Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Before Sunrise
www.continuumbooks.com
Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
James Luchte
Part I: Of Method
Notes 183
Bibliography and Further Reading 207
Index 211
Contributors
We would like to thank Rainer Hanshe of the Nietzsche Circle, and Greg Moore
and Duncan Large of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, for their assistance on
this project.
List of Abbreviations
AC The Anti-Christ
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT Birth of Tragedy
CW The Case of Wagner
D Daybreak
EH Ecce Homo
GM Genealogy of Morals
GS Gay Science
HC Homers Contest
HH Human All Too Human
PTAG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
TI Twilight of the Idols
UM Untimely Meditations
WP Will to Power
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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Introduction
The world is deep and deeper than the day had ever thought.
From Before Sunrise, Thus Spoke Zarathustra1
A sense of irony attaches itself to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, although not due
to any fault of its own (or, perhaps it is the guilty book par excellence). It is a
work that was written for philosophical purposes, and for a cultured, philo-
sophical audience. Yet, it is written in a style which was, and still is, not
recognized as philosophical and is thus not taken seriously as philosophy
(disregarding for the moment the scattered clusters of researchers in the
Continental tradition). At the same time, however, due to its philosophical
content and the status of its author as a philosopher, Z is regarded by special-
ists in literature as a work of philosophy. The work thus ends up homeless.
The irony is, in this way, due to the ambiguous, or perhaps, undecidable,
status of the work, which simultaneously plays in the fields of literature and
of philosophy. One could, and always does ask, is this accursed status not
Nietzsches own fault, after all, for having transgressed the customary
boundaries of our academic division of labour? It response to such a
question, it can just as simply be argued that it is this very distinction which
itself has given rise to the irony (and the problem of assignment) in the first
place. Indeed, is it not the case that this problem is itself indicative of the
revolutionary significance of Zarathustra, as its homelessness is an intima-
tion that it is outside of the motley city of reason and of its organizational
compartments? The reception of Z, and its ambiguous status, in this light,
can once again serve as an indication of a task yet to be fulfilled, a task for
the philosophers of the future.
For the philosophers of the analytic revolution, Nietzsches greatest
work is a work of poetry, of literature, capable only of conjuring forth a
metaphysical attitude towards life. In the opinion of no lesser figure than
2 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Of Method
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Chapter 1
You will be able to tell from the Finale [of Zarathustra] what the whole symphony
is really saying.2
Without music life would be simply an error, exhausting toil, exile. This
well known pronouncement makes a fitting motto for Nietzsches life and
work.3 He grew up in a milieu pervaded by music. As a teenager, he wrote of
his departed father: He would fill his hours of leisure with study and music.
In piano playing he attained a significant level of skill, especially in free
improvisation. Naumburg, where Nietzsche spent his childhood, offered
like many towns in Germany at the time an unusually rich array of musical
possibilities, from oratorios in the cathedral to chamber music in private
homes. The young Nietzsche writes fondly of his best friend, Gustav Krug,
and the musical riches of the Krug family home, where the paterfamilias was
a good friend of Mendelssohns and himself an accomplished amateur
composer and musician. As well as playing music together, Nietzsche and the
younger Krug would spend hours reading and discussing musical scores.
In his early autobiographical essays, Nietzsche describes several encoun-
ters with the sublime in the towns churches and cathedral while listening
to works by Hndel, Mozart, Haydn, and Mendelssohn. Piano lessons from
an early age developed his own talent on that instrument, and after he left
home for boarding school, his correspondence is filled with requests to his
mother to send him musical scores. In an autobiographical fragment
On Music he writes: Music often speaks to us more urgently in tones than
poetry does in words, engaging the most secret folds of the heart. . . . May
this glorious gift from God always be my companion on the pathways of
life. Once when an illness deprived him of piano playing, he wrote to his
10 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Only now is the human being coming to realize that music is a sign-
language of the affects: and we shall later learn to recognize clearly the
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 11
Even after having admitted to himself that the proper medium for his
work was the language of words rather than tones, Nietzsche still hoped to
attain some kind of fusion between the two. In 1887 he wrote to Kselitz:
Beyond a doubt, in the very depths of my being I would like to have been able
to compose the music that you yourself compose and my own music
(books included) was only done faute de mieux.9 And when he writes two
years later that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes
a musician, he is clearly referring to himself as one whose musicianship
had infused his philosophizing.10 When Nietzsche wrote in a letter to the
conductor Hermann Levi, Perhaps there has never been a philosopher
who was so fundamentally a musician as I am, the only possible exception
that comes to mind is Rousseau.11 What is certain, however, is that
Nietzsches writings have inspired the composition of more music than
have those of any other philosopher which is some measure of the success
of his efforts to infuse his philosophy with music. By 1975, over 170
composers had created some 370 musical settings of 90 texts by Nietzsche,
among them 87 pieces that are settings of excerpts from Zarathustra or are
explicitly inspired by the text as a whole.12
The whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be reckoned as music,
Nietzsche writes in retrospect about his favourite book, certainly a rebirth
in the art of hearing was a precondition of it. The first mention of the idea
that inspired this work, the eternal recurrence of the same, occurs in a
notebook entry marked Beginning of August 1881 in Sils-Maria.13 It is
significant that in the letter to Kselitz which announces this inspiration he
also writes: I have been forced to give up reading scores and playing the
piano once and for all.14 Shortly thereafter, a notebook entry mentions a
projected work with the title Midday and Eternity and a first sentence that
begins: Zarathustra, born near Lake Urmi, in his thirtieth year left his
home . . . The work will consist of four parts, and the sketch begins: First
Book in the style of the first movement of [Beethovens] Ninth Symphony.15
Nietzsche recounts in EC that the first part of Zarathustra came to
him and above all Zarathustra himself, as a type . . . overwhelmed me
shortly after he had moved to Rapallo, a small town on the Ligurian coast
east of Genoa.16 In a letter to Kselitz from Rapallo, Nietzsche discusses
the problem, raised by Wagner but still unsolved, of how a whole act of
an opera could achieve a symphonic unity as an organism.17 A crucial
12 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
point is that the flow of affects, the whole structure of the act has to have
something of the schema of the movement of a symphony: certain respon-
sions and so forth. Three weeks later, another letter to Kselitz announces
the completion of a small book . . . my best. . . . It is to be called: Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. With this book I have entered into a new Ring. The allusion
to Wagners Ring of the Nibelungen, not to mention the challenge to the
worlds longest, if not greatest, opera, is not as far-fetched as it sounds.18
When on the same day he writes to his best friend, Franz Overbeck, to tell
him about the new book, he adds: I am now engaged for a couple more
days with the Nagelprobe revisions, a work requiring refined hearing, for
which one cannot be sufficiently alone (324). The mix of metaphors is
significant: Nagelprobe alludes to the Latin ad unguem, which refers to the
sculptors practice of running a fingernail across a surface to test its
smoothness and yet Nietzsche is testing the perfection of his language
by listening to it.19
Two months later, when he asks his Kselitz, Under which rubric does
this Zarathustra really belong? he reverts to the symphonic in answering his
own question: I almost believe that it comes under symphonies. What is
certain is that with this I have crossed over into another world. Finally, after
finishing the third part he refers to it several times as the finale of my
symphony. And at the same time he writes to Kselitz: Music is by far the
best thing; now I want more than ever to be a musician.20
Why does Nietzsche insist on calling this work a symphony? Given that the
protagonist not only speaks but also sings at crucial junctures in the book,
then why not an opera a new Ring in a different medium? Or, given the
predominance of Zarathustras voice over all the others, why not an oratorio
with a dominating soloist, or even a concerto with Zarathustras voice as the
solo instrument? Yet no lesser authority than Gustav Mahler confirms
Nietzsches claim about his favourite work: His Zarathustra was born
completely from the spirit of music, and is even symphonically
constructed.21 Given that Mahler understood the structure of the classical
symphony as well as any human being that ever lived, this comment demands
to be taken seriously.
