Juvenescence - Robert Pogue Harrison
Yes-Saying and No-Saying
I have taken up Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s ‘psychological problem’ of Yes-saying and No-saying in recent weeks particularly as the toxicity of our culture appears to accelerate in the wake of the inauguration. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche lays out the challenge in stark clarity: ‘The psychological problem with the Zarathustra-type is how someone who says No to everything to an inordinate degree, does No to everything to which hitherto everyone said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit’. [1]
In other words, how can I prevent my constant need to say No to this toxicity from hardening into a deep and prolonged embrace of ressentiment? To do so would be to replay Nietzsche’s Eternally Recurring cycle of Western nihilism and its paroxysms of dormant and active vengeance.
This feels like the problem of our age—at least for someone of my age, who grew up amid a relative stability of institutions. It may not be the problem for others, especially those chronologically younger than me. They cannot share the same age in this sense; their experience of institutional stability is necessarily different. They consume different information, inhabit different rhythms, and likely carry very different expectations about what politics owes to the people. For me, the present moment is deeply alien and alienating. For those of another age, it may feel familiar, tolerable, or perhaps not felt much at all.
In Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, Robert Pogue Harrison helps me find a way of navigating this ‘psychological problem of the Zarathustra type’ that Nietzsche so powerfully—and untimely—diagnosed. This essay undertakes that navigation. It will be an exercise and experience of what Nietzsche called great health in The Gay Science, a passage he quotes in full in the very section of Ecce Homo with which I began.
My focus will be on the experience of heterochrony. Like other essays I’ve posted on particular books, this will not be a review, which tends to require a more or less juridical stance toward the work under observation. That kind of monologue doesn’t interest me. Instead, I want to work through the power of heterochrony—and its relation to vengeance—more fully than I have elsewhere. In this sense, the essay is inspired by Juvenescence rather than a summary of it. There are, after all, plenty of LLMs willing to provide those.
Ressentiment and Time
In his 1953 lectures, Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, Heidegger argued that at the heart of Eternal Recurrence lies the problem of humanity’s redemption from ‘the spirit of revenge.’ One of Nietzsche’s decisive innovations was to link our Western experience of time to ressentiment—our weakened yet lingering desire for revenge, and the pervasive conditioning of time that follows from it. To redeem humanity from this spirit requires Zarathustra to show us how to ‘overcome our ill-will toward time.’ [2]
For more on Nietzsche and the challenges of Yes-saying and N0-saying, see my collection of essays on our current Revaluation of Values.
For Heidegger, this ill-will is bound up with the problem of Being and Time. Our desire for Being is, at bottom, a desire to overcome Time. The Da (there) of Dasein stages the adventure of Being as a quest for a permanent state of Sein. Harrison offers a wonderful phrase for this in Juvenescence: ‘the constant finishing action of time’ (3). The desire for Being to permanently overcome Time lies at the heart of the Western onto-theological adventure, which construes Time as a linear movement toward the achievement of permanence.
Heidegger found in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra a sustained attempt to show that this ill-will toward time is itself the mode of Being that must be overcome if humanity is to be redeemed from the spirit of revenge—what Zarathustra describes as the logic whereby ‘whenever there was suffering, there also had to be punishment.’ [3]
Heidegger’s reading highlights the centrality of time in Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment. I have argued that ressentiment must be understood temporally rather than spatially. It is a conditioning of time that can, if prolonged, crystallize into ‘the man of ressentiment’ as a psychological type. With Heidegger, this temporal conditioning is pushed even deeper, into time itself as an ill-will toward time.
Given the importance of this ill-will, it is no surprise that both Nietzsche and Heidegger locate the problem of vengeance at the doorstep of Christianity. The story runs roughly as follows: as the immanent eschatological claims of an itinerant apocalyptic Jew aged into the institutions of a formalized religion, the dominant Western experience of time became fundamentally linear and finite—stretched between Genesis and Apocalypse.
This linear finitude renders time monochronic. Everything is subsumed into a single temporality marching toward a total and final end. Because this end also functions as a universal judgment on all of creation, there is no escape; meaning itself becomes tethered to this temporal horizon and to the eventual judgment of humanity by its Creator.
Yet this eschatological timeline bares an inherent problem. As the expected end failed to arrive, time changed once again. It aged into something else—an existential problem. Put simply: if time is about to end at any moment, ‘like a thief in the night,’ what are we to do in the meanwhile? When the kingdom of God (basileia tou Theou) is near at hand (ēngiken), as Jesus proclaims in the earliest Gospel, the meanwhile is experienced as immanent kairos, not as extended chronos. Mark 1:15 places kairos at the center of Jesus’ first recorded proclamation: Peplērōtai ho kairos—’The time is fulfilled.’
