-assertion that he devotes an entire chapter to the Byronic hero in his History of Western Philosophy. And Peter Thorslev, who wrote the book on the Byronic hero, persuasively links the enthusiasms of Sturm und Drang—its Promethean fire—to incarnations of rebellious individualism in the later nineteenth century, particularly in the ideals of Nietzsche.¹ But the biographical underpinnings of this lineage, the ways in which Byron's and Nietzsche's lives and works parallel and inflect each other, has not been sufficiently explored. Nietzsche's interest in Byron can be best understood by examining his predilection for Manfred, Byron's notorious closet-drama of 1816, the year of his permanent self-exile from England. One aspect in particular seems to have appealed to Nietzsche: the lesson of Manfred's thwarted demand for forgetfulness, his need to escape the past. In this essay I shall examine the significance of “active forgetfulness” in Nietzsche's life and writings, and focus on the dialectic of memory and forgetting at the heart of Manfred. Nietzsche's attraction to Byron's play encouraged him to produce an astonishing musical composition, his “Manfred Meditation.” In this homage to Byron, Nietzsche practices an art of forgetting that is also a memorializing tribute to an admired precursor. This doubleness, the dialectic in action, is what I mean by the mystery of forgetting.

What tribute should we offer to greatness? How do we honor only those parts or aspects of greatness we admire and ignore the rest? In Book III of Daybreak, Nietzsche takes up these questions in regard to Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Bismarck, each “a stream in its own, self-fashioned bed, and so mightily agitated it can often seem as though it wanted to flow uphill.” These figures produce “unconditional feelings” in those Germans quick to admire all of what these men believe, think, or compose, which means swallowing whole the inconsistencies in their writings and the differences between their ideals. As Nietzsche observes, “Schopenhauer is an enemy of Wagner's music, and Wagner an enemy of Bismarck's politics, and Bismarck an enemy of everything Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian! What is to be done!” Nietzsche suggests a way to qualify one's homage:

Might one not select from the composer's music several hundred bars of good music which appeal to the heart because they possess heart: might one not go aside with this little theft and forget all the rest! And do the same in regard to the philosopher and the statesman—select, lay to one's heart, and in particular forget the rest!

We must fasten on those qualities most admirable in our heroes and neglect what is contradictory, absurd, or otherwise disagreeable in their works. But this strategic forgetting is no easy affair, as Nietzsche is quick to point out.

Yes, if only forgetting were not so difficult! There was once a very proud man who would accept nothing, good or bad, but what came from himself: but when he needed forgetfulness he found he could not give it to himself and had to summon the spirits three times; they came, they listened to his demand, and at length they said: “this alone stands not within our power!” Can the Germans not profit from the experience of Manfred?²

In Manfred's moral and metaphysical writhing is Byron's remorse about his disastrous marriage, his incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and his problems with the moral hypocrisy of England, which he called “that tight little island.” Goethe's 1820 review of Manfred galvanizes the biographical interpretation.

We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the most astonishing talent born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is laboriously ruminating.³

The simple equation of Manfred and Byron and the serious tone of moral disapprobation are perhaps just what the poet desired, not, however, as a way of flagellating himself, but rather because such responses played into his game of deceit and dissimulation about his incestuous past. Manfred's “read it there— / Ye know it …” invites his contemporaries to conclude what they had long suspected about his incestuous affair.

Byron wanted to reticulate his hypocrisies and weave his tangled web so variously that it captured the widest possible audience. Manfred's labored ruminations and impressive sufferings are not necessarily to be taken as straightforward expressions of his guilt and need for forgiveness. Even a fantasy of forgetfulness, a dream of “Oblivion, self-oblivion,” need not be taken as some kind of metaphysical longing for negation. Indeed, after all the Faustian toil and trouble involved in summoning the swarm of spirits, is it not a little ironic—even bathetic—that Manfred's only request is, forgetfulness? What kind of Promethean spark is this? The will to oblivion was already a Romantic idiom by the time Byron wrote Manfred, present both in Werther's abysmal longings and in the works of Kleist. Even Wordsworth, lover of memory, sometimes slips into this idiom: “It seemed the very garments that I wore / Preyed on my strength, and stopped the quiet stream / Of self-forgetfulness” (1850 Prelude, 5.294-96).

