Passing By: Zarathustra’s Other Response to Revenge

Abstract

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality warns that revenge’s reactiveness can jeopardize salutary change in shared values. I identify an overlooked revenge-mitigating praxis in the spatial movements of Nietzsche’s fictional prophet Zarathustra, who seeks collaborators to overcome Christian morality and create new world-affirming values. Zarathustra’s well-known response to revenge, specifically the revenge against time undergirding interpersonal revenge, is willing the eternal return of the same. But he also exemplifies a more available response. “Passing by” is a coming close to, followed by a veering away from, the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. Although Nietzsche inspires agonistic political theory, Zarathustra avoids direct contest in the usual late modern milieux, which he finds constitutively vulnerable to revenge. When revenge floods the communal passional reservoir, it forestalls recovery—essential to new-values creation—of passions effaced by reigning values. Zarathustra still approaches the usual milieux to know the present-past as the raw material of the future. But by then veering away he practices relaxing his value-creative will and not raging against the present-past. Repeated passing by helps him accept and thus better take up the raw material of the future and accept value change’s slow temporality. Since passing by’s concern is the value horizon, not the political sphere, and since it minimizes direct resistance, it may be less reactive to the political sphere than directly contestatory versions of “refusal.” Analysis of Gandhi’s value-praxis confirms passing by as a tactic for less reactive value-creation and as a lens on the reactiveness of different value-praxes.

For those seeking radical change, vengefulness presents a dilemma. The “legitimate desire for revenge” can constitute “flashes of consciousness” and mobilize the oppressed. Yet revenge’s reactivity can impede the creation of new values and long-term struggle for such values (Coulthard 2014, 105–15; Fanon 2004, 89). Those driven by revenge tend to focus on past injury and redress, on harming or usurping extant power holders (perhaps thereby perpetuating the systems and values that wrought harm), and sometimes define themselves in opposition to those who have harmed them rather than developing positive, plausible, and significantly different visions for the future. Those seeking to express unease about revenge often look to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) (Brown 1995, 52–76; Coulthard 2014, 108, 111, 115, 169). There Nietzsche offers an account of Christian morality’s origins, or perhaps a provocative fabulation (Porter 2019, 66); marginalized priestly classes driven by “ressentiment,” the revenge of the weak, reactively define new values in opposition to the “noble” values of aristocratic warrior classes and birth a “slave morality,” which demonizes strength and valorizes meekness (Nietzsche 1998, 14–28). ¹

The problem of revenge poses a question the Genealogy raises but does not answer: What widely available practices support creating novel rather than reactively inverted value regimes? ² For answers, theorists often look past Nietzsche, preferring to keep him as a “diagnostician.” His apparent focus on the individual suggests he is not a thinker for those who seek collaborative approaches to value change (Brown 1995, 74). And his elitism suggests he is not a thinker for the marginalized, despite, say, his critique of hegemonic European culture (Gooding-Williams 2006, 132). I argue that Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra answers the Genealogy’s question. Although it is the earlier work, Nietzsche insists that Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) is the “greatest gift” to “humanity” and the “portico” to his “philosophy” (Nietzsche 2005a, 72; 1996, 223). There his fictional prophet seeks co-creators to help replace waning Christian morality, and the nihilism it brings, with a world-affirming morality. Separate from this substantive value project, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s “philosophical explanation of the possibility of creating new values” (Gooding-Williams 2001, 303). Zarathustra’s journey contains a formal account of the existential, spatial, and affective prerequisites for value change. Approaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra in this light, we find an answer to the Genealogy’s question: the practice of “passing by.” ³

For the sake of his striving, Zarathustra sometimes veers away from others—both others collectively and specific individuals—and from the spaces they inhabit. This veering away, however, follows a coming close, so it can occur after potential or actual engagement. Such decreasing and increasing of spatial distance is passing by. It is not absolute retreat. To pass by you must come near what you then avoid or minimally engage. This double movement occurs whenever Zarathustra describes himself, or is described, as passing by (10, 78, 152–54, 229–33, 243 ⁴ ). Unlike other practices Nietzsche commends, this spatial maneuver is available to all, not only a spiritual elite; and, while individuals can practice passing by, it can also occur in concert (78–80).

There is a specific episode titled “On Passing By.” At the gates of the “great city,” Zarathustra encounters and feels vengeful toward his “fool” or “ape,” who repeats his teachings with a vengeful inflection (152–54). Zarathustra concludes the encounter with: “Where one can no longer love, there one should—pass by!” Political theorists who note this episode understandably focus on passing by as an alternative to revenge for past atrocity (Arendt 2002, 3–8; Berkowitz 2011) or take this episode as a parable about revenge as an affect from which no one is safe (Connolly 2008, 57). However, if we read Thus Spoke Zarathustra not simply as an account of Nietzsche’s most important doctrines, such as eternal return, and instead also as Zarathustra’s travelogue, the entire text emerges as a meditation on passing by as a spatial practice that mitigates revenge and supports less reactive value-change.

Despite references to passing by throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, most scholars do not see it as an interpretive key. I incorporate important insights but also depart from the two illuminating exceptions to scholarly neglect of passing by and its relation to value-creation. Jenkins (2022), who focuses on the eponymous episode, considers how passing by and its associated affect of contempt might address value-reactivity but does not theorize passing by’s spatiality. Groff (2022) considers the variety of spaces Zarathustra traverses and sees passing by as integral to Zarathustra’s overall trajectory. However, Groff ultimately explores Zarathustra’s trajectory as a movement to “withdrawal and disregard” and a “continual deferral, if not ultimate abandonment, of the attempt to ‘fix’ humanity” rather than as a practice of ongoing value-striving (65–70, 75).

To the extent political theorists look to Thus Spoke Zarathustra for insight on how to address revenge, they acknowledge Zarathustra’s teaching in “On Redemption” that “revenge” (Rache) arises from the will’s desire to undo the past (say, to undo an injury) and its frustration over its inability to do so. Interpersonal revenge rests on the will’s underlying vengefulness “towards time and its ‘It was’” (121). In the Genealogy’s language, the ressentiment that birthed Christian morality arises from revenge against temporality, which drives Christianity’s devaluation of the temporal world for an eternal kingdom of heaven. Zarathustra’s most prominent response to revenge against temporality is the practice of willing the eternal return of the same. To will the repetition of all events and aspects of the world in an eternally repeating cycle is a mark of, and exercise in, truly accepting the past and affirming, rather than devaluing, this temporal world (119–23, 283–84). From this yes-saying, it is also possible to create new values that are not merely a reactive inversion of extant values. Yet willing eternal return seems only available to the extraordinary few (Nietzsche 2001, 194–95). Passing by is Zarathustra’s other response to revenge. It is a less intense but still potent and more available yes to the past and the present the past bequeaths.