The meanwhile announced in Mark would have been experienced very differently in the first decades after Jesus’ death than it would even a generation later. Christianity addressed the expanding meanwhile by imposing circularity within this eschatological linearity. The historical evidence is clear. As Christianity became the religion of the Empire, it did not abolish so-called pagan rituals such as the Kalends; it absorbed and refashioned them. It also populated the calendar with new feasts and observances. In doing so, institutional Christianity layered cyclical rhythms onto linear time and invented the liturgical calendar. [4]
Heterochrony thus re-emerges as the mixture of cyclical and finite-linear time. The more permanent the meanwhile appears, the more experientially necessary this heterochrony becomes. As Christianity ages, it generates the instruments of its own endurance: the Nicene Creed, fixed liturgies, permanent churches, and a professionalized priesthood. Augustine’s City of God stands as the first full articulation of the need for a stable institution capable of inhabiting an indefinitely extended meanwhile.
Time as a Function of Age
We have just encountered a clear example of Harrison’s differentiation between time and age. Because time is a phenomenon like any other in the universe, it ages. For that reason, Harrison proposes that we begin to think of ‘time as a function of age’, rather than age as a function of time (Juvenescence, 1). Christianity’s experience of linear, finite time does not age well when the eschaton fails to arrive. As a result, humanity is compelled to make itself at home in the meanwhile. The intensity of kairos gradually gives way to the monotony of chronos as the dominant experience of time.
Because Christianity carried forward the promise of time’s end as the reward of salvation, the ill-will toward time lingers as time itself ages. Ressentiment can thus be understood, following Heidegger, as the residual desire for time to come to an end—for time to die so that eternal salvation might finally arrive. Time, redemption, and eternity become so tightly bound that redemption is imagined only as a permanent state of Being, one that seeks release from time altogether.
This is a complex history, and I do not pretend to do it justice in such a brief treatment. For my purposes, it serves to illustrate how deeply intertwined time and institutions are. To descend into this Western inheritance, as Nietzsche and Heidegger both did, is already to begin experiencing the force of heterochrony—and to learn how to think of time not as a neutral container, but as something that ages, shifts, and demands new ways of inhabiting it.
Heterochrony, Democracy, Sophia
Time has always been central to human institutions; this is not a Christian innovation. When Cleisthenes instituted his democratic reforms in late sixth-century Athens, remaking time was integral to the project. A new ten-month civic calendar structured the rotation of the Council of 500, ensuring that fifty council members were always present in the city. These prytaneis committed to serving in Athens during their designated segment of the calendar. [5 ]
The imposition of measurable time is always a way of governing motion—and therefore a way of governing how those motions age.
Crucially, this civic calendar did not replace the existing lunar calendar of religious festivals. It ran alongside it. The result was an explicit coexistence of temporalities, a lived experience of heterochrony. This capacity to inhabit multiple times consciously and deliberately mattered politically. As many have argued, the absence of strong institutions binding the Greek poleis into a unified political order was a key condition for the democratic experimentation of the sixth century BCE. Christian Meier captures this well:
Gradually, politics moved into the foreground. The need to find institutional ways to prevent uprisings, conflict, and civil war became more urgent. As these efforts showed success, there was a demand for more. All of Greece became a field of experimentation. What happened in one place was watched in another; similar rules required different adaptations; where some had failed others tried to do better. (Athens, 147)
Greek political innovation—and Cleisthenes’ heterochronic ordering of time—emerged as direct responses to the problem of vengeance in the absence of stabilizing institutions.
It is no accident, then, that the Greek practices of sophia (wisdom) and dikē (justice) arise in this same context. In their earliest formations, these were not anchored in durable institutions that imposed a single temporality on a broad population. Instead, they took shape in a world that demanded attentiveness to multiple rhythms at once. In that sense, the Greek experience of heterochrony was not a defect to be overcome but a capacity to be cultivated.
The Greeks show us that heterochronic experience can function as a resource for living with conflict without automatically surrendering to vengeance. We lose something essential in our thinking if we sever that connection.
See my related essays on the Iliad and the problem of violence and temporality.
Renewal or Destruction?
While revenge and vengeance are not explicit organizing concepts in Juvenescence, the problem of institutional destruction certainly is. If our democratic and modern institutions were already under strain in 2014—a strain that now appears to be reaching a breaking point—then our experience of time is showing its age. And insofar as those institutions trace their lineage back through the Federalists to Solon and Cleisthenes, we should not forget their origins in sophia and dikē: practical responses to the problem of vengeance in societies lacking stable institutional forms.
We now inhabit a strange mixture of temporalities. On one side is a politics of restoration—the fantasy of recovering a lost greatness. On the other is a politics of identity maintenance—holding together constituencies that have been drifting away. Social media demands that we take sides without nuance—where hatred of the other is the main basis for factional belonging.
See my first Substack post on Rejuvenation for my take on this problem of our stuck time in politics.
The deeper problem is that we do not know where this is leading. It is possible that the devastation of ossified institutions is, in some sense, necessary—that administration without renewal has exhausted its legitimacy. But if we treat this moment as driven by a fixed historical logic, we risk becoming spectators of a fate we imagine already written, staring at circular time from the outside.