Peter Manning reads Byron's desire for oblivion as the jeremiad of “a ceaseless self-tormenter whose most insistent desire is absolution from the painful self-consciousness which is the Promethean heritage.” For Manning, the drama finally distills into an affirmation of the authorial Abbot, whose “condemnation of Manfred is so absorbed in admiration and pity that Byron seems to be delicately placing the best possible construction on the characterological strains reflected in the play, describing himself to himself and making his apologia to the world.” Here as elsewhere, Manning's readings seem too anaclitic, that is, they always end up having Manfred/Byron leaning up against the same support—the all-protective mother. Or father figures invariably materialize—like hoary spectres—to subjugate their weak sons; thus the stern Abbot “reduces Manfred to [a] bitterly reductive account of himself” and becomes “the dominant father before whom Manfred must prove himself.”⁴ Between scouting around for the redemptive maternal on which to recline and scampering away from the judgments of severe fathers, Manfred would not seem to have much left to do.

Byron dangles moral and sexual amnesia before Manfred only to offer him, through the agency of the conjured spirits, eternal memory, a mockery of his romantic request. The self-exiled poet had plenty to forget. In a journal he kept for his sister while touring Switzerland during this period, Byron wrote: “the recollections of bitterness—& more especially of recent & more home desolation—which must accompany me through life—have preyed upon me here.”⁵ Nietzsche also retreated after the publication of Human, All-Too-Human (1878), a work that scandalized his sister and made him seek solitude in the Bernese Alps.

Byron sought to bury himself in the sublimity of the Swiss Alps, but his withering memories followed him. In the first act of Manfred, the spirits cannot grant forgetfulness. Most critics see Manfred twisting in the wind because of a mysterious and fatal liaison with a woman named “Astarte,” a woman for whose death Manfred is somehow responsible. In the course of the drama, Manfred tries to fling himself from a precipice, is stopped by a chamois-hunter, refuses the offices of an Abbot, scorns the spirits, and finally expires, saying to his would-be confessor, “Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!” In Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche claimed that he himself “must be profoundly related to Byron's Manfred: all these abysses I found in myself; at the age of thirteen I was ripe for this work.”⁶

But the closet-drama is far more deviously ludic than many imagine. It is actually a hate-poem sent home to England to hex its several addressees, in particular Lady Byron and Augusta Leigh. The proud solitude of Manfred therefore belies Byron's connections to his many readers. One can read Manfred as a fantasy of autonomy only if one ignores the many filiations generating it. Byron's personal affairs form one set of these connections. Mario Praz shrewdly observes that “Byron felt a perverse joy at the simultaneous presence of the two women [Annabella and Augusta], with all the amusement and innuendoes and double meanings which it afforded him, and the continual sensation of hanging over the edge of an abyss.”⁷ In exile Byron continued to amuse himself by taunting his ex-wife with allusions to his incest. He even wrote his sister shortly after Manfred had been published and heartlessly asked her whether the work was causing “a pucker” in London. It was. By alluding to his incest with Augusta, Byron was coming out of the closet-drama and dragging his sister along with him. Existentialist critics ignore these autobiographical elements in order to see Manfred as a cross between Prometheus and Nietzsche's superman, a line of interpretation encouraged by Nietzsche's remarks on the play. But Nietzsche's attraction for this work and this Byronic hero lay not merely in the way Manfred seemed to prefigure Zarathustra, but also in the problem of forgetting that the play presents, a subject Nietzsche introduces more than once in his writings.

Nietzsche's interest in forgetting first appears in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874). The beasts roaming the fields, writes Nietzsche, “do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.” We envy such an animal, writes Nietzsche, “who at once forgets and for whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is extinguished forever.” We might call this passive forgetfulness in order to distinguish it from the kind of forgetting Nietzsche later champions. Nietzsche affirms the need to forget portions of the past, since “forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic.” Nietzsche's belief in the power of forgetting—indeed one may think of this capacity as a will to forget—carries him to the brink of philosophical generality: “… this is a universal law: a living thing can only be healthy, strong, and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.”⁸

One wonders if Nietzsche is silently borrowing from Kierkegaard's section on the “Rotation of Crops” in Part I of Either-Or (1843). How similar to Nietzsche's bounded horizon is Kierkegaard's “method of cultivation”: “Here at once is the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” And the following is something Nietzsche, if he read it, would certainly have a hard time forgetting:

To forget—this is the desire of all people, and when they encounter something unpleasant, they always say: If only I could forget! But to forget is an art that must be practiced in advance. … The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for to remember poetically is actually only an expression of forgetting.⁹

Nietzsche's critical historian practices this kind of forgetting in order to be productively limited, fruitful as a rotated crop.