The word symphony (or sinfonia) was first used in the musical sense to
refer to an instrumental prelude for, or interlude in, an opera or oratorio.22
The classical symphony grew out of several different musical forms and
especially from the French overture (as perfected by Lully) and the Italian
sinfonia (with Scarlatti as exemplary). When these forms became indepen-
dent works, they usually consisted of three movements, in a pattern of
fast slow fast. The pre-classical symphony, as developed by numerous
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 13
First movement
set a serious tone and establish a grand scale that sets the tone for later
stages of the work. This is certainly the function of Zarathustras Prologue,
which introduces the major places and themes to follow: the solitude of
Zarathustras mountain-top cave, the death of God, his descent and return
to human beings, the problem of the audience, the last human, and his
teaching concerning the Overhuman.25 The first of Zarathustras speeches,
On the Three Transformations (1.1), is like a second, much shorter intro-
duction, insofar as it depicts a general process, invoking through vivid
imagery three transformations of the spirit to be exemplified in the three
sections (exposition, development, recapitulation) of the First Part. Taking
chapters 1.8 (On the Tree on the Mountainside) and 1.15 (On the Thou-
sand Goals and One) as transitions, the exposition, development, and
recapitulation would each consist of six chapters (27, 914, 1621), with
the last chapter (16.22) understood as a coda.
The exposition in a symphonys first movement presents two or more
themes, or groups of themes, which are often repeated after a shift in key.
The exposition chapters (27) correspond to the camel stage of the spirit
insofar as they discuss traditional teachings concerning human existence.
The first theme, virtue, is sounded by the wise man who occupies a profes-
sorial chair for that subject, advocating the practice of virtue as a means to
sound sleep. Zarathustra wryly comments on the splendidly soporific effects
of these rote prescriptions. The next two speeches, On Believers in a World
Behind and On the Despisers of the Body, introduce the second theme
or group of themes: the way suffering and weariness of will prompt people
to invent Gods and worlds behind, and to denigrate the earth and the
living body as the loci of suffering.
The next two speeches, On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions (1.5)
and On the Pale Criminal (1.6) resume the theme of the virtues, but in a
different key, insofar as the audience of brothers for the speech
On Believers in a World Behind has now shrunk to a singular brother to
whom a more intimate form of address is appropriate, and the despisers of
the body have been replaced by the narrower class of judges and sacrifi-
cers. Zarathustra now revisions the virtues as transformations of the
passions, of drives originating from the body though the Triebe (drives)
are not mentioned by name until the eighth speech.
The last two speeches of the exposition, On Reading and Writing and
On the Tree on the Mountainside, intimate Zarathustras responsion to
the second theme, whereby spiritual transcendence to a divine realm
beyond this world is replaced by an ecstatic flight within this world
occasioned by the dancing of a God (Dionysus) through the human body.
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 15
There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom
rejection of life must be preached.
Full is the earth of the superfluous; corrupted is life by the all too many.
Let one use eternal life to lure them away from this life!
The speech revisits the theme of suffering as a reason for rejecting life, and
now shows furious labour and distraction and the desire for what is fast,
and new, and strange as symptoms of the drive to escape from suffering.
Zarathustra ends the speech with the wish, whether one calls it death or
eternal life, that the preachers of death would just pass on to it quickly
taking their disciples with them.
In the next speech, On War and Warrior Peoples (1.10) Zarathustra
incites his brothers in warfare to become warriors of understanding and
to wage spiritual and intellectual warfare war for your own thoughts
against the traditionally entrenched teachings. He sets a good example by
attacking the institutions of the state and its public sphere in his next two
speeches, showing how their suppression of vital originality promotes death
and destruction rather than life and creativity. In the following two speeches,
which are softer in tone, Zarathustra revalues the virtue of chastity and the
institution of friendship by revealing the repressed vice that often lurks
behind chastity and the need for enmity in friendship.
16 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
animal passions turn into virtues is a first step, after which the human as
virtuous is to be overcome (1.5); but now marriage can help raise sexual
love above the level of two animals finding each other out to a
sympathizing with suffering and disguised Gods and thereby an arrow and
yearning for the Overhuman (1.20). Lastly, the speech On Free Death
(1.21), with its exhortations to welcome death at the right time as a
festival and thereby love the earth more, harks back to the courage that
wants to laugh, that can kill with laughter the Spirit of Heaviness, through
whom all things fall and all mortal creatures are brought down and back
into the earth (1.7).
The final speech, On the Bestowing Virtue (1.22), is a kind of coda,
set outside the town, in which Zarathustra takes leave of his disciples
(first mention of them as disciples) but not before speaking to them
of the highest virtue. He recapitulates several main themes from
Part I: the body as something that goes through history incorporating
error as well as reason; the will (to power) as the origin of virtue; the
exhortation to his brothers to stay true to the earth. Then he finishes by
encouraging his disciples to question his teachings and reject him as a
teacher: Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves. The climax of the
speech amplifies and exalts the ineffectual image from his first speech to
the people in the marketplace, The human is a rope fastened between
beast and Overhuman, by confidently proclaiming the advent of the
Great Midday:
when the human stands in the middle of its path between beast and
Overhuman and celebrates its way to evening as its highest hope; for it is
the way to a new morning.
Second movement
. . . and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.
Verily, with different eyes, my brothers, shall I then seek my lost ones; with
a different love shall I then love you.
Nietzsche later quotes the slow opening of the speech Upon the Isles of
the Blest (2.2):
The figs are falling from the trees, they are good and sweet; and as they
fall, their red skins burst. A north wind am I to all ripe figs.
And thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their
juice and their sweet flesh! Autumn is all around and clear sky and
afternoon.
In EH, he writes of these lines: From an infinite fullness of light and depth
of happiness there falls drop after drop, word after word a tender slow-
ness is the tempo of these speeches.28 A tender slowness indeed, in which
Zarathustras wisdom presents itself as an understanding that God is a
thought, a supposition, while the Overhuman is a possibility that can actu-
ally be created by humans, though only through hard work and pain and
suffering, joyful begetting and the pangs of giving birth. He also catches a
glimpse of the wisdom that regards creating as the great redemption from
suffering and willing as the ultimate liberator and joy-bringer.
The next five speeches (2.37) constitute the first episode by intro-
ducing variations on the theme of wisdom, drawn from the Judeo-Christian
and modern democratic perspectives. Zarathustra understands these
perspectives because he himself has inhabited them earlier in his life, but
he now finds them wanting. In On Those Who Pity, he proposes that his
friends favour great love [which] overcomes forgiveness and pitying; in
On the Priests he confesses his being related to those brethren, and gently
ridicules their susceptibility to those whom the people call redeemers.
In On the Virtuous, he apologizes to them for depriving them of the ideals
of their immaturity reward, retribution, punishment, righteous
revenge while promising that the next wave from the sea of ideas will
shower them with new colorful seashells with which to play. Turning to
what Nietzsche sees as the extension of Christianity (as Platonism for the
people) into the modern period in the form of egalitarian democracy,
On the Rabble laments the way the rabbles pretensions towards ruling
and creating have co-opted politics and culture. On the Tarantulas exposes
the preachers of equality as vengeful spiders compensating for their own
impotence by poisoning the efforts of those more gifted than they. Near the
beginning of his expos, Zarathustra sounds a note of hope that anticipates
the return to the main theme, when he says, fortissimo: That humanity might
be redeemed from revenge : that is for me the bridge to the highest hope and a
rainbow after lasting storms (2.7).