I shall highlight a neglected aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, but my main purpose is to show how passing by could augment, or is already within, the practical repertoire of those seeking value change. I am thus more selective with the relevant scholarship on Nietzsche than if my sole purpose was a new exegesis of his difficult literary text. In what follows Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a starting point from which to elaborate passing by as a particular kind of no-saying to extant values. Its no-saying, which includes a yes-saying, is distinguishable from but illuminative of another no-saying idiom—namely, “refusal.” There are theorists of refusal who do consider the importance of space to the refusal of co-optive “recognition” of rights and identities offered by political regimes and to the creation, beyond reactive inversion, of new values. Fanon tracks the way “spatial divisions” help “determine and mediate” how colonialism “shapes lived experience” and suggests that “decolonization” with “a new humanity” might arise, in part, by reshaping architecture, infrastructure, and the “built environment” (Adalet 2022, 6–7, 9, 16; and see Fanon, e.g., 2004, 2–3). ⁵ Coulthard highlights the importance of Indigenous peoples’ relations to land for generating and reviving their own value systems (Coulthard 2014, 13, 53, 60–62). What Zarathustra offers to the practical repertoire of value change is a unique spatial practice of constantly adjusting one’s distance from the most insistent embodiments of reigning values (e.g., the state and the public sphere). Rather than a simple exit or withdrawal from dominant political and cultural milieux, Zarathustra combines skirting with the possibility of abbreviated engagement and extended time away. He also offers a detailed account of how new values emerge, which explains how dynamic spatial distancing can support less reactive value-creation.

The importance of the veering-away aspect of passing by comes from Zarathustra’s view of the human body as a site of competing passions, which also drive reasoning, and as porous to the passional situations within which it finds itself. According to Zarathustra, our values are constituted by the current rank ordering of passions within us. Physical distance from the most insistent embodiments of reigning values enables attunement to passions effaced by current values. Value-creation involves, in part, individuals and generations retrieving an inner “passional chaos,” ⁶ which partakes in and is affected by (what I call) the communal passional reservoir, and then altering the priority of passions within their bodies. Zarathustra finds direct contest in his contemporary public sphere to be excessively reactive not simply because interlocutors articulate positions within and against existing frames but also because dialogue, even as it remains at the level of superficial beliefs, allows revenge to flood communal and individual passional reservoirs, and thereby inhibits connection with effaced passions.

Zarathustra veers away from the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. But he also comes close. This nearness allows Zarathustra to know the raw material of the future—including current human passions, aspiration, and patterns of living—and the extent of this material’s current intractability. By then veering away, rather than staying to rage against this material, he practices accepting its intractability. Repeated passing by trains Zarathustra to relax his value-creative will, and this allows him to accept the past and the present it bequeaths as the starting point for the future, as well as the slow temporality of value change, the nonacceptance of which can also provoke reactivity. Passing by does not seek an impossible nonreactivity, which Zarathustra sometimes associates with eternal return. It mitigates but does not eradicate revenge. The affect belonging to passing by is “contempt.” While this is also a risky affect, I show how it can partially supplant revenge and bring an aloofness supportive of less reactive value-creation.

Therefore the insight I take from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is that for the sake of less reactive value-creation it is worth passing by direct conflict and contest in the received public sphere. How does this insight sit with the view of “agonistic” political theorists? Such theorists, inspired by Nietzsche’s understanding of the created, contingent nature of values and his praise of the Ancient Greek agon or contest, deny the possibility of a rational ultimate settlement of values and instead call for political actors to embrace ongoing and robust democratic contestation (Honig 1993a, 69–75; Mouffe 2013, 130; Nietzsche 1997). Agonistic political theorists tend to emphasize and celebrate engagement in the political and cultural public sphere. However, direct contest is not necessarily a requirement of their bare commitment to ongoing value struggle. Importantly, even as Honig endorses agonism, she also notes how, according to Nietzsche’s own analysis, without certain institutional measures and ethical preparations over generations, political action in late modernity may “inevitably sink into ressentiment” (Honig 1993b, 531; also see Honig 1993a, 73). As I will show, this tendency is a major reason Zarathustra tries to avoid direct contest and practices passing by.

Nevertheless, passing by’s dynamic movement has a flexibility about the political sphere; for example, it allows for abbreviated engagement to avert atrocity. This flexibility, especially important for the marginalized, is possible because the one who passes by is ultimately concerned with the value horizon, which one can never simply leave and which exceeds even as it shapes the political sphere. This gives the one who passes by a freeness about politics. Indeed, since one who passes by is not focused on politics—or even on refusing politics—there is even less danger of political capture and excessive reactiveness to politics. In this way the idiom and practice of passing by may be able to reduce reactivity in the struggle for value change even more than the idiom and practice of “refusal.” Using Gandhi’s praxis as an example, I suggest how passing by is perhaps already practiced but unacknowledged and how, at the very least, the lens of passing by can help reveal the degree of reactivity of a value-praxis. I conclude by further elaborating passing by as a practice of relaxing the value-creative will.

Moving the Body for New Values

We meet Zarathustra leaving his mountain home after ten years of solitude. Almost immediately he speaks to “a crowd of people gathered in the market-place” about how, in the face of the death of God, namely the undermining of belief in the highest values, they must forestall the “last humans.” Last humans no longer seek meaningful existence through higher values but only to alleviate suffering via small pleasures (9–17). After failing to reach the people en masse, Zarathustra resolves to find fellow travelers, who could help usher in the full overcoming of Christianity and its world-devaluing nihilistic legacy and co-create new world-affirming values. He calls the possibility of such values the coming of the “overhuman” (11, 18, 21). ⁷

Over the course of the text, Zarathustra moves across land and sea and in and out and around his mountain home, woods, cities, towns, and islands. His movements indicate that those who desire to create new values must constantly alter their physical distance from the most insistent embodiments of reigning values—namely, dominant institutional structures and habitual human milieux. For Zarathustra (and Nietzsche), humans are primarily bodies, and the body is a “site of conflicting passions (Leidenschaften)” vying for supremacy (Gooding-Williams 2001, 117). The current rank order of our passions constitutes our values, and our passional bodies direct what we ordinarily call our reason but Zarathustra calls our “small reason” or “spirit” while designating the passional body our “great reason” (27–33; see also Nietzsche 2002, 8–9; Acampora 2013a, 367).

