38 Nietzschedoes not target individuals. It is a blind coincidence from which we wrest
meaning with our own actions. He considered belief in benevolent
providence a "degrading sort" of "surrender to God's will," which does
not dare to "confront destiny head on" (/ 2,60). He regarded fate as a
contingency, an inane coincidence, and a necessity. Nevertheless, in the
final analysis, there is a kind of goal, even if the course of the world is
not intentionally oriented toward it When the young Nietzsche wrote
his essay, the idea of evolution was in the air. Because Darwinism had
already begun its triumphant advance, Nietzsche was drawn to experi-
ment with the idea that natural history culminates in human beings. The
arena of consciousness is unveiled in humans, and life itself becomes
vivid theater. Nietzsche was quite taken with theatrical metaphors. "The
curtain falls," he wrote, "and man rediscovers himself like a child play-
ing with worlds, like a child awakening at dawn and laughingly wiping his
awful dreams from his brow" (/2,59). The "awful dreams" refer to the
notion that we do not so much live life as get lived by it, that we do not
act consciously, and that thus everything originates in "unconscious
action." However, once we awaken to consciousness, we cannot be sure
whether we are truly awake or have simply exchanged one dream for
another, and whether the supposed freedom will not in fact turn out to
be a somnambulistic dream. Ί have discovered for myself," Nietzsche
later wrote, "that the past of both humans and animals and indeed of all
of the entire primeval era and past of all sentient being in me keep on
creating, loving, hating, and conjecturing—1 suddenly woke up in the
middle of this dream, but only to the awareness that I am dreaming and
that I will have to keep dreaming so as not to perish, just as the sleep-
walker must keep dreaming so as not to fall" (3,416; GS§ 54).
This later perspective expanded Nietzsche's earlier insight into the
mystery of freedom, which he viewed as the "highest power of fate."
But what did all of this amount to for the young Nietzsche? If the rela-
tionship between freedom and fate is constituted such that it depends on
the individual to connect the two spheres in his own life, every individ-
ual becomes an arena of the world as a whole. Each individual is a case