20 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
With On the Famous Wise Men and the next four chapters (2.812),
Zarathustra returns to the theme of his Wild Wisdom. Here for the first
time he directly addresses his predecessors in the philosophical tradition as
You famous wise men. His speech is direct to the point of bluntness, insofar
as he accuses them (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling?) of pandering
to the people and the peoples rulers while merely feigning a will to truth.
Having made of wisdom a poorhouse and hospital for wretched poets and
being now not driven by any strong wind or will, they are incapable of
following Zarathustras Wild Wisdom which goes across the sea like a sail,
rounded and swollen and trembling from the violence of the wind [and] of
the spirit (2.8).
At the beginning of the next three chapters The Night-Song, The
Dance-Song, The Grave-Song Zarathustra suddenly bursts into a new
mode of discourse: singing rather than speaking. Slow movements are
usually lyrical, and this section is as lyrical as philosophy can become. In EH,
Nietzsche calls the Night-Song the language of the dithyramb, the song
sung at ancient Greek festivals in honour of Dionysus.29 He writes of it as
the immortal lament that, through an abundance of light and power,
through ones sunlike nature, one is condemned not to love and then he
quotes the Night-Song (all 74 lines of it) in its entirety. Thus suffers a God,
a Dionysus, is his comment. The response to such a dithyramb of sunlike-
isolation in light would be Ariadne and we hear it near the symphonys
end, in On the Great Yearning (3.14).
Zarathustra characterizes the Dance-Song (2.10) as a mocking-song on
the Spirit of Heaviness, my supreme and most powerful Devil, and he sings
it for the God Cupid, or Eros, and some young maidens as they dance
together on a green meadow. There is no actual mention of the Spirit of
Heaviness in the song, though we do hear two new voices those of Life
and Zarathustras Wisdom personified as feminine figures as Zarathustra
tries to decide between them, and concludes that, while he is fond of
Wisdom, it is ultimately Life that he loves. (He is the opposite of the tradi-
tional Platonic philosopher, who loves wisdom so much as to demean life.)
His song mocks the Spirit of Heaviness presumably because Zarathustra
loves Life as changeable and wild and in all things a woman, and not a
virtuous one even though he is going to have to leave her in the end.
So, as he asks his friends when the song is over: Is it not folly to go on
living?
In The Grave-Song, (2.11) his wise mockery of the Spirit of Heaviness
(representative of Platonic-Christian wisdom) continues as he leaves the
Isles of the Blest and sails to the Isle of the Graves, where he will sing to the
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 21
visions and apparitions of [his] youth who are buried there. In singing this
song, Zarathustra becomes aware of his will as something invulnerable,
unburiable, within, something that can continue to break through all
graves! Appropriately directed, the will can resurrect what is unredeemed
from his youth, thereby making a mockery of the Spirit of Heaviness that
brings everything down to an earthy grave.
This reprise of the theme of wisdom culminates in the chapter On Self-
Overcoming (2.12), where Zarathustra addresses his most select audience,
you who are wisest, and intimates to them what Life has taught him (what
is the profoundest philosophical teaching in the book): that all life is will to
power, and that Life herself claims to be in her own words, fortissimo
that which must always overcome itself As perpetual self-overcoming, life
takes form in the wise as a constant process of reinterpretation which anni-
hilates old and creates new values.
The second episode (2.1318) examines various pretensions to wisdom:
about beauty and the sublime on the part of thinkers like Kant (On Those
Who Are Sublime), about culture and education by men of the present
(On the Land of Culture), about abstract knowledge of the world which is
untainted by passion (On Immaculate Perception), about the world in
general by scholars (On the Scholars) and poets (On the Poets), and
about the future on the part of political revolutionaries (On Great Events).
With quiet irony, Zarathustra shows, Socrates-like, all these pretensions to
be empty.
Then suddenly, without warning: . . . and I saw a great mournfulness
come over humankind. Another speech by one other than Zarathustra,
The Soothsayer (2.19). Zarathustra is transformed by hearing the darkly
nihilistic tidings: All is empty, all is the same, all has been! For three
days he took neither drink nor food, had no rest, and lost his speech,
fell into a deep sleep, and when he awoke he recounted a terrifying
dream that echoes, in a minor key, as it were, themes from The
Grave-Song. As a night- and grave-watchman in the lonely mountain-
castle of death, he is guarding glass coffins [containing] life that had
been overcome when a wind breaks open the castle gates and casts before
him a black coffin which bursts open and spews forth a thousand peals
of laughter from a thousand masks of children, angels, owls, fools, and
child-sized butterflies. His favourite disciple offers an optimistic inter-
pretation to the effect that Zarathustra is himself the wind and the coffin,
and will overcome by means of laughter all nihilistic death-weariness. But
Zarathustra refuses this interpretation, knowing that nihilism is not so
easily overcome.
22 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Third movement
The third and last movement of the early classical symphony assumes a
variety of forms sonata-allegro, minuet (and trio), or scherzo and trio, or
rondo though the tempo is always fast (allegro to presto) and usually
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 23
But this is my blessing: to stand over each and every thing as its own
Heaven, as its round roof, its azure bell and eternal security . . .
For all things are baptized at the fount of eternity and beyond good
and evil.
24 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The world is deep and deeper than ever the day has thought.
The next four chapters (58) find Zarathustra back on terra firma, eager
to discover whether humanity has become greater or smaller during his
absence, and addressing an unspecified audience about what he finds.
In On the Virtue That Makes Smaller, he derides the peoples doctrine of
happiness and virtue, which has diminished human stature. As Zarathustra
the Godless, he brings his speech to a climax by fulminating like an Old
Testament prophet against the pathetic weariness of the people: Oh blessd
hour of lightning! Oh mystery before midday! Raging fires will I yet make
of them one day and heralds with tongues of flame.
The quietly lyrical interlude that follows, Upon the Mount of Olives
(3.6), was originally called The Winter Song and still ends with the refrain
Thus sang Zarathustra. The song recounts how he has learned to survive
in public by concealing his sun and unshakeable solar will beneath a veil
of wintry silence. Zarathustra addresses the last part to You snow-bearded
silent winter Heaven, echoing his ecstatic apostrophe to the light-abyss of
Heaven before sunrise and thanking the winter Heaven for teaching the
long and luminous silence.
On Passing By brings our speaker to the great city, where the foaming
fool known as Zarathustras ape delivers a harangue on the slaughter-
houses and soup-kitchens of the spirit (3.7). Zarathustras response
deprecates the revenge evidenced by the fools harangue, culminates in
another Old Testament fulmination: Woe unto this great city! And would
that I might already see the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed! But
it ends with a sudden drop in volume, with Zarathustras wise advice: Where
one can no longer love, there one should pass by! . This sets the tone for
the last speech in the episode, On Apostates, in which he chides with
gentle humour his former disciples who have become pious again.
He tells of how the Gods laughed themselves to death when one of them
claimed, There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!
In response all the Gods laughed, shouting: Is just this not Godliness, that
there are Gods, but no God?
With The Return Home (3.9), Zarathustra comes back to the solitude of
his cave and to another feminine figure, Solitude so he is not alone and
he remains there until the end of Part III. This move also marks a return to
the theme of eternal recurrence (though it is not mentioned by name),
since in his solitude Zarathustra is able to speak, and hear himself speak,
The Symphonic Structure of Zarathustra 25
a different language one that often speaks itself. As he says to his Solitude:
Here the words and word-shrines of all Being spring open for me: all Being
wants to become word here, all Becoming wants to learn from me here how
to talk. Practice in listening for and speaking such words is necessary for
his being able to summon and give voice to the thought of eternal
recurrence.