The implicit logic of the veering away element of Zarathustra’s practice of passing by is that not only is it impossible to exit the value horizon physically, we also cannot think our way out of reigning values because our bodies are more influential than our reason or spirit (though spirit does help the passional body “listen”) (30–31). At best we can take spatial distance from the spaces—for example, the state and the public sphere—that contain the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. These spaces continually confirm the extant bodily passional orders that constitute reigning values. By taking distance from these spaces, we might be able to attune ourselves to the passions effaced by the current value horizon (159). That attunement amounts to psychic distance from reigning values, and such psychic distance depends on physical distance.

That our passional bodies are porous to the communal passional situations we find ourselves in is a lesson of the episode “On Passing By.” The fool, known as “Zarathustra’s ape,” critiques the denizens of the great city, saying: “Here all blood flows putrid and tepid and spumy through all veins” (153). But staying in the city, he has become like its inhabitants by partaking in their communal passional reservoir. Zarathustra asks him: “Why did you live for so long in the swamp that you yourself had to become a frog and a toad? Does a putrid and spumy swamp-blood not now flow through your own veins, that you have learned to croak and blaspheme thus? Why did you not go into the forest? Or plough the earth? Is the sea not full of grass-green islands?” (154). ⁸

Zarathustra’s practice of passing by includes periods of solitude (Einsamkeit), where he attunes himself to his inner “passional chaos”—the reservoir of undisciplined passions within—which is effaced by the current rank order of dominant passions. That passional chaos provides part of the raw material for new values but is threatened by Christian asceticism’s effort to “extirpate” the passions (Gooding-Williams 2001, 117–31). In solitude, less familiar passions emerge and a new language to speak of and configure those passions—a new language for new values—arises. Zarathustra says in solitude “nothing . . . is ashamed of oblique, obdurate feelings” and “the words and word-shrines of all being spring open for me; all being wants to become word here, all becoming wants to learn from me here how to speak” (159–60).

It is tempting to view retreat to solitude—rather than repeated passing by as a coming close and veering away—as Zarathustra’s signature move and key support for his value-creative will. We meet Zarathustra after ten years of solitude and see him return to solitude twice: once to free his “friends” or “disciples” to become co-creators rather than mere “believers” (68), and once when he realizes he himself harbors vengefulness and so cannot will eternal return and should not teach that doctrine to others (123, 128, explained at 189–93). And in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: “The whole of my Zarathustra is a dithyramb to solitude” (2005a, 83). In Part Three, the original end to the work, Zarathustra seeks self-transformation, which culminates in his solitary embrace of eternal return. And in the late-added Part Four, we do not see Zarathustra find the co-creators he is seeking, even among the supposedly “superior” or “higher” humans, who at least recognize the suffering of nihilism and who come seeking him.

It makes sense, then, that in a rare and rigorous scholarly treatment of passing by, Groff (2022) sees Zarathustra’s trajectory and passing by itself as ultimately a withdrawal to solitude and a turn to the contemplative life, which involves constant world-affirmation by willing eternal return. According to Groff, Zarathustra is pulled between a desire for contemplative withdrawal and the “desire to fix humanity.” Even though “Zarathustra’s recurrent need for sociopolitical distancing” could be preparatory for creating new values, Groff sees withdrawal and a world-affirmation free of the will to fix, which is how Groff understands the final teaching of eternal return, as the possible “culmination” of the text (2021, 136, 149–50; 2022, 76). That Zarathustra ultimately chooses the contemplative life is an available interpretation. But it is just as plausible that constant passing by, as a double movement of coming close and veering away, for the sake of collaborative and less reactive striving to transform the shared value horizon is Zarathustra’s signature movement.

Every time Zarathustra veers away there follows an actual or anticipated coming close. After his initial disappointment with the people, Zarathustra avoids the state and the market-place and the bigger cities, but he skirts and sometimes briefly engages human milieux, even beyond his disciples. He listens to a “preacher of virtue” who holds a “professorial chair” (25–27). When he and his followers inhabit the so-called “Isles of the Blest” (72), he leaves to visit a political revolutionary (a “fire-hound” or “over-throw devil”) to learn what revolutionaries seek (112–16). Returning home for the second time, he does not proceed “straight back” but “rather pursued many ways and questions and investigated this and that” to know more about the current value condition (144). He comes to the gates of the “great city” (152–54) and revisits The Motley Cow, a town he “loved” and which gave him his first followers (158, 24). In Part Four the supposedly “higher humans,” who are themselves arguably passing by ordinary cultural and political milieux, interrupt Zarathustra’s mountain solitude. He seeks and engages them and hosts them in his cave, but at moments he tries to avoid them and (thus) even speaks of passing by them (e.g., 229–33; Nietzsche 1999, 346). They are not the caliber of co-creator he is seeking, although he acknowledges their struggles will help in the long run with overcoming Christian morality (256) and eventually recognizes the inventiveness in their weird attempt at creating a new this-worldly religion in which they worship an “ass” (271–77). As Part Four concludes, he awaits truly higher humans and receives a sign they are close and that it is time to return to human milieux (284–87, 170). That the text ends where it begins, with its own element of recurrence as Zarathustra prepares once more to approach others, supports seeing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as depicting continuing and potentially collaborative value-striving, combining proximity to and distance from others and their usual spaces within a larger and repeated practice of passing by.