At the beginning of the second Essay of The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche again broaches the issue of forgetfulness in explicitly psychological terms. In the animal with “the right to make promises,” Nietzsche sees an opposing force which does indeed make it difficult for man to keep to his word, to honor those contracts (Schuld/Schulden: “guilt/debt”) which underpin traditional moral categories. It is here that we first see the paradox of willing forgetfulness.

Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process “inpsychation”) as does the thousandfold process, involved in physical nourishment—so-called “incorporation.” To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs, working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulations, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy)—that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette; so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.¹⁰

This passage complements Nietzsche's earlier views on the importance of exercising the power of forgetting in his essay on the historical sense. Thus, the “man who is sick of historical fever” now appears as a “dyspeptic—he cannot ‘have done’ with anything.” He suffers, in short, from a historico-moral constipation, a malady Nietzsche connects to a “memory of the will” that allows a human being to “stand security for his own future.” But if we feel the crush of the past and ransom the present to the future, we also have the capacity, which seems equally reflexive, “to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time,” in order to enjoy “a little tabula rasa.” It is these doors and windows Manfred cannot close.

Nietzsche is drawn to Manfred because Byron's hero makes no contract with the spirits and therefore circumvents the problem of guilt and debt. Nietzsche affirms the superiority of Manfred over Faust when he wrote in Ecce Homo: “I have no word, only a glance, for those who dare to pronounce the word ‘Faust’ in the presence of Manfred” (245). This judgment rests on the fact that Faust bargains with spirits and Manfred does not. Manfred does try to inveigle the spirits to do his bidding, and only after disappointing his hopes of self-oblivion (Vergessenheit) does he scorn them. Nietzsche also ignores the fact that Goethe's Faust is more Promethean than Byron's Manfred if we take titanism also to refer to literary self-reliance, a will to steal fire from previous authors but not leave any tracks. The closet-drama is one of Byron's most compressed homages to previous writers, although he strenuously denies this in a letter to John Murray, his London publisher, whom he tells of an “American who came the other day from Germany—told Mr. Hobhouse that Manfred was taken from Goethe's Faust.—The devil may take both the Faustus's, German and English—I have taken neither” (5:270).

Byron tried to escape his guilty debt to previous writers in creating Manfred's fantasy of autonomy. Manfred vehemently defies moral, religious, and political authority, but he does so in language riddled with references to previous works, especially to the Bible, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost. The work is burdened by the literary achievement of the past just as the author is weighed down by his personal past. The Promethean rhetoric in the following passage from Manfred is conspicuously unoriginal, and yet David S. Thatcher believes it anticipates Zarathustra's ideal of “a free death.”¹¹

Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts,—
Is its own origin or ill and end—
And its own place and time: its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

(III. 4:125-36)

Manfred clearly echoes Satan's rhetoric in Paradise Lost (7:254-55)—“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”—a flourish of unconditional self-homage and a parody of Jehovah's sacred tautology: “I am that I am.” In studying the play and its author, readers get caught up in the energy of Manfred's declamations and fail to see that his rhetoric is not only derivative but dubious. Failing properly to weigh this contradiction or paradox in the play—namely, that the hero's Promethean rodomontade is at odds with both his crippling personal memories and his burdensome literary memories—encourages critics, including Nietzsche, to see Manfred as a Romantic titan.

But Nietzsche's infatuation with Manfred was partly the result of two other acts of homage, one to Robert Schumann and the other to his sister Elizabeth. Thatcher's essay nicely lays out the connections between Robert Schumann's symphonic overture, Manfred, and the “Manfred Meditation” Nietzsche would write both as a tribute to Byron and as a sharp reply to Schumann, whom he later called “that sugary Saxon.” Nietzsche's homage to Byron did not extend, however, to a mere aping of Manfred. His “Manfred-Meditation” purports to be an original work based on the play, a work inspired, Nietzsche later claims, by his youthful allegiance not to Schumann but to Wagner. The composition was so bad that his friends, including Cosima Wagner, wondered if he had intended the piece as a joke or a parody. Frederick Love describes the Manfred music:

Although there are no identifiable quotations from Wagner's music, there are more than a few instances of thematic parallels and borrowed techniques. … We are served a potpourri of advanced and conservative practice, of the banal and the inspired, of the noisy and the delicate, all strung together as though illustrating a text which is not supplied. The tonal anarchy which reigns here must not, in all fairness, be imputed to Wagner, although his example did little to counteract Nietzsche's tendency in this direction.¹²