The speech On the Three Evils (apparently addressed to his Solitude)
begins with a dream in which Zarathustra weighs the things of the world
anew, and revalues traits that have traditionally been denigrated: sensuality,
the lust to rule, and selfishness. In the light of eternal recurrence, which
affirms the innocence of becoming, these apparent vices can be seen to be
virtues. Once more the culmination is biblical in tone (though now New
Testament): But for all these [world-weary cowards and cross-spiders] the
day is now at hand, the transformation, the sword of judgment, the Great
Midday: then shall much be revealed!
In the next speech, On the Spirit of Heaviness (3.11), Zarathustra
takes on his arch-enemy whose task is to impede the self-love and self-
knowledge that are necessary for affirming eternal recurrence. Since
much that is in the human being is like an oyster: namely, disgusting and
slippery and hard to grasp, the self-knowledge that is the prerequisite for
self-love is difficult to attain not least because the Spirit of Heaviness
wants to impose a fixed, traditional standard upon all. But he has discov-
ered himself who can say: This is my good and evil; with that he has struck
dumb the mole and dwarf who says: Good for all, evil for all. In the
light of eternal recurrence, one realizes that (ones) evil is necessary for
and necessarily connected with (ones) good, so that to affirm one is to
affirm the other. Yet, what is to be cultivated is affirmation on the basis of
taste, to avoid the slack quietism of all-contentment, which is inclined to
chew and digest everything truly the way of swine! Cultivation of taste
requires a questioning and trying out of many ways, which leads to the
statement of judicious pluralism with which this speech and section
conclude:
This is just my way: where is yours? Thus I answered those who asked
of me the way. For the way does not exist!
The next chapter, On Old and New Tablets (3.12) is by far the longest
in the book, though its division into 30 short sections lends it a tempo suit-
able for an episode in the fast final movement of a symphony. While the
first five sections seem continuous with the preceding three chapters,
26 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the giver not be thankful that the taker has taken? Is bestowing not a need?
Is taking not being merciful? In The Night-Song, he had called his
soul the song of a lover, and now at the end of The Great Yearning he
exhorts her to sing. She obliges with The Other Dance-Song (3.15) in
which Zarathustra, wearing the mask of Dionysus, asserts his mastery over
the Maenad Life.
The tempo of this song, with its rhyming couplets in irregularly syncopated
rhythms, calls attention to its briskness at the end, when Zarathustra sings:
You shall dance and also scream to my whip-cracks brisk tempo! I did not
forget the whip, did I? No! The song also has overtones of the duets
between Don Jos and Carmen in Bizets opera (perhaps the best opera
there is), which Nietzsche heard many times in the two years before he wrote
this chapter.33 Life then confesses her love for Zarathustra and her jealousy
of his Wisdom yet is candid in admitting that, if his Wisdom were to leave
him, she would too. After all, so she claims, Zarathustra is not true enough to
her, entertaining thoughts of leaving her, of dying, whenever he hears the
ancient heavy heavy booming-bell strike the 12 strokes of midnight.
Each of the first 11 strokes precedes a line of the most famous poem
Nietzsche wrote, O Mensch! Gieb Acht! which Gustav Mahler set to
profoundly haunting music in his Third Symphony. But after the twelfth
stroke is silence, the silence of the grave which precedes the joyful and
triumphant final song, The Seven Seals (or: The Yea- and Amen-Song),
which hymns the resurrection and mystic marriage of Zarathustra/Dionysus
and Life/Ariadne in a finale that recalls numerous themes from throughout
the work. Since this is now Zarathustras ultimate victory over the Spirit of
Heaviness, the last words are spoken by the bird-wisdom of the one who
has finally learned to fly: Are all words not made for those who are heavy?
Do all words not lie for one who is light! Sing! speak no more! And then,
sung for the seventh time, the refrain:
Oh how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of all
rings the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, except
for this woman whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!
For I love you, O Eternity!
This love is not of the eternal life promised by the New Testament for the
world to come,34 but is rather love for this radically ephemeral life that
eternally recreates itself at every moment.
28 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Coda
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is probably Nietzsches most read work, but it is rarely
dealt with in scholarly and philosophical discussions of Nietzsches thinking.
This is largely due to its unsuitable style Nietzsche himself refers to the
book both as poetry and as a symphony and many modern commentators
are highly disturbed by its prophetic and metaphorical nature. Nonethe-
less, this lack of serious discussions of Z is problematic. Not only did
Nietzsche see it as his most important work but it also contains all the major
motifs of his later thinking.
In this chapter, I wish to address and summarize our knowledge of some
of the preconditions necessary for an adequate understanding and philo-
sophical discussion of this work. For this purpose, one needs to ask and
answer questions like why Nietzsche praised Z so excessively. What made
him make such exorbitant claims that it is the book of books and that it will
divide mankind into two parts, and why did he spend almost the whole of
his autobiography Ecce Homo quoting and praising the work to an embar-
rassing extent? Why did Nietzsche regard Z as being superior and standing
alone and apart among his works? What does Z contain which is not in
Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and
the like?
The answer cannot merely be a stylistic one, that it contains more poetry.
Nor can it be the philosophical content, for there has been no convincing
claims that Z contains philosophical material which is not to be found in his
other late works. Related to these question is the question who is
Nietzsches Zarathustra? This question, most famously posed by Heidegger,
has received many answers; a Persian founder of religions, Heraclitus, a
prophet, a poet, Empedocles, man or mankind, the future of man or
mankind, and the like. Nietzsche himself answered the question as a sort of
reverse Zoroaster.1 There is some truth in all these suggestions, but none of
them is sufficient. There exists a much better and more accurate answer,
30 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
parallels which exist between his life and the stories in the book (even if
most of them are hidden), and we see it in the manner in which Nietzsche
worked, that is, by continually using his own experiences for his thinking
and writing. Consistent with this, we can also note that Nietzsche wrote a
very large number of autobiographies, the first (a long and impressive one)
already at the age of 14,4 thereafter about six or seven further ones before
he finally wrote EH. It is not wholly inappropriate to see Z as a symbolic
autobiography, one that requires explication and interpretation to fully
disclose how intimately it relates to his life. This seems also to be Nietzsches
view. Not only does he state that it is his most personal book5 but he also
frequently claims that to understand it one needs to have gone through the
experiences it is based on: And to feel with it, for that several generations
are necessary, who first catch up with the inner experiences upon which it
is founded.6
Furthermore, this tendency to use himself and his experiences can be
seen in that he in his published writings often includes little hidden mini-
autobiographies. To take just one such example which seems to have
escaped most readers notice, 272 of Human, All Too Human, called
Annual rings of individual culture, where he not only describes in some
detail his own intellectual development but also generalizes it so that it is no
longer obvious to what a great extent it is his own development he describes;
with his religious upbringing, Emersonian pantheism, Schopenhauerian
and Kantian metaphysics, thereafter an aesthetical metaphysics inspired by
Lange, and the break with metaphysics and idealism to positivism which
occurred in 1875/76, at the age of thirty/thirty-one:
This song is done desires sweet cry died on the lips: a sorcerer did it,
the timely friend, the midday friend no! ask not who he is at midday
it happened, at midday one became two . . . friend Zarathustra.13
This is certainly still truer for Z. He also explicitly admits that it is highly
personal and it is created out of his reality:
The great poet creates only out of his own reality to the point at which
he is afterwards unable to endure his own work. . . . When I have taken
a glance at my Zarathustra I walk up and down my room for half an
hour unable to master an unendurable spasm of sobbing.19
There can be no doubt that Nietzsche felt that Z closely reflected not
just his philosophy but also his life and his development and self-
overcomings.