Caring for Passional Reservoirs

When he speaks to the people in the market-place, Zarathustra says right now they still have (passional) “chaos” within that might birth a “dancing star” (new value). But he warns of the danger of becoming last humans with no passional depths, presumably due to Christian asceticism, and no aspiration for meaning (15–17; Gooding-Williams 2001, 86–87). Worry about disconnect from and diminishing passional depths animates Zarathustra’s larger critique of dialogue and contest in the market-place, which is the arena of public speech and also has an economic dimension, like the Ancient Greek agora. In the market-place supposedly “great men,” who push “beliefs” that make the people “believe” in them, dominate. They “bowl-over” extant beliefs and drive opponents “mad” rather than “demonstrate” or “convince.” Despite its intensity, this battle is reactive, remains at the level of beliefs, and does not reach the passional depths. The market-place demands an immediate “yes” or “no” to presented beliefs, and this haste also forestalls deep thought: “Slow is experience for all deep wells: long must they wait before they know just what has fallen into their depths” (45–46). The fool, whose bare words Zarathustra concedes may be true, goes further. He says the great city’s feverish feelings are simulacra of deep passions and cannot sustain great thoughts: “here great thoughts are boiled alive and then cooked down small /Here all great feelings decay; here only tiny skin-and-bone feelings are allowed to rattle” (152, 154). Indeed, within late modern nihilism humans are losing the passional root for their beliefs. Now it is as if humans have a pastiche of beliefs from past value systems on their skeletons rather than robust passional bodies; they “seem to be baked with colors and glued scraps of paper” (103–4). The market-place’s economic logic offers a final reduction of thought and aspiration: “One might ring out one’s wisdom with bells: the shopkeepers in the market-place will out-jingle it with pennies!” (160).

The state itself and interactions within its orbit make the communal passional situation even less suitable for new-values creation by providing conditions for the intensification of revenge. With the death of the Christian God, the state has become “the new idol” and the default locus of aspiration. The state’s “language” is an incoherent mix of the value languages of previous peoples and through this “confusion” the state draws aspiration away from the search for meaning and toward power in the state and power’s “crowbar,” money (43–45). Aspiration narrows to seizing the levers of power and attaining recognition from the state and leaves revenge as the primary affect around the state. The “preachers of equality” are driven by revenge. Their iconoclasm seeks to harm those in power and overtakes any desire for a new shared meaning for life (85–88). Political revolutionaries are jealous of whomever currently holds power, and their resentment is like the smoke of an erupting volcano that is not followed by any of the (passional) gold within the earth (112–16).

Vengefulness not only clings to interactions within the state, it is also present in the larger public sphere. Zarathustra accuses the fool of raging against the great city, which appears to be a nexus for the market-place and the state, because its inhabitants had not “flattered [him] enough” (152–54). Zarathustra tells his followers that those in the market-place who lack the stature of great men—who do not get the recognition of the people—resent those who do not seek such recognition and stature. The attacks of these “petty” ones, with their “invisible revenge,” can bring down potential value-creators by an onslaught of small wounds. To “be a swatter” of these “flies of the market-place” is depleting (46–47). Even conspicuous avoidance of direct contest may elicit revenge. If those in the market-place see you pass them by, they will “never forgive you” (55).

Revenge also appears contagious in that it intensifies the underlying vengefulness of those on its receiving end. For this reason, although Zarathustra says we should pass by unworthy enemies and save ourselves for “worthier” enemies (182), he passes by even worthy enemies. He passes by priests, despite having some regard for them, because they are vengeful, and “whoever attacks them will easily besmirch himself” (78). When Zarathustra baits the preachers of equality to reveal their vengefulness, one of these “tarantulas” bites him, and he fears he has been infected with revenge (85–88). At this point, Zarathustra is unaware of his own underlying vengefulness against time; his own vengefulness is intensified by, rather than entirely caught from, public contest. Passing by limits depleting struggle and preserves stamina for the difficult and long-term task of creating new values, but it also prevents revenge flooding communal and individual passional reservoirs and inhibiting attunement to inner passional chaos.

So although Zarathustra emphasizes the importance of “struggle” or “battle” (Kampf) for new values (41), he constantly practices and counsels passing by (55, 78, 152–54, 160, 182, 229–33, 243). Nietzsche is fairly an inspiration for agonism, but his Zarathustra is non-agonistic in the specific sense that he avoids direct contest in the public sphere; direct contest is often (but not always) assumed when we speak of agonism in political theory. The one time he proposes direct contest is against his friends, but he is still too close to the public sphere, and this is when a preacher of equality attacks him (88). In “On War and Warrior-Peoples,” Zarathustra calls would-be creators to wage war for their thoughts, and this initially seems a call for direct contest, but on reading further we see it is a call to struggle for the opportunity to be silent (41). As Christa Davis Acampora points out, Nietzsche’s praise of the agon was as a site for new-values creation. Contestants pushed each other to new heights and, through contesting excellences, generated new values (Acampora 2013b, 24–36; Nietzsche 1997). Zarathustra is skeptical about whether the contemporary public sphere can be a site of value generation because of its passional depletion and its vulnerability to revenge. Direct contest in the public sphere has the quality of a destructive agon—where the participants seek to destroy each other rather than push each other to new heights of excellence (on this kind of agon, see Acampora 2013b, 22). This is why, for the supposedly great man of the market-place, “blood counts . . . as the best of all grounds” (46). Thus, for Zarathustra, the creation of new values can only occur where the public sphere ends (45, 46). He goes so far as to say those who create new values and the emergence of these values are not conspicuous. The “world revolves,” both “invisibly” and “inaudibly,” around the creators of new values (45, 114). And “[t]houghts that come on doves’ feet direct the world” (127).

Readers may now worry that Zarathustra’s account of how to change shared life is overly idealistic or too focused on individual self-transformation, so let me clarify his emphasis on and understanding of value change. For Zarathustra, value change is necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) to precipitate lasting change in shared life, and significant material and political change may be parasitic on value change. Without value change, hierarchies overthrown through revolutionary action will easily reestablish themselves and may become stronger and more seductive from persecution. This is why he calls the creation of new values the “greatest events” (114). Although Zarathustrian value-change requires overcoming reigning passional configurations in individuals’ bodies, that this must occur within and across generations (about which I will say more shortly) and depends on a repeated spatial maneuver, practicable with others, indicates that value change is not simply about individuals’ internal self-transformation.

Accepting Time

I just focused on the aspect of passing by as a veering away. Through a reading of “On Passing By,” I want to consider the combination of veering away and coming close in a repeated practice of passing by and show how this double movement helps mitigate revenge (and consequent value reactivity) by enabling an acceptance of time. Time here includes both the past that bequeaths a present, which present is the raw material of the future even if it may not be immediately shapeable toward a new future, and the slow temporality of genuine value-change. By providing a spatial practice for accepting these aspects of time, Zarathustra reminds us that such acceptance is not merely a matter of intellectual assent.

