That time is a philosophical mystery has been obvious to philosophers since Heraclitus. That time is not merely one philosophical problem among others but a condition of philosophy itself, so that philosophy needs, in all its dimension, to respond to time was propounded by Hegel out of Hume’s success and Kant’s failure (# 24). It was so radical a thought that its presence in Hegel’s writings was, and still is, missed entirely.
How philosophy should respond to time is obviously a function of what we take time to be. For Kant, it was the ordering of incompatibles: if x has both property φ and ～φ, our minds assign φ and ～φ to different times, so that instead of a contradiction we have a process: φt implies ～φt±n. This follows from the nature of time itself: nothing comes-to-be from itself, because then it would not have come-to-be at all; it would have been there all along. Nor can it pass-away into itself, for then it would not pass away at all. So it must come-to-be from its opposite and pass-away into it, in the ancient sense in which the “opposite” of hot is not cold but not-hot. Kant’s account of time thus accommodates the ancient doctrine of antapodosis, that things come-to-be from their opposites (see Plato, Phaedo 70e-71e).
But this account of changes is incomplete, for it focuses only on the terminal points of the process:～φ from which it begins, and φ with which it ends (or vice-versa for passing-away). What about the process itself?
Nietzsche’s characteristic way of handling this begins by designating or evoking various intermediate stages of the process. Example: “the water is hot.” Since the hot water is in time, it must have come-to-be from something that is not hot water, either because it is not hot or because it is not even water. Let us take the previous case. English affords us several different ways of referring to water by its temperature, so we can say, first, that the water is cool; then that it is lukewarm; then that it is warm; then warmer; then really warm; and finally hot. We have now construed the coming-to-be of the hot water as a six-stage sequence ending in hot water. That final stage is different from the others in that it marks the end of our construal. The water may go on to boil, or it may cool down, but those possibilities do not interest us; for our purposes the process is over, and we now have, not a process of water getting progressively hotter but something quite different, namely a state of the water.
This, then, is a version of antapodosis, a general theory of coming-to-be formulated in Plato’s Phaedo. It is the last (indeed the only) theory of change advanced in the Phaedo before the Theory of Forms is introduced, so we can see how it would appeal to the materialist in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s way of mimicking antapodosis is, often, to lead the reader in one direction, getting closer and closer to a final revelation—and then slamming-over, not to the revelation prepared for, but to something quite different: as if the sequence were cool—lukewarm—warm—warmer—really warm—ice. A quick and simple example is Nietzsche’s joke, “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.” The first part of the sentence prepares us, not merely for an assertion of God’s existence, but for an apologia for Him; the second part undoes the expectation. The two parts can only function together, but what is important is the slamover from seeming apologia for, to atheistic dismissal of, the Deity.
A deeper example, to be discussed shortly (#32), lies in the progression of the Homeric hero, who wins victory after victory—until he doesn’t, which means he is vanquished and dies in the ultimate slamover. Slamovers, then, are not merely philosophical tropes. They have general significance for knowledge and action:
As knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations…to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity—”the latter understood, not as contemplation [Anschauug] without interest but as having in our power our “pro’s” and “cons:” so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.
Genealogy of Morality III.12
One of the cardinal rules of reading Nietzsche is, then, to wait for the slamover. A case in point is his treatment of the Übermensch. We hear so much about the Übermensch’s superiority to others, his awareness of that superiority and his salutary contempt for inferior creatures, that we are unprepared for—and so set up for—the slamover when Nietzsche says that the Übermenschis is often kind to others—as humans are often kind to kittens. In particular, using other people to assert one’s own superiority is about as un-Nietzschean as anything can be—a fact which escaped Nietzsche-readers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 failed to wait for the slamover and, entranced by the ruthlessness in early stages of Nietzsche’s portrayals of the Übermensch, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They not only misunderstood Nietzsche but mutilated the rest of their lives: both of them went, fittingly, to the slammer.