Clegg, Jerry S.  "Nietzsche and the Ascent of Man in a Cyclical Cosmos."  Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (January 1981): 81-94.

Excerpt:

“ANYONE WHO IS either innocent or determined enough to take the myriad speculative genealogies and prophesies of Nietzsche’s work at face value will readily allow that it tenders an evolutionary theory of history. The Birth of Tragedy claims that we are nearing the end of a “Socratic” era and that the change impending will be for the better as we overcome in ourselves a debilitating, scientific outlook and acquire a more healthy mode of perception drawn from the arts. Later books insist on parallel historical divisions and make similar, equally celebrated prophesies. On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Antichrist all identify our earliest ancestors as pagan, naive, innocent “beasts” whose Christian descendants, owing in part to the harsh repressions of military and priestly elites, have evolved into self-conscious, guilty “men” in need of redemption. These same works suggest that that redemption will come to our own descendants only by way of further evolution in an age now beginning that will result in self-conscious, but innocent “supermen.” According to Thus Spake Zarathustra “man” is but a bridge between the prehuman and the posthuman, and the “great noon” that will mark the second advance of the race is upon us.l A new habit, Nietzsche speculates in Human, All-too-Human, is forming in us that in time may be powerful enough to give humanity the strength to produce conscious, wise, innocent men as it now produces conscious, unwise, guilty men. 2 Our old sick ideals are now fighting their last fight, he avows in The Joyful Wisdom. 3 Indeed, ac- cording to The Antichrist* and On the Genealogy of Morals s a new age of emancipation and innocence has already begun. Thus it would seem transparently clear that for Nietzsche we live at a pivotal point in our race’s history, with a grim era behind us but with brighter prospects before us. It would seem, too, that that assessment of our age allowed him to flirt with a sense of historical mission, for — although one may find an element of ironic bravado in his boasts he was ready to claim for his writings a millennial import in marking the end of one stage in our development and the beginning of another. “I might shoot the history of mankind into two halves,” he wrote to his friend Overbeck, 6 thereby commenting in private on his public,”

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