When Zarathustra arrives at the gates of the great city, the fool warns him away. Zarathustra is initially appalled by the fool’s ranting and puts his hands over the fool’s mouth (153). Zarathustra’s teaching is centrally about the perils of revenge, and the fool’s vengeful spouting of Zarathustrian critique injures Zarathustra and draws out his vengefulness; he tries to undo an injury. But then Zarathustra “looked at the great city, sighed, and was long silent.” He finally says: “I too am disgusted by this great city and not only by this fool. Here as there, there is nothing to be made better, nothing to be made worse.” Zarathustra acknowledges he can do nothing at this moment to alter the fool or the city; for now, the city and fool cannot be drawn directly into a new future. He wishes the city had already perished “[b]ut this has its own time and destiny.” He then counsels the fool: “Where one can no longer love, there one should—pass by!” The episode concludes: “Thus spoke Zarathustra and passed by the fool and the great city” (154). In passing by the fool and the city, Zarathustra practices accepting, in a bodily way, the past and the present the past bequeaths and the slowness of the present becoming otherwise. Zarathustra passes by not only to prevent interpersonal vengefulness but also to inhibit his revenge against time. Notably, when he explains the revenge of the will against time, in “On Redemption,” he refers to the will as a “prisoner” of the past and describes how “every prisoner becomes a fool”; the will is a fool in its impotent raging against the past (121). Nietzsche thereby invites us to connect redemption from revenge against time and the practice of passing by.

The grip of the past over the future is also another aspect of the doctrine of eternal return; this aspect is different from willing eternal return as an affirming existential stance and is a description of how time works. We find this sense of eternal return in Zarathustra’s question: “And are not all things knotted together so tightly that this moment draws after it all things that are to come? Thus– –itself as well? /For, whatever among all things can walk: in this long lane out, too–it must walk once more! – ” (136). Every present is a reverberation of the past in that the past shapes the present moment, and the present moment will itself reverberate into the future, and so in this sense the past eternally recurs (see, e.g., Nehamas 1980, 337–38). ⁹ The grip of the past on the future is part of the “spirit of heaviness” Zarathustra struggles against in order to withstand despair and sustain his aspiration for change long term (93–95, 134–38, 166–69). In combining the recurrence of the past with constant references to the chaos, chance, and accident of becoming (141–44, 171), Zarathustra presents the strongest case for why humans rage against their temporality. Time imprisons the human will and temporal life is an unfolding of multitudes of wills to power (98–101) with no overarching logic, the effects of which can nevertheless congeal and repeat and feel necessary. The repetition of what has come about contingently is especially hard to bear. It is true that Nietzsche’s account of history—where history is a senselessness that invites us to make sense of it—suggests radical change can occur by reinterpreting the past (1998, 50–54). But when we combine the chanciness of history with the grip of the past, including the recurring grip of certain interpretations, we see how difficult transformational reinterpretation might be.

By veering away from what, because of the weight of the past, is not immediately responsive to his creative will, Zarathustra draws back his vengeful willing against time. In a bodily way, he practices reducing his raging against the past and the present that it bequeaths. This letting-be of what is currently intractable allows for a release from its hold. There is a release from a rage that seeks to negate what is and envisions a future defined against what is. An inability to accept the past and its grip on the present and the future leads to excessive reactivity.

By coming close, Zarathustra comes to terms with the raw materials of the future. These raw materials are the caliber and capacities and aspiration of humans as they have so far emerged, the layered interpretations of the contingent events that constitute history, and the cumulative communal passional reservoir. He stays long enough to encounter the raw material but not long enough to rage against it. When we rage against the past and what it bequeaths, we do not properly confront the past and the present and so are unable to take them up as the raw material to be shaped, eventually, into a new future. By coming close and then relaxing his ordering will by veering way, Zarathustra is better able to access, know, and ultimately take up the raw material of new-values creation.

To accept time is also to decline the rushed temporality of the market-place and accept that value change unfolds slowly across generations. Zarathustra looks to a distant future (208–10). His “children” (the co-creators he cultivates) and his children’s children will redeem their forbears (139, 176–77). He works to accept this generational temporality by passing by. This temporality calls for the present generation to find meaning in sacrificing itself for humanity and its possible development. This sacrifice belies his (and Nietzsche’s) supposed individualist focus, which is rather an understanding of how change, while taking generations, unfolds in individuals who painfully overcome aspects of reigning values in their individual lives. We cannot skip the arduous, idiosyncratic processes of self-overcoming, in which we slowly allow values that no longer support our flourishing to perish (172). Each generation’s hard-won overcomings are inherited by their offspring. Children become less defined by what their parents struggled against and by the struggle itself. We cannot immediately be less reactive to what is.

By accepting time, we gain the patience to work at new ways of living to the side of the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. Through passing by, repeatedly, we can slowly inaugurate ways of living less tied to the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. If we cannot accept the actuality of reigning values’ most insistent embodiments and the slowness of their becoming otherwise, we will fixate on them and try to fix them. Seeking radical change by declining to engage the current order is often read as impatience, while seeking incremental change within that order is read as patience. Yet Zarathustra’s practice suggests that incremental reformers may engage reigning structures because they actually lack patience to learn to live around them. Jenkins argues that if the fool follows Zarathustra’s counsel and looks away rather than exercising his “reactive fixation on the city,” he might “create a psychic space in which an original, non-reactive project might grow” (174–75). I would add that passing by is also about creating a physical space (and hence a psychic space) for less reactive projects.

Reducing Reactivity and Exclusivity

Zarathustra implicitly raises the question of reactivity in his first speech to his followers, “On the Three Transformations.” He portrays humans under Christian morality as “camels” burdened by imposed values. To “seize the right to new values” is “a matter for a predatory beast,” a “lion” who must “create freedom for itself for new creation” by a “sacred Nay even to duty.” Yet a lion must still become a “child” because “for the play of creating . . . a sacred Yea-saying is needed.” The child is too young for rage against the past and can affirm the world and so create values that surpass mere reaction: “Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying” (23–24). This yes-saying promises an overcoming of revenge against the past (“forgetting”) and the possibility of nonreactive value-creation (“a self-propelling wheel”) and anticipates the intense affirmation involved in willing eternal return. But arguably, and perhaps going beyond Nietzsche’s intentional theorization, passing by provides sufficient acceptance of the present-past to allow value creativity, even as it falls short of the full-throated affirmation of this world in willing eternal return. Passing by combines no-saying and yes-saying, though its no-saying is less direct than the lion’s and its yes-saying is less fulsome than the child’s. ¹⁰ This diminished no and yes does not eradicate revenge but might mitigate it sufficiently to make value-creation significantly less reactive, though falling short of a surely impossible standard of nonreactivity, such as a self-propelling wheel.