This appraisal of Nietzsche's “Manfred-Meditation” also holds for Byron's Manfred with respect to the works it parallels and from which it freely borrows. Perhaps one good farrago (Byron's) generated another (Nietzsche's). But of course these potpourris are not identical, for Nietzsche gleans from Byron's work only what he takes to heart, and forgets the rest. We can characterize his theft as an act of conditional homage to Byron, a way of blending monumental and critical approaches to past achievement in the interests of creating a work of one's own. In doing so, however, Nietzsche seems to have bowed before Wagner, whose music he simply could not forget. The virulence with which he treats Wagner in his later works represents a hard-won anti-homage, Nietzsche forgetting his hero as energetically as he once felt compelled to honor him.

Nietzsche's profound attachments to Goethe, Schumann, Wagner, and his sister help explain the appeal that Manfred had for him. This double attraction also parallels Byron's own connections to Goethe and Augusta Leigh. In these multiple affiliations it becomes difficult to see whether literary incest is a metaphor for familial incest, or vice-versa. Do the artistic bonds of Byron and Nietzsche re-present their personal bonds metaphorically or metonymically? Homage, both conditional and unconditional, is an ever-reweavable web of personal and literary liaisons. Active forgetfulness severs these ties, makes autonomy more than a fantasy, and delivers one into self-reliance. To put it another way, the will to forget is a form of the will to power.

But another, perhaps more powerful liaison must detain us. Thatcher also wonders if “in Manfred's incestuous or near-incestuous love for his sister, Astarte, Nietzsche recognized an attitude disturbingly close to his own highly ambivalent feelings towards Elizabeth?” (141). This is a promising surmise, for the young Nietzsche's attraction for his sister would seem to rival Byron's for Augusta. When he first read Manfred at the age of thirteen, he was nearing the end of a childhood with Elizabeth that was one silken thread of pleasures, an actual version of the mystical union Emily Brontë was creating in those deeply affined children of the moors, Cathy and Heathcliff, almost at the same time that Lizzy and Fritz were living it in Naumberg and Pobles.

From Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche's biography, we learn not only of this ideal childhood but also of her interest in being her brother's memorialist.

From a very early age I always kept a treasure drawer, where I preserved everything from my brother's pen that I could lay hands on when it had been discarded by him. … For when I was only six, though I attached but slight importance to my own things, I had already started this collection of my brother's productions.

Förster-Nietzsche seems to have anticipated her role as custodian of her brother's legend; she also had apparently made an early decision not to value her own productions. She speaks of her “reverence and admiration for Fritz” as having had “one excellent practical result in the shape of the Nietzsche archive.”¹³ Förster-Nietzsche does not make much of the fact that this archive was the center for her own interests as well, a kind of salon in which artists and aristocrats of Weimar could come to pay homage both to the insane brother upstairs and to the formidably lucid hostess downstairs.

If Förster-Nietzsche's biography is a sustained act of hagiography and self-promotion, it is no more biased or distorting than the work of a distinguished scholar such as Frederick Copelston, whose homage to his subject brooks no obstacles toward his utter transfiguration of it. After mentioning Nietzsche's burial and Peter Gast's graveside eulogy, Copelston cannot resist offering a eulogy of his own:

The tragic and lonely life of Friedrich Nietzsche had gone forth to its Maker, whom it had denied: who will be prepared to affirm that He who searches the heart of all, may not have given him at the last the grace to seek for mercy where it is never sought in vain.¹⁴

Thus does the self-proclaimed Antichrist have one more chance to die a good Christian, at least in the pious imagination of Copelston. Like Förster-Nietzsche, Copelston cannot bear the thought of an unsaved Nietzsche. Both blood-relative and detached scholar cut loose the letter of Nietzsche in order to free up his spirit, destined for heaven and its maker. Perhaps forgetting is not as difficult as Manfred and Nietzsche led us to believe.

Nietzsche's remarks on homage thus oddly foreshadow the treatment he would receive at the hands of the first curator of his legend, his sister Elizabeth, who turns him into an archive—a monumental ambition—as he lay dying on its second floor. Förster-Nietzsche's management of her brother's life and legend and her skill in parlaying his fame into hers shows another important dimension to conditional homage.

