Chapter 7 draws on Nietzsche’s autobiographical writings to focus in on his philosophical methods. Here I identify the three features of genealogical analysis. First, Nietzsche attests to being gripped and limited by theological and moral prejudices, which, as he further suggests, functioned to constrict his evaluative horizons (GM P 3). Second, Nietzsche substantiates further that those deeply entrenched patterns of value and habits of thought, which (non-consciously or pre-reflectively) shaped his outlook, also oriented him in a particular way toward his suffering. As a way of combating that precarity, he adopts, for a time at least, thoroughly moralized responses: He warded off precarity through decadence in the forms of either world-denial (pessimism) or ascetic self-renunciation. Finally, he confirms that refracting these automatic responses through his long-drawn-out illnesses opened up, for him, a new line of sight.

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.