The problem, according to Katsafanas, is the tendency to negate what presently exists in favor of an imagined future ideal. This tendency is dramatized in Zarathustra’s overwhelming urge to be rid of the rabble and the small human (ZII: “Rabble”; ZIII: “Convalescent”). At the same time, however, Nietzsche insists that life-affirmation should be unconditional, meaning that it should not depend on the possibility of removing objectionable elements from life. This is why Zarathustra needs the thought of life’s eternal recurrence. Since all such objectionable elements must eternally recur as the same, his attitude to this thought serves to reveal any conditionality in his claim to affirm life. Zarathustra must seek to affirm the eternal recurrence of life because only in this way will he be pursuing his higher values while at the same time affirming life as it is actually lived in the present moment.

Nietzsche is widely reputed to have a novel approach to moral philosophy. Georg Simmel called him the “Copernicus of philosophical ethics,” presumably intending to convey by this that Nietzsche recentered the perspective from which philosophical ethics is conducted (Simmel 1992: 124). And Nietzsche himself agreed: “I hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring” (BGE 228),1 he writes, and presents himself as offering a new approach. His “project is to traverse with quite novel questions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and so well-hidden land of morality – of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived; and does this not mean virtually to discover this land for the first time [GM P:7]?” The project of philosophical ethics must be rethought: it must be conducted in a different way, employ different methods, and pursue different aims.