This is also how it was received by his friends and family. Erwin Rohde, for
example, wrote back: The wise Persian is you,20 and his sister Elisabeth
referred to Zarathustra as identical with Nietzsche already before the book
was written.21
II
little experience of women but know the power of this cat-like being. They
both are apolitical and avoid mass society and the flies at the marketplace.
Both are destroyers of morality, but lived very moral lives. Both love
walking, especially among mountains. Both have an ambivalent view of
followers and disciples, but nonetheless strove intensively to acquire
them. Both have believed beyond the world, in a God, but realized that this
was only a symptom of human suffering, and both proclaimed the death of
God. Both prefer water to alcohol, and both live satisfied in modest poverty.
Let us finish this listing, which could be made much longer, by two of the
most specific similarities but which require a little interpretation both
have been followers of Schopenhauer, the prophet, and been liberated by
life-affirmation from his pessimism,23 and been influenced and awed by
Wagner, the sorcerer.24
Let us examine a few sections from Z, and discuss the parallels between
Nietzsches and Zarathustras lives.
1. Nietzsches first relevant reference to Zarathustra occurs in August
1881, and is as follows:
Zarathustra, born at the lake Urmi, left his home when he was thirty
years old, and went to the province of Aria and wrote there, during ten
years of solitude in the mountains, the Zend-Avesta.25
This is slightly rewritten in the Prologue of Z (and thus also in Die frhliche
Wissenschaft, 342):
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of
his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of
his spirit and his solitude and did not weary of it for ten years.
Zarathustra . . . was born in the town of Urmi, by the lake of the same
name . . . At the age of thirty, he left his home, went eastwards to the
province of Aria and spent there in the mountains ten years in solitude
and occupied himself with composing the Zend-Avesta.27
Zarathustra as Nietzsches Autobiography 35
There has been extensive discussions not only about why Nietzsche selected
Zarathustra as his spokesman but also about such details as to why he chose
thirty years old and a ten year period of solitude. Attempts have been
made to link them to Nietzsches own life. However, in this case this is not
correct. Nietzsche found and picked up the figure of Zarathustra from
Hellwald and borrowed some traits from this work.
On the following three pages after having introduced Zarathustra,
Hellwald refers to a number of other aspects of Zarathustras teaching,
which Nietzsche made use of: We thus for the first time encounter among
the ancient Iranians the delusion of a moral world-order, an idea to which
only higher developed peoples reach, and which influence on the develop-
ment of culture has been of incalculable value.28 Compare Nietzsches
explanation to why he chose Zarathustra as his spokesman in EH:
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name
Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first
immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that
Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the
first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in
the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of
metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, as his work. . . . Zarathustra
created the most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also
be the first to recognize it. . . . the whole of history is indeed the experi-
mental refutation of the proposition of a so-called moral world-order -:
what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any
other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the
supreme virtue.29
This last bit of life was the hardest that I so far have chewed through, and
it is still possible that I will choke of it. . . . If I do not find the alchemist
Zarathustra as Nietzsches Autobiography 37
trick also of making gold also out of this shit then I will be lost. I here
have the very best opportunity to prove that to me all experience are
valuable, all days holy and all men divine!!!!!
This last sentence, a quotation from Emerson, will return in the next
example.
Another stimulus to the whole idea and for the advice of the old woman
is given by Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsches account of the origin of the whip-
scene in her two-volume biography of Nietzsche.36 She there describes
how she in early 1882 read Ivan Turgenevs short story First Love to
Nietzsche, which is about a young man who falls in love with an attractive,
capricious, and spoilt woman, Zinaida, some years older than he, who in
turn, however, falls in love with his father. In one scene, the father hits
her (once) with a horse-whip, but she continues to love him. Elisabeth
claims that Nietzsche reacted negatively to this scene and objected to the
fathers behaviour, but that she defended it and argued that some women
need to have the threat of a symbolic whip to prevent them from misbe-
having. One or two years later she read in Nietzsches presence Z for the
first time, and, with dismay, called out to him: Oh, Fritz, I am the old
woman, to which Nietzsche laughingly answered that he would not tell
anyone.37
4. In The Funeral Song Zarathustra discusses all the visions and conso-
lations of my youth and vaguely mentions a large number of events from
Nietzsches life and childhood.38 The text is based around some words by
Emerson, which Nietzsche frequently quoted and made into the motto of
Die frhliche Wissenschaft : To the poet and sage, all things are friendly and
hallowed, all experience profitable, all days holy, all men divine. He, among
others, mentions Lou Salom and his high expectations on her,39 his family
(my kindred and neighbours) who turned into abscesses and trials, that
Re lured away my favourite singer, his sleepless nights, the mental
anguish, and several other events.
Many other episodes could in a similar manner be referred back to
Nietzsches life.40 In the section The Prophet, Nietzsche describes his first
response to Schopenhauer, and his emancipation from his teaching. The
description of the dream where Zarathustra cries Alpa! Alpa! Who is
bearing his ashes to the mountain? is taken from one of Nietzsches own
dreams, which he had told Reinhart von Seylitz about in the summer of
1877.41 The episode of the howling dog in Of the Vision and the Riddle
goes back to memories of hearing a dog bark when Nietzsche, only five
38 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
years old, found his father collapsed. Several of the episodes of the first four
sections of the third book are apparently based on his experiences during
the remarkable sea journey from Genoa to Messina on Sicily, from 29 March
to 1 April 1882, when he was taken as the sole passenger on a sailing
ship.42
III
Z differs from all of Nietzsches other works in that there are no explicit
references to other authors or books in it. This makes it appear much more
isolated and entirely created out of Nietzsches own thinking than was
really the case. One of the tasks of a commentator on Nietzsche is to expose
or uncover aspects and influences not visible on the surface level of the
text. In this section, I will briefly mention some of the many hidden literary
influences on the work.
Nietzsche claims in EH that he wrote, at least the first three parts of Z in
about ten intensive and inspired days each (the first and second parts were
written in JanuaryJuly 1883, the third part in January 1884, and the fourth
and final part during JanuaryMarch 1885, and published in May and
September 1883, April 1884, and April 1885 respectively). This claim may
in some ways be true but it also gives the wrong impression. He had found
the fundamental idea of the work already in August 1881 when he discov-
ered the idea of eternal recurrence,43 and at least by 1882 he knew that he
was going to write a work like Z.44 His notes from 1882 onwards contains
extensive drafts to such a work, and some of his extensive reading at the
time shows that he was searching for ideas and impulses for such a work.45
The work is also much more closely argued than one would assume if it
were written in just a few inspired days. Nietzsche had prepared the first
book for over a year, but the pieces fell together in ten intensive creative
days. He will later claim that Jenseits von Gut und Bse and Zur Genealogie der
Moral are sorts of commentaries to Z, and written in preparation for this
work. In several ways this is correct, including in that they are based on the
same notes and reading as lay behind Z.
There probably exist a large number of stylistic influences which stimu-
lated Nietzsche to write the work in the prophetic-metaphorical-poetic
manner he did. Most relevant are, apart from Hellwald, Nietzsches
continual parody of the Bible (Old and New Testament) which is well
known and visible throughout the book. However, there also exist other
important probable stimuli, such as Siegfried Lipiners Der entfesselte
Prometheus: Eine Dichtung in 5 Gesngen (Leipzig, 1876), and Carl Spittelers
Zarathustra as Nietzsches Autobiography 39
Prometheus und Epimetheus [1881] (he published his poetry under the
pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem), but their influence have not been firmly
established and no consensus exists.46 Other major suggested and probable
influences on the book are Emerson, Hlderlin, Goethe, Wagner, and
Schopenhauer.
