Untimely Meditations 115for the first time that it has attained its goal, realizing that it must
unlearn the notion of having goals and that it has played the game of
living and becoming with stakes that were too high" (1,380). This argu-
ment is open to misinterpretation. Nietzsche was well aware that nature
is not a "subject" that can learn or unlearn or set its stakes too high. He
had no desire to read God into nature. His references to learning and
unlearning on the part of nature applied to reflexes in the conscious-
ness of man. Nature is manifested in human self-awareness as a goal-
oriented drive that must remain perpetually unfulfilled. This drive
recognizes at every goal that it, in fact, wanted to attain not the goal but
only itself, and will therefore continue driving on. When consciousness
holds a mirror up to the drive, it may well expire. The cause is not
exhaustion or despair but the realization that in the end there is no goal;
we are always already at it. The fulfilled moment does not lie in the
future, but is always there already; it is up to us to seize it by learning to
be alert and sharp-witted. The "game" of life has set its stakes too high
if they need to be paid out in an ominous future. We may gamble with
life in this way, but life itself does not play by these rules. Life does not
follow the principle of linear accumulation and progressive enhance-
ment, but instead revolves in a cycle of expiring and expanding. Any
point along the circumference of the circle is equidistant from the cen-
ter. For this reason, life is always already at its goal or remains equally
remote from it, which ultimately amounts to one and the same thing.
Nature within man, Nietzsche explained, "is transfigured with this
knowledge" (1,380). He called this puzzling "emotion devoid of agita-
tion" (1,381; SE § 5) the "great enlightenment," which illuminates the
"beauty" (1,380; SE § 5) of reality.
Nietzsche's line of reasoning, which evolved from his study of
Schopenhauer, aimed at a transfiguration of reality requiring not a new
"revelation of eternal kindness" in nature, as it had for his adversary
David Friedrich Strauss, but a transformation in the man of knowledge.
Instead of observing reality with an eye to one's own interests and
desires, consciousness loosens its ties to the will and adopts a composed