Nietzsche warns against this posture. What is required instead is the Augenblick: the moment in which past and future collide in an Eternally Recurring now charged with responsibility rather than inevitability.
This is precisely where Harrison situates Juvenescence. He asks whether the present moment signals a form of renewal or merely destruction. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ‘destructive character,’ Harrison considers a force that clears away not out of hatred but out of a need to ‘make room,’ to find a way through the encrusted accumulations of history (115–18). This differs from Nietzschean ressentiment, yet the two can coexist.
I have argued in another essay that contemporary reactionary movements in the United States are best understood through a mixture of ressentiment and Benjamin’s acedia: the sense that all meaningful projects lie in the past, and that those who inherited their fruits are entitled to enjoy them without friction. Ressentiment waits beneath this posture as dormant vengeance—not weakened vengeance as Nietzsche first formulated it—ready to assert its claim to the spoils. [6]
When ressentiment takes power, it begins to resemble mênis—an amoral, unbounded vengeance that asserts status through destruction. This, too, is a way of composing time.
What matters for Harrison—and for us—is that modern democracies inherit a temporality that periodically requires the destruction of history in the name of renewal. The Enlightenment promise of self-evident reason carries both creative and catastrophic potential. At the outset, we cannot know which will prevail. As Harrison writes in 2014, “It is too early to say” (116).
Perhaps it is always too early to say.
This is the untimely problem Nietzsche posed long ago. It is why the ongoing mixture of No-saying and Yes-saying—destruction and renewal—must be handled with care, curiosity, and wisdom.
Stasis and Rejuvenation
The relation between No-saying and Yes-saying must be understood temporally, not spatially. When we spatialize the problem, we reach for metaphors of balance and equilibrium. We tell ourselves to manage the load, to cope, to stabilize. This is already a sign of trouble.
Nietzsche gives us a better grammar in Zarathustra’s three metamorphoses. The camel bears the accumulated weight of inherited values, institutions, and expectations. The lion learns to say No—to negate what has become intolerable, ossified, or unjust. But the lion cannot create. Its freedom is purely negative. If we remain with the lion, No-saying hardens into ressentiment.
Without the child, we become stuck in time.
The child does not erase the past, nor does it merely rebel against it. It creates by transforming inheritance into possibility. It says Yes without forgetting what it has overcome. This is not balance. It is movement—temporal, not spatial. It is the difference between carrying burdens forever, endlessly negating them, or learning how to age without turning against time itself.
This is where juvenescence becomes decisive. I’ll call it rejuvenation.
Rejuvenation is not novelty overcoming tradition. It is the capacity to keep what is youthful alive as we age—personally, culturally, and institutionally. What makes the present moment so precarious is that we no longer experience ourselves, or our institutions, as capable of this transformation.
The United States Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. The burst of rejuvenation that marked the mid-twentieth century—much of it aimed at expanding political participation—has given way to stasis. Today, constitutional renewal appears almost unimaginable. Interpretive doctrines such as originalism convert age into authority and immobility into virtue.
This is not stability. It is a composition of time in which rejuvenation has become unthinkable.
Rejuvenation is neither destruction nor preservation. It is the practiced capacity to move from camel to lion to child without getting trapped in any one of them.
Wisdom and Genius
This brings us to the distinction at the heart of Juvenescence: wisdom and genius. These are not psychological traits, nor timeless ideals. They are functions of age.
Wisdom and genius should not be opposed as reverence for the past versus faith in the future. That opposition merely repeats the camel–lion stalemate in another register. Harrison’s question is subtler and more demanding: can a society rejuvenate itself without repudiating its inheritance? Can it create without denying its historicity? (43–44)
‘Genuine newness,’ Harrison writes, ‘entails the rejuvenation, rather than the repudiation, of that from which it seeks freedom and independence’ (97). Genius without wisdom accelerates toward destruction. Wisdom without genius hardens into stasis. Juvenescence names the fragile, demanding practice of holding them together across time.
This is what Nietzsche called great health. It is not balance. It is not equilibrium. It is the ongoing work of learning how to say No without becoming trapped in negation—and how to say Yes without pretending we stand outside time.
That work is never finished. But it is the only way forward.
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Footnotes
[1] I’m using the Stanford University Press edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche for my English translations. See Volume 9, page 286 for this passage.
[2] See David Ferrell Krell’s translation of this lecture in Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger, Volumes One and Two, Harper One.
[3] ‘On Redemption’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[4] Robert A. Markus has an excellent discussion on how this need for recurring cycles within Christianity’s composition of linear time led to an extensive proliferation of ceremonies and rituals as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. See his chapter on “Kairoi: Christian Times and the Past” in The End of Ancient Christianity.
[5] This is a very well understood story, but a good entry point into it can be found in Pierre Leveque and Pierre Vidal-Niquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant’s review and extension of this work in an essay entitled, ‘Space and Political Organization in Ancient Greece’, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort trans., Zone Books 2006.