Indeed, while Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, criticizes the human of ressentiment, who cannot act without external stimuli (1998, 19), he never imagines a complete spontaneity and envisages reactivity in all action (Porter 2009, 146). Even the child emerges from the lion stage. And strong natures can feel ressentiment, although in them it “runs its course and exhausts itself in immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison” (Nietzsche 1998, 21). But generally, Nietzsche does not valorize immediate reaction or (impossible) nonreaction. Rather he valorizes the capacity for slow reaction and the capacity not to immediately react (2005a, 77; 2005c, 190–91). Passing by slows and so reduces reaction, and it does so by relaxing the will.

So even though Zarathustra and Nietzsche speak of new values as arising from the “will to power,” new-values creation—at least in Thus Spoke Zarathustra—is not a straightforwardly willful exercise. For Nietzsche, the will to power is the will to overcome resistance and, as Siemens notes, a strong will to power has a capacity to resist and finds encountered resistance a “stimulant” (hence Nietzsche admires the Greek agon). But Siemens shows that Nietzsche’s concept of “active resistance” depends on nonresistance (or, I would say, less resistance). For example, Nietzsche diagnoses modern “decadence” as the “incapacity to resist stimuli” and in response prescribes “the capacity to resist stimuli” as a “not reacting,” as “the capacity to overlook and not-resist resistance.” We see this capacity in Nietzsche’s account of “learning to see” from Twilight of the Idols, where the capacity to resist stimuli by not resisting them enables “an active form of knowing or seeing” (Siemens 2019, 36–41). Nietzsche says “learning to see” requires “not to react immediately to a stimulus” and “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of individual cases from all sides . . . the essential thing here is precisely not ‘to will’, to be able to suspend the decision” (2005c, 190–91). This is precisely the relaxing of the will that passing by helps cultivate and that allows a deeper acceptance and a better knowing of the raw materials of new-values creation.

In aiming for slower reaction and reduced reactivity rather than nonreactivity, passing by seems more available as a practice. Nietzschean exemplary practices tend to be available for a select few. In the Genealogy (in addition to quick and cold revenge), Nietzsche also valorizes the “forgetting” practiced instinctively by “the strong, full natures”: they avoid revenge by “forgetting” injuries almost immediately (1998, 21). In contrast to forgetting, which Zarathustra also associates with the child stage, passing by is a possibility even for the vengeful fool—Zarathustra counsels him to pass by the great city. Passing by is a practice for the weak in the sense of those susceptible to revenge (almost all of us) but also the marginalized. And yet it is a practice Zarathustra mentions in the same breath as forgetting. Upon his second return to his mountain solitude, he says, “down there,” “forgetting and passing by are the best wisdom” (160). Passing by’s taking of spatial distance, as a support for new-values creation, is also different from the aristocratic precondition for salutary value change Nietzsche describes in Beyond Good and Evil, where he claims “the pathos of distance,” specifically a feeling of superiority to others arising from sociopolitical hierarchy, has been a prerequisite for all enhancements of humanity so far. This pathos of distance elicits a desire for inner distance, for cultivating “new expansions of distance” or rank orders within the soul, where the “order of rank” of the “innermost drives” constitutes “morals” (Nietzsche 2002, 8–9, 151–52). As I will elaborate later, passing by could be a support for value-creation within communities with a more egalitarian self-understanding. Still, although passing by is theoretically available to all, the opportunity for significant movement through space does place a material limit on its availability.

Love and Contempt

Passing by is a response to revenge and also to a failure of love: “Where one can no longer love, there one should—pass by!” (154). This absent love could be amor fati, the love of fate that is arguably the same as being able to will the eternal return of the same (see Nietzsche 2001, 157). It could also be the love Zarathustra has for humanity and the shared world he seeks to imbue with meaning and which he sometimes articulates as the love a creator has for his raw materials (13, 75, 77–78). This love is apparent in Zarathustra’s initial articulation of eternal return in “On Redemption”: he redeems the past as something he could have willed on the basis that he is able to draw it into the new future he is creating (123). But this “backwards” willing (and creator’s love) may still invite vengefulness toward the past because one only accepts the past insofar as it is amenable to one’s creative will, and the past is not always so easily drawn into a new future. Perhaps passing by is apt when this flawed love fails in the face of what Zarathustra cannot immediately or easily reshape and so elicits his vengefulness against the past. I cannot make this ambitious claim here, but perhaps passing by, as a way of accepting what is currently unshapeable, might be a preparation for a less vengeful willing of eternal return—for a backward willing that more fully accepts what is not susceptible to the creative will. ¹¹

Passing by is apt where there is a failure of love, but it also has an affect that is positively attached to it: “contempt” (Verachtung). When Zarathustra suggests passing by unworthy enemies, he is referring to enemies who merit contempt: “You shall have only enemies to be hated, but not enemies to contemn; you must be proud of your enemy.” ¹² One should wait for the possibility of a generative agon. But in waiting for worthy enemies, one has to “pass by much rabble,” and it appears that the rabble, for Zarathustra, encompasses almost all of contemporary humanity including the educated and powerful (64, 182–83). Most of his contemporaries count as the rabble insofar as they are approaching last human beings, who do not seek meaning, have no aspiration other than comfort, and so can no longer have any contempt for themselves (15–16). Since they lack self-contempt, any struggle with them would not spur higher excellences and new values. So Zarathustra leaves a role for contempt in avoiding ungenerative agonism. Crucially, this contempt should not arise from vengefulness. The fool’s contempt for the great city comes from vengefulness at not being recognized by the city, whereas Zarathustra’s contempt comes from “love” (154), which I take to be a bare love for the shared human world he wants to imbue with meaning (the perversion of which is the conditional creator’s love).