Many other lesser influences exist, or influences for specific themes or
sections, for example: Oldenberg, Kerner, Hartmann, Lecky, Pascal (from
whom he probably took the figure and story of the tightrope walker),
Spinoza, Burckhards Der Cicerone, Roux, Mantegazza, Byron, Baumann,
Vogt, Galton, Taine, Turgenevs First Love, and Prosper Mrimes Carmen.47
I have attempted to make some of this material known by listing and briefly
discussing all of Nietzsches known reading until shortly before he wrote Z
in a previous publication.48
IV
I will in this section deal with a different, but related, question to that of the
rest of the chapter: What is the place of Z among Nietzsches corpus? Was
it, in his own view, his best and most important book? The answer to this
question seems to be that it undoubtedly was. Nietzsches own praise of the
work seems to make it inevitable that he regarded it as his foremost:
He calls it a non plus ultra and claims that it is the most important work that
exists and states that it is the most profound book that humankind
possesses.49 Furthermore, following Nietzsches own view of his develop-
ment (as also reflected in the three metamorphoses) we can see that it
represented Nietzsches coming to himself and his synthesis; after the too
romantic and idealistic first phase and the too positivistic second phase. His
praise of Z in his last book, EH, which he largely wrote between October
and November 1888 but continued to revise until his mental collapse in
early January 1889, was extreme, and he throughout the book quotes from
and refers to Z. In letters he states that the purpose of EH is to get people
to discover and better understand Z emphasizing the importance he
placed on this work.
That he regarded the works written after Z as less important is patent. We
know that he regarded the next two books, Jenseits von Gut und Bse and Zur
Genealogie der Moral, as commentaries to Z, and as preparatory for under-
standing it.50 This was also true for the fifth book of Die frhliche Wissenschaft,
added in 1887.51 That he regarded these books as preparatory for Z, can, for
example, be seen in what was meant to be the last section of Zur Genealogie
der Moral, after having described his desire for the man of the future who
40 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
will restore its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and
antinihilist; the victor over God and nothingness he must come one day:
The mostly short later books, Der Fall Wagner, Gtzen-Dmmerung, Nietzsche
contra Wagner, and Dionysos-Dithyramben he viewed as minor works, confir-
ming the view that Z was without doubt his magnum opus.
Nevertheless, this story does not give the full truth. Nietzsche already
from early on, from 1882 to 84, wanted to go beyond Z, in the sense of
writing something more conventionally argued about his new philosophy
and eternal recurrence, and in the sense of going one step further. This
is the major project Nietzsche worked on the last four or five years of his
life, entitled Midday and Eternity, The Eternal Recurrence, The Will
to Power, and finally Revaluation of All Values. It is this project that he
repeatedly refers to as his Hauptwerk, his main work or magnum opus.53
This project was never completed, but this intention and this project
gave direction to his work and thought during the last years of his life.
Thus, even the figure and the book Zarathustra was meant to be
preparatory.
In early 1884, after he had finished Z in three parts (he had no definite
plans to continue it until late 1884), he clearly had plans to write a greater
work in which he planned to elaborate on his idea of eternal recurrence,54
and on his critique of morality he certainly wrote down a large number of
titles for such a work in 1884 and 1885. It is at this time that his intention to
write a Hauptwerk becomes explicit as can be seen in four letters where
Nietzsche speaks of Z as merely an entrance hall to his philosophy, and
that he was working on the main building. In a letter to Meysenbug, end of
March 1884, he writes that he has finished his Z and calls that work an
entrance hall to my philosophy built for me, to give me courage, and he
hints at that he is working on the main building by claiming that he was
working on the book of my life [das Werk meines Lebens].
In three further letters he refers to Z as merely the Vorhalle to his philos-
ophy, and to his strong sense of purpose and mission.55 It seems clear that
he had in mind a more philosophical (and less metaphorical) work than Z,
but which, in all likelihood, would elaborate on the same fundamental
ideas.
Zarathustra as Nietzsches Autobiography 41
Now, after that I for me have built this entrance hall to my philosophy,
I will have to start again and not grow tired until the main building also
stands finished before me.57
In fact, this was not only an intention, for during much of 1884 Nietzsche
actually planned and worked on this Hauptwerk or main building of his
philosophy.58 At this early stage, it seems most frequently to have been called
Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence as title or subtitle as was still the case in
1888, as we will see below. In early autumn, Nietzsche seems to confirm that
he had fulfilled his plans:
I have practically finished the main task which I set myself for this
summer; the next six years will be for working out a scheme which I
have sketched for my philosophy. It has gone well and looks
hopeful.59
For the coming 4 years the working out of a four-volume magnum opus
[Hauptwerks] has been announced; already the title is enough to raise
fears: The Will to Power. Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. For its
sake I have need of everything, good health, solitude, good spirits,
perhaps a wife.61
42 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche continued to work on this project during the following two years;
sometimes feeling that things were going well, at other times being more
dejected and frustrated:
During the autumn of 1888, shortly before his collapse, he mostly felt that
he was moving forward well, as can be seen in several letters, with claims
such as: My life is now coming to a terrific confrontation, which has been
long in preparation: that which I will do in the next two years is such that it
will overthrow our whole present order.63
For what was Z to be preparatory? For what was it an entrance hall?
The most reasonable answer is for the project Revaluation of All Values
and the philosophy of Dionysos. In the context of this present book on
Z, my somewhat provocative claim is that there existed for Nietzsche a
still higher state, figure, and book than Zarathustra. This latter was to be
overcome and transcended, just as Nietzsche had planned to have him
killed in the continuation of the book.64 Zarathustra, after all, is just a
prophet, Dionysos a god! That is, a still higher manifestation of
Nietzsche himself. In 1888, although Nietzsche praises Z excessively,
Zarathustra only represents how far he has come philosophically during
18831887/88 in his published books, while Dionysos represents where
he is going (and to some of his notes during these years). This is also
reflected in that the collection of poems he gave out early in 1889, which
was long intended to be entitled Songs of Zarathustra, but was now
renamed to Dionysos-Dithyramben. This new emphasis on Dionysos as
symbol for his philosophy is visible in Gtzen-Dmmerung where he
writes:
In the section following one after this one, which was originally going to be
the last section and sentence of the book, he writes:
Meaning the planned Umwerthung aller Werthe, especially its fourth book,
entitled Dionysos.
Nietzsche thereafter adds a chapter to Gtzen-Dmmerung, What I Owe
to the Ancients, in which he discusses both Dionysos and the eternal
recurrence. It ends with the words: I, the last disciple of the philosopher
Dionysos I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence. . . . In several letters, he
also speaks of this work as highly preparatory for what was to come.67
Ecce homo seems to show how highly he regarded Z, but this is at least in
part a mirage. In the conclusion of it he states: I have not just now said a
word that I could not have said five years ago through the mouth of
Zarathustra,68 thus implying that he still held fast to the same philosophical
position now as then. It is correct that he valued Z extremely highly, but he
felt that he was now moving into a new stage and the main purpose of EH
was to be preparatory for what was to come, by informing the readers who
he was and by bringing attention to his philosophical position before his
coming revaluation of all values. This is visible, for example, in a letter to
his publisher Naumann, 6 November 1888, where Nietzsche refers to EH as
a in the highest degree preparatory text to his Hauptwerk to which it
constitutes a sort of long preface. Ecce homo also contains continual refer-
ences to his future Hauptwerk. In the first sentence of the preface he
states that he is publishing the book because he will shortly approach
mankind with the heaviest demand, that is, with the revaluation of all
values. In the second section of the preface, he repeats that he is a disciple
of the philosopher Dionysos. Both Jenseits von Gut und Bse and Zur Geneal-
ogie der Moral are now described as being preparatory for the coming
revaluation.69 Furthermore, at end of the review of Der Fall Wagner, he again
explicitly refers to his coming Hauptwerk: And so, about two years before
the shattering thunder of the Revaluation which will set the earth into
convulsions, I sent the Wagner Case into the world. In it he reviews all of
his books, except Der Antichrist which he regarded as part of the coming
revaluation. Ecce homo also ends with the words: Dionysos against the Cruci-
fied . . . In one of his very last letters, to Cosima Wagner, 3 January 1889, he
states: This time, however, I will come as the conquering Dionysos, who will
44 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
make the earth into a celebration, and he accordingly also signs many of
his last letters with the name Dionysos.