What is at stake in active forgetfulness is nothing less than the creation of new values or the transvaluation of old ones. Thus, the critical historian, along with the artist and the composer, remember poetically, that is, selectively forget. To do so is, as Richard Rorty says, to create a new language (a new vocabulary) for reweaving one's web of beliefs and desires, to be an “ironist” in seeing that “nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-redescription.”¹⁵ To be an ironist is to draw a limited circle around oneself and call it pragmatism. I take pragmatism to be the somewhat illegitimate heir to Nietzsche's desire for a philosophy beyond good and evil, a way of creating values unencumbered by previous philosophical vocabularies. Even Rorty's style of writing—a blend of distinctively American voices from Thomas Wolfe to Russell Baker—seems positively to repress the antique voices of the past. Rorty is a journalistic Zarathustra. Between Nietzsche and Rorty, however, several other voices intervene: Freud, Heidegger, and Kundera all more or less explicitly take on the issue of forgetting, which begins to enjoy the status of a topos by the time we get to Derrida, whose later works, like Nietzsche's, want to dance outside of metaphysics even as their movements often seem to end up coerced into the dark silhouettes of the tradition.¹⁶ Rorty labors to forget these steps.

It is important to see “forgetfulness” not as yet another trope for translatio or Aufhebung, though of course it does have affinities with those venerable old words. The mystery of forgetting lies precisely in its deliberate unconsciousness, its active dimension. Manfred's problem, like his author's, is in trying to forget, even to the point of begging the conjured spirits to bestow forgetfulness on him. Active forgetfulness does not come naturally to Manfred and this is his tragedy. The ability to create new values and forget the old ones must be reflexive; it must be a spirit of rebellion which comes naturally to one, or not all. Perhaps Nietzsche gives us a clue to the mystery in Thus Spake Zarathustra in the discourse “Of the Three Metamorphoses.” The camel and the lion spirits are necessary but not sufficient for absolute self-overcoming and transvaluation. The highest of the three metamorphoses Nietzsche—a Romantic at heart—calls the child:

The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.

Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.¹⁷

Nietzsche combines the symbolic importance of the child in Christianity, the metaphor of the child in German and British Romanticism, and the idea of the world as will in Schopenhauer. And forgetfulness, Manfred's greatest and ungranted wish, is again at the heart of this sacred Yes, this fully humanized primum mobile of new values.

The mysterious process of forgetting parallels the enigma of creating new values or forging a new vocabulary, anointing one's beliefs with the balm of a sacred Yes, a self-propelling self-homage. Mightier than Faust, the titanic Manfred could not make this first motion to and for himself. His “Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!” is the nearest he comes to Zarathustra's “Die at the right time.” The difference is that Manfred, haunted by both literary and personal memory, creates nothing, and thus what Zarathustra calls “the consummating death” is beyond him. The only way he can enjoy the boon of forgetfulness is to fold into himself and expire. In having the strength of will to choose forgetfulness, on the other hand, the higher spirit creates itself anew without guilt, debt, mourning, or pity. From Byron's drama, Nietzsche learned the importance of going beyond Manfred, just as Manfred had gone beyond Faust, so that forgetfulness is not the commission of any spirit other than one's own. How one actively practices the art of forgetting is still a mystery, as richly enigmatic and as deeply rebellious as making a new value.

Notes

1. Peter Thorslev, The Byronic Hero (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962), especially the final chapter.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 101, 102.

3. Cited in Byron: A Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 119.

4. Peter Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978), 72-75.

5. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), 5:104-5.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 245.

7. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford UP, 1933), 73.

8. Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 60, 73, 63.

9. Soren Kierkegaard, Either-Or, Part I, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), 290, 103.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 57-58.

11. David S. Thatcher, “Nietzsche and Byron,” in Nietzsche Studienbandz (Berlin, Band 3, 1974), 135.

12. Frederick Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1963), 70, 72.

13. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche (New York: Sturgis and Waltham, 1912), 1:41, 45.

14. Frederick Copelston, Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), 28-29.

15. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 80. Of the ironist's activity, Rorty writes: “Her description of what she is doing when she looks for a better final vocabulary than the one she is currently using is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present. She thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria” (77). Getting beyond such antecedents is precisely the aim of active forgetfulness. What many find annoying about Rorty's pragmatism is the way in which it “forgets” the tradition of Western metaphysics.

16. The idea and art of forgetfulness may be traced from Kierkegaard, who lets it caper ironically in Either-Or (Part I), to Freud's serious pathologizing of forgetting, to Heidegger's “forgetting of the question of Being,” to Derrida's playful forgetfulness (“oubliance”) in deconstructing the metaphysics of presence, to Kundera's oddly sobering The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), 55.