It seems dangerous to endorse contempt, even as part of a practice that mitigates revenge and minimizes engagement with those whom one finds contemptible. But let me compare the positive possibilities of contempt with those of revenge. In the spirit of not pathologizing the affects of the marginalized and of giving reaction and the darker affects a limited place in politics, Coulthard makes an important case for a chastened revenge. Drawing on Fanon, he sees a “disciplined” and “righteous” “resentment” as salutary for the practice of “refusal.” Disciplined resentment can mobilize action, disclose the “breakdown” of “subjection,” and open “the possibility of developing alternative subjectivities and anticolonial practices” (Coulthard 2014, 22, 109–15, 126, 169). Like disciplined resentment, contempt can signify breakdown of subjection to reigning values. For the oppressed to feel contempt for the oppressor’s way of life is already to be more than victims because it suggests they have a better, if still emerging, alternative approach to life. And that life might itself be rehearsed with every act of passing by. Someone who contemns is especially circumspect about engagement. Rather than being focused on this or that injury, contempt can be directed toward a whole way of life in light of an incipient ideal of the future. According to Jenkins, this is what Zarathustra calls “great contempt,” which spurs overcoming and creation and is what Zarathustra feels toward the city (13–14; Jenkins 2022, 176–77). In addition to great contempt, Jenkins identifies a second contempt—a kind of indifferent looking away—that Zarathustra attempts to perform with regard to the fool and encourages the fool to perform with regard to the city. This looking away seeks to supplant the fool’s “reactive fixation on the city” (Jenkins 2022, 174–75). That is, contempt as a looking away can overtake the expression of vengeful contempt toward specific humans and structures one finds contemptible.

Freeness toward Politics

Passing by’s relation to the received political sphere has a quality of freeness in its flexibility about distance. Even as passing by avoids or minimizes participation in politics, it allows for intervention when necessary. Zarathustra critiques believers in the world beyond who say things like, “Let him who wants to, strangle people and stab them and strip them and flay them! Do not lift even a finger against it. From this will they yet learn to renounce the world.” Clearly he disapproves of the world-devaluation present in this saying (178). But beyond Zarathustra’s project of overturning Christianity, a willingness to intervene in the face of atrocity fits with passing by’s coming close and veering away. Such willingness is surely important if passing by is to be apt for the struggles of the marginalized. Theorists of “refusal” similarly acknowledge the need for some interaction with the state because of present power configurations. With regards to Indigenous politics, Simpson (2017) notes: “‘Refusal’ rather than recognition is an option for producing and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical relationship to states” (19; my emphasis). The idiom of passing by makes flexibility toward the state more explicit, even as it seeks to minimize or avoid participation within or even directedness toward the state. To pass by is to refuse even refusal, and so passing by is even less reactive than refusal. Of course, passing by may not always be an option. Acts of refusal may have to lay the ground for future passing by.

Just as passing by combines a “yes” and a “no” and seeks to be generative of new values, some theorists seek to show how refusal can surpass no-saying. Indigenous activists’ blockades of land can become occasions for rehearsal and retrieval of alternative socialities, beyond the state, and within and around the blockade itself (Coulthard 2014, 169). But Honig (2021) seeks to extend the idiom of refusal in her “feminist theory of refusal” to efforts to “transform” dominant milieux, including the political community. This extension is plausible insofar as the idiom of refusal can include direct resistance. She allows that certain versions of refusal eschew any attempt to salvage the mainstream institutions of politics ¹³ but imagines how refusal could “arc” back to try to change the “city” (“political community,” “an actual city,” “a state, town, village, or a neighborhood”) after a period of retreat to a “heterotopia.” An existing power configuration should not be left “empowered to do its work” because refusers neglect action in concert and “abjure power” to avoid the “impurities of politics” (e.g., xiv, 1–2, 71). In contrast, passing by never arcs back to directly change the city. It retains an obliqueness to the city because its aim exceeds the city: it seeks to alter the value horizon itself. Any political changes arising from passing by are side effects. And perhaps that look away from politics might enable a more fulsome “no” to politics (a point to which I shall return).

To claim passing by never has the political sphere as its ultimate object is to take a stance on whether Zarathustra looks to the future “great politics” of the philosopher-legislator from Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 2002, 54–55, 99–102, 105–106, 132–34, 141–43, 148–50). On one view of that later text, Nietzsche transforms what he had labeled “petty politics” into “great politics,” which envisions a pan-European ruling class “whose aim is to foster a New European culture that is specially called upon to guarantee world culture” and to unify Europe itself (Drochon 2016, 2, 18, 20). Lampert says Zarathustra anticipates great politics but understood as the spiritual rule of a cultural elite and not necessarily tied to geopolitical institutional structures (1986, 63–64, 283–85, 323n107). Gooding-Williams also thinks Zarathustra anticipates great politics but accepts that “nothing in his concept of new-values creation rules out the possibility of a new-values creator who declined to dedicate himself to the aims of ‘great politics’” (2001, 143–44). Pippin sees Zarathustra himself as entirely unconcerned with commanding others (see “Introduction” to Nietzsche 2006, xxvii). Instead of reading great politics back onto the earlier text, Loschenkohl reverses the interpretive order so great politics becomes Zarathustrian continuous collective self-overcoming of values that currently impede flourishing (2020). I hold that regardless of whether Nietzsche looks to great politics, Zarathustra cannot, even in the long term. It would subvert his aspirations for the value horizon by inhibiting his attunement to his inner passional reservoir. That attunement, as we shall further see, requires him to relax his will and so is inconsistent with grasping the usual structures of cultural and political rule. Great politics is incompatible with great events.