However, as stated above, only the first volume, Der Antichrist, of this
planned magnum opus was finished. There are a number of drafts of the
contents of the following two planned volumes, but very few drafts for the
fourth book, called in several notes: Dionysos: Philosophy of Eternal
Recurrence.70 Also sprach Zarathustra represents the highest Nietzsche
publicly achieved in his own view, but we should be aware that he for several
years planned and aimed higher and beyond that, for a position that he
signified by the name Dionysos.
The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extin-
guished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything
good least of all for philosophy. Selflessness has no value either in
heaven or on earth. All great problems demand great love, and of that
only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves
are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has
a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny,
his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an impersonal one, meaning
that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with
antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter case nothing will come
of it; that much one can promise in advance.71
You know these things as thoughts, but you have not experienced your
thoughts, they are only the after-effect of those of others: like when
your room vibrates when a wagon travels by. I, however, sit in the wagon,
and often I am the wagon itself.72
Zarathustra as Nietzsches Autobiography 45
I should add, one must want to have more than one has in order to
become more. For this is the doctrine preached by life itself to all that
has life: the morality of development. To have and to want to have more,
in one word, growth, that is life itself.78
Typology is not only a study of types2 which embody certain human traits
and tendencies, but it is also a philosophical framework which shows how
such studies can be done, that is, the method of doing it. The two are inter-
woven in Nietzsches thought. One difficulty with the interpretation of
Nietzsches typology lies in bringing the fragments and the hints together
into a sensible whole. Nietzsche himself did not write a work of typology nor
call any of his works a work of typology, unlike The Genealogy, for instance,
where the method of genealogy is presented and used. Another difficulty in
dealing with typology alone is the two other philosophies in Nietzsche,
which are complementary to it and which are often presented as such:
namely, genealogy which studies forces and their originary constellations in
specific contexts, and symptomatology which reveals the symptoms of an
age, a culture, or an individual. Type, force, and symptom are the units, or
concepts, of each of these philosophies which, in a larger project, must be
48 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
II
strong in each of the pre-Socratic philosophers was not arbitrary, but all the
archetypes unconsciously formed a complementary circle, a diversity of
types which were necessary for the life of their culture and which somehow
belonged together. Nietzsches early works on the pre-platonic thinkers and
their age show what type was prominent in the philosopher studied and
how different types unconsciously entered into a division of philosophical
works (from the solitary cosmologist typified by Heraclitus to the reformer-
legislator typified by Empedocles).
In addition to the question of archetype, it is necessary at the outset to
bring up briefly two issues pertinent to a study of types in Nietzsche: value
and power.
preciousness; on the contrary, it adds one more charm to it. The way we
realize it and live up to it fully in this human life is by knowing that we are
beings with power, by knowing the power of our value-making, and by
knowing our power and our place in the cosmological hierarchy of power
relations.
To understand types in terms of power is to know, for a culture, what types
to empower and what types to emaciate, in an epochal context, to enhance
life. This point will be explored further below by way of a hierarchy of
types in Z.
III
Cultural typology
One of the philosophical problems Nietzsche presents in his early works is
what are the forces which constitute culture? This problem is presented
within the context of ancient Greek culture, but with an eye to the prob-
lems of his own age. The question is posed again in BT in relation to tragedy,
the tragic worldview, and the Socratic epochal turn. Both in this work and
in the other writings of this period, especially in The Philosophers Book,
Nietzsche thinks through the problem of forces of culture, such as art,
science, mythology, philosophy, cosmology, and religion, and what kinds of
constellations these forces make, what impacts they have on each other.
This project is pursued in different ways throughout Nietzsches works.
Cultural types are what embody the forces of culture in their epochal
contexts. There are in Nietzsches typology, at least, the following types:
artistic, philosophical, cosmological-religious, scientific, linguistic, psycho-
logical, and somatological, but below I will only explore three cultural types:
the type of the theoretical man, the priestly type, and the artistic type of
decadence.
Zarathustra in Nietzsches Typology 51
The type of the theoretical man, which Nietzsche associates with Socrates,
symbolizes the scientific spirit of that epoch and its overestimation of knowl-
edge and rationality. With this type, Nietzsche exposes the fundamental
traits in this mode of existence:
Some of the issues which come up in Nietzsche regarding the type of the
decadent artist lie in the realm of deeper values, issues some of which
may not be apparent on the surface: the antithesis between chastity and
Zarathustra in Nietzsches Typology 53
sensuality (the millennia-old opposition between the angel and the beast);
one-sidedness when it comes to ones own activity and seeking philosoph-
ical justification for it, artistic vanity, to be caught up in the problems of the
age as one seeks spectators indiscriminately who will glorify the artist and
thereby sustain his vanity.13 These traits and problems are pervasive in the
modern age, and for Nietzsche to understand the type of decadent artist
and to understand the problems of the modern age reciprocally imply each
other.
These three types (from Greek, medieval, and modern epochs) somehow
belong together: they typify trends that are problematic and collective in
modern culture and which Nietzsche saw and critiqued. Simply put together,
these trends are: overestimation of knowledge and rationality to the detri-
ment of other forces of culture; undervaluation of this-worldly existence
and denial of the body, sensuality and sexuality; and the artistic decadence
unique to the modern age. These types fit together in the economy of the
culture of the modern age.
Character typology
There are trends in culture which have become so because certain traits
within the character of a human being gain currency and shape the collec-
tive character. Now when these individual traits are problematic, the
collective trends also become problematic, even more so, since the problem
has multiplied itself onto the collective field. The study of such character
traits and trends and the types that typify them can be called character
typology. This study is by no means confined to the problematic aspects of
human existence. Below I will survey a few examples for character typology
from Nietzsches works in an attempt to understand how he approaches the
problem.
One of the first distinct character types that appears in Nietzsches works
is the cultural philistine.14 The cultural philistine is the type who prescribes
that the incongruity between two things must not exist; namely between the
complacent belief that one is in possession of a genuine culture and the fact
of cultural deficiency. Exposing some of the deficiencies of the culture of
his times in his first explicit critique of the modern age, Nietzsche makes a
distinction between the already-known type of philistine and the type of
cultural philistine:
One may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type free spirit will one
day become ripe and sweet to the point of perfection has had its decisive
experience in a great liberation and that previously it was all the more a
fettered spirit and seemed to be chained forever to its pillar and
corner.17
Zarathustra in Nietzsches Typology 55
IV
Now back to the question of hierarchy. Regarding the rank and file of
types, Nietzsche says: . . . he does not conceal the fact that his [Zarathustras]
type of man, a relatively superhuman [more overmanly] type, is super-
human [overmanly] precisely in its relation to the good that the good and
the just would call his overman devil .29 It is relatively overmanly, because
there is hierarchy of types. This hierarchy exists both within the individual
and among individuals. From the standpoint of a Nietzschean typology, it is
just as important for an individual to place types and their appropriations
in a rank from the lowest to the highest as it is for a culture to place its types
in a hierarchy so that what is individually and collectively valued as the
highest is the type of the Overman. To be able to do this, it is necessary to
study Nietzsches typology from diverse perspectives and also its relation to
other aspects of his thought.30
The concepts of higher or highest pertain to Nietzsches notion of strife
and the idea of ones perpetual re-creation of ones self and, at the same
time, to making these values in culture. It is necessary to cultivate great
types within the context of their hierarchy and to place them on the pedestal
of great values. As works of culture, they will serve it to strive higher, and the
destiny of a civilization depends on the higher types and their works through
which the former is held together and uplifted. Hence, Nietzsches concern
for the breeding of the higher types:
The problem thus I pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the
sequence of living beings (man is an end), but what type [Typus] of man
shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value, worthier of life,
more certain of a future . . .
symbolizes. But what does the type of Zarathustra mean in terms of cultural
typology and historical typology?
