Loeb’s reading, again, one of the central claims of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—woven right into the narrative arc of the book that Nietzsche himself considered to be his most important, indeed, to be world-changing—is the claim of “willing backward” (“Zurückwollen”). This is the power to influence the meaning and import of the past, if never to change the physical events of that past. This, of course, constitutes a willed interpretation of the past from the future that changes the meaning of that past, not dissimilar to how Elliot Wolfson’s philosophical readings of medieval kabbalah change and
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