Tactic and Lens

We can now consider how passing by, in its difference from varieties of refusal that directly contest extant political structures, can augment the practical repertoire of those seeking value change. Fanon says the colonized should refuse—“turn away”—from the colonizer’s values and recognition and through active “struggle and conflict” seek “freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values” (Coulthard 2014, 38–39, 43–44). ¹⁴ Indeed, the colonized must struggle for independence (rather than have it bestowed) so they will become, in an explicit appeal to Nietzsche, “actional” rather than “reactional” (Fanon 2008, 191–97). And Fanon eventually holds struggle should be “a direct and violent engagement with the colonial society and its institutional structure” (Coulthard 2014, 44). He understands violence as a cathartic (but not sufficient) means to self-affirmation (Fanon 2004, 44, 51–52). The arc back to the city, in Honig’s feminist refusal, also appears to require direct contest within and against dominant political structures. She does not argue for violence but accepts violence as inevitable in politics and violent agonism as consistent with feminist refusal, especially given the violence of what is being refused, and is reconciled to reactive engagement and “mimetic aggression” as risks of agonism (Honig 2021, 70, 71, 77, 100). But direct violent contest has ramifications for the possibility of value change. As Nandy (1987) says of Fanon’s violent refusal, violence entraps refusers within “the same frame of values” as the colonial state (34). Zarathustra, who advocates nonviolence (see D’Iorio 2016, 86–87, but cf. Groff 2022, 73), avoids even nonviolent direct contest within or against the normal venues of politics because he thinks direct contest can inflame revenge against time and inhibit attunement to passional chaos. In this way, his concerns include but go beyond how direct engagement can lead to ensnarement by structures of recognition and established agendas and to mimesis of means. Even if we can accept nonviolent or violent direct contest at certain junctures, it is worth including an indirect no-saying in the practical repertoire of radical change on the basis that direct contest in the public sphere can forestall the generation of less-reactive values.

Passing by’s very concept can also illuminate other value-praxes. For example, it can help us gather and better understand diverse elements of Gandhi’s theory and practice of nonviolence, even if he did not ultimately practice passing by. Gandhi sought to vitalize nonviolence as an overarching value and basis for a way of life and refused violent means, which he also associated with the colonial state (2009, 78–80). But he oscillated in and out of engagement and cooperation with the state, its officialdom, and public sphere, and took long tours of India speaking to ordinary people outside cities. He founded and often dwelt in ashrams and saw them as sites to cultivate, patiently, new habits, including patience itself, by attending to the “mundane fabric of everyday life” and drawing out its nonviolent character (R. Gandhi 2008, 277, 287, 311; Mehta 2010, 355–57). In this way, he had “none of the urgency of a typical nationalist” (Mehta 2011, 422). He worried about direct contest’s effects on the communal passional reservoir: attempting to force change through dialogue could generate ideological resistance and “psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie inter-personal violence” (Bilgrami 2003, 4161, 4163; Mantena 2012, 461). More fundamentally, he sought to separate moral judgment from moral criticism and preferred moral exemplarity to moral criticism, which he regarded as (“paler”) violence (Bilgrami 2003, 4161–63). Further, Gandhi accepted the parts of the West within the Indian tradition he was trying to vivify and included recessive strains from the colonizer’s culture in his starting point for the future. This, along with other factors such as his rejection of violence and willingness to live apart from colonial centers, made him a “nonplayer” vis a vis the colonial regime rather than a (reactive and co-optable) “counter player” (Nandy 1983, xiii–xiv, 49, 73; 1987, 34). All these elements of Gandhi’s praxis could be brought within an overarching practice of passing by. That said, I admit that, even if we put aside their substantive differences (e.g., their differing views of the masses), Gandhi is not an easy exemplar of specifically Zarathustrian passing by. Zarathustra avoids direct critique of those for whom he feels contempt; but for Gandhi, to feel contempt, let alone express it, “would be to give in to the spiritual flaws that underlie violence” (Bilgrami 2003, 4161). And, obviously, Gandhi engaged directly in politics. But Gandhi was working in a situation of actual and pending atrocity, so more “flexibility” about and engagement in politics was necessary (see R. Gandhi 2008, 361). This might allow his practice to count as passing by, albeit elaborated beyond Zarathustra’s practice.

As an analytic, passing by bolsters Gandhi’s claim that his ultimate goal was not political but rather “self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain moksha,” which he understood as a possibility for all (see Gandhi 2018, 46; discussed in Mehta 2021). ¹⁵ This claim surprises because we know Gandhi for his political impacts, and because we think politics “defines the domains of all significant collective action” and so “assume that all significant transformations must have a political purpose as their cause” (Mehta 2010, 362). But Gandhi’s claim is more plausible when we see how far he approximates the practice of passing by. He intermittently engaged the state but had a more encompassing goal that pertained to the value horizon itself—he wanted to vivify the value of nonviolence, instantiate it in every aspect of life, and thereby create a civilization supportive of self-realization for all. His nonpolitical goal oddly and arguably made him more effective in politics. He could say a more fulsome “no” to the colonial state and be less ensnared in its logic because his ultimate goal was not its overthrow. The lens of passing by reveals how, and the extent to which, his value-praxis was less reactive.

Outward and Inward Relaxing of the Will

We have seen that for less reactive value-creation, the value-creative will must relax with regards to what it contemns outside itself and that passing by supports that relaxation. But the value-creative will must also relax internally, only then can it be attuned to passions effaced by reigning values. As Gooding-Williams has argued, but without reference to passing by, Zarathustra’s challenge is to move from an overly “defiant” “lion’s” posture of no-saying and arrogation of all value-creative power (seized from a creator god) and “go under” to his “uncreated” “passional chaos” (2001, e.g., 15–16; 160, 224). He must fully embrace how the will alone is not self-sufficient for value-creation but also relies on what it does not create. Zarathustra suggests a willful heroic posture forecloses experience of passional depths: “precisely for the hero is the beautiful of all things the most difficult. Unwinnable is the beautiful by any violent will.” To attune oneself to one’s inner passional chaos, one must not seek to master or immediately reorder passions, or preemptively presume to know oneself. Instead, the hero must “stand with relaxed muscles and an unharnessed will,” otherwise he cannot experience his passions because his “streaming passion has not become quite still in beauty” (101–3; Gooding-Williams 2001, 181–82, 294). Perhaps passing by as an external relaxing of the value-creative will also elicits its internal relaxing. This would be analogous to how Nietzsche claims in Beyond Good and Evil that the external feeling of rank order can elicit a desire for new rank orders within the soul (2002, 151–52). Insofar as an external feeling of rank order is also necessary for new-values creation, that might be supplied not by sociopolitical hierarchy but by the experience of passional abundance enabled by passing by, which abundance could bestow a sense of spiritual superiority. Of course, much remains to be said about the difficulty of relaxing the will in situations of oppression while maintaining long-term striving and about the need for mutual relaxing of wills by oppressor and oppressed for change to occur. ¹⁶