Dissenters notwithstanding, Hegel and Nietzsche have long been held to be fundamentally irreconcilable, not least because of Nietzsche’s hostility towards all philosophical systems – ‘The will to system is a lack of integrity’ (TI ‘Maxims and Arrows’ 26, KSA 6:63) – and his animus towards those late eighteenthcentury philosophers who delayed ‘the victory of scientific atheism’ and with it the death of God. According to Nietzsche, Hegel ‘was a delayer par excellence, with his grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence by finally enlisting the help of our sixth sense, the “historical sense”’ (GS 357, KSA 3:599). In recent years, however, renewed attempts at a rapprochement between the two philosophers have been made. Robert R. Williams, for example, has sought to establish points of convergence in the specific areas of tragedy, recognition and the ‘death of God’, while Will Dudley finds common ground in the two thinkers’ positing of true freedom in the practice of philosophy. I shall also touch on the latter by highlighting Hegel and Nietzsche’s common calls for a practice of philosophy uncontaminated by moral bias – although, as I have endeavoured to show in the previous two chapters, Nietzsche’s re-purposing of the Christian virtues of honesty, obedience, self-control and self-denial evinces a clear moral bias, albeit one predicated on the law of becoming rather than on any divinely ordained law.

My main contention in this chapter is that Nietzsche’s principle of affirmative negation, which in Zarathustra is figured as both lion spirit and Untergang (destruction), is an iteration of Hegel’s ‘labour of the negative’ (PhS §19, W 3:24). In section 1, I shall underscore the destructive force of the collocation ‘affirmative negation’. In section 2, I will show how the lion spirit of negation, the second stage in what Zarathustra refers to as the three metamorphoses of the spirit from camel to lion to child (Z1 ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’, KSA 4:29–31), unwittingly recuperates Hegel’s assertion that ‘Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation’ (PhS §32, W 3:36).