In the type of Zarathustra, various forces of culture and their types come
together and are sustained in their difference from one another. As the
teacher of the eternal recurrence, he is the cosmological type; as he debates
with the after-worldly, the spirit of gravity and the spirit of revenge, he is the
type which symbolizes new forms of spirituality; in his polemics with the
sages and the philosophers of the past, such as the good and the just, the
teachers of virtue, and in his teachings of a different kind of wisdom, we see
the philosophical type; the artistic type is present in his dance and singing,
in his light-footedness, in his wandering, and in the teachings of becoming;
even the scientific type is sustained within Zarathustra insofar as he is a
searcher and an experimenter; the psychological type looks into the human
soul, its deep recesses, and explores the unconscious; the physiological
type places a new value on the body, the senses, passions, instincts, and
sexuality.
This multiplicity of types, which Zarathustra symbolically stands for, is
hinted at in the aphorism cited above: . . . whoever wants to know from the
adventures of his own most authentic experience how a discoverer and
conqueror of the ideal feels, and also an artist, a saint, a legislator, a sage, a
scholar, a pious man, a soothsayer . . . .32
That Zarathustra prefigures the artist-philosopher type of Nietzsches late
period is an understatement: first, there is a multiplicity of forces of culture
and their types which are necessary for a culture (art and philosophy are
only two of these forces); second, what is at stake is the value-creator(s) in
this multiplicity; third, Zarathustra symbolically stands for the value-
creator in these various realms of culture.
As to the historical analysis of Zarathustra, he stands at an epochal
threshold. Its signpost is God is dead, and the coming of the new epoch is
symbolized by high noon. It is at high noon that the unconscious of an
epoch is re-created, that is, a new shadow for a transformed culture. From
the perspective of historical typology, Zarathustra and the types he embodies
and teaches, that is, the types that he upholds, symbolize the rise of a new
epoch with its new set of values, new mode of valuation, and its own histor-
ical unconsciousness. These prospective types are consistent with one
another; that is to say, they are the signs of a new puzzle, which complement
one another. These are now the types to be implanted in the soul to allow
the old, problematical types that are within us to gradually become weak
and pale.
62 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
VI
If Zarathustra, the type created by Nietzsche, were to take a living form and
speak today, what would he say to those who have ears for him? Would he
show up to speak to them or remain in his cave? Despite the many efforts to
appropriate the type of Zarathustra since he was born more than a century
ago, the challenge still remains to give life to it, that is, to make his wisdom,
his art, and his sensibility of lightness, a part of the living reality of contem-
porary culture based on its specific needs.
Chapter 4
The ripeness of man: that says that one has regained the seriousness one had as a
child at play.
Beyond Good and Evil, 941
Introduction
concepts like the eternal return, the over-man, the Dionysian, and the will to
power. The Nietzschean notions of life-negation and life-affirmation are
nowhere defined; rather the reader is given a variety of perspectives on them
so that a highly nuanced picture is gradually built up.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that a life-negating attitude is fearful of anything
that has the potential to bring suffering, particularly change and embodi-
ment.6 The fear of change allegedly motivates both the Platonic positing of a
more perfect, static world beyond the moving world we live in, and the
(conventional) Christian emphasis on the supreme value of the afterlife. The
fear of embodiment allegedly motivates the Platonic mistrust of the senses
and the negative evaluation of sexuality and sensuality often found in Chris-
tianity. In all of these cases, life as we experience it is contrasted with some
better realm of being, and is thus denigrated or devalued. Nietzsche describes
several manifestations of this general trend: nihilism, the ascetic ideal, the will
to truth, otherworldliness, metaphysics, the urge to systematize.
A life-affirming attitude, by contrast, is one of celebration of embodiment
and those who hold it are stimulated rather than frightened by change.
There is no hankering after a better world than the one we live in, whether
post mortem or empyrean. Suffering is not feared but understood as a neces-
sary part of life to the extent that ones fate is loved, even if it were to repeat
itself endlessly as is suggested by the doctrine of the eternal return.7 At the
same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the abundance of energy that is
the concomitant of life-affirmation expresses itself as creativity, even to the
extent that one might attempt a great task. Love of fate is not fatalism, the
refusal to improve particulars of life.
Against this standard, almost the whole of Western philosophy is found
wanting (though it is not treated with very great attention to its detail and
variety). Its influence must therefore, in the light of the great task, be over-
come. This project entails a number of strategies. Indeed, the very
characterization of Western philosophy as enmeshed with life-negation is one
such strategy as well as being the initiating moment of the whole project.
Nietzsche also attempts to undermine philosophical doctrines and methods of
enquiry by parodying them, by attempting to get them to self-destruct by criti-
cising them according to their own lights, by carrying the application of their
procedures to extreme lengths, and by casting suspicion on them by ques-
tioning their presuppositions and origins. This is Nietzsches active nihilism.8
Nietzsche is not just destructive, however. He suggests some direction
that might be taken as an alternative to that which he seeks to destroy.
He offers perspectivism as a new method of enquiry into all manner of
phenomena.9 He offers evaluation against the life-affirmation/life-negation
66 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
gained in solitary retreat in the mountains. His audience, his brothers, are
his contemporaries who have remained in the lowlands. If we take it that
Zarathustra is Nietzsches alter-ego, we can then see in The Three Meta-
morphoses a highly condensed account of Nietzsches development,
including the recognition of the ludic nature of the methods appropriate
to his great task and what is involved in the abandonment of the venerable
project of propositionalist philosophy.
At the outset, Nietzsche tells us that the strong, reverent spirit needs a
difficult test for its strength.13 This need for a difficult test is a corollary of
the spirits reverence which draws it onto a journey which will transform it,
almost despite itself. I want to suggest that this indicates the way in which
propositionalist philosophy is drawn into a nihilism of which it itself contains
the seed, and the reverence which incites the spirit to embark on its journey
is reminiscent of the conscience which drives propositionalist philosophy
towards nihilism.
This latter needs some explaining, though only broad-brush strokes are
possible here. As already indicated, propositionalist philosophy pursues the
project of establishing true propositions about existence/being, knowl-
edge/truth, rules of inference, and the subject/self, emphasizing one or
other of these sub-projects at various times. These subprojects are in fact
attempts to make good lacunae in propositionalist philosophy itself since its
project presupposes the binaries being/non-being, truth/falsehood, trans-
gression/obedience with respect to the rules of inference, and subject/
object. Being is presupposed because being or the instances of being are
what propositions are true or false about. Obviously, without some notions
of truth and falsehood, there is no propositionalist project at all. Rules of
inference regulate the procedure of propositional philosophy which aspires
to consist in chains of propositions, each being justified by its predecessor
in the chain. (Propositionalist philosophy values and relies on argument.)
All of this requires a special comportment on the part of the subject, a
disinterestedness which places the results of valid inference from true
premises over what the subject would like to discover or believe. This subject
is conceived over and against the object about which it enquires and hopes
to be Enlightened.
The role of the conscience which drives propositionalist philosophy,
mentioned above, should now be clearer: without the propositionalist
conscience, adherence to the laws of inference and the mandatory disinter-
estedness on the part of the subject could scarcely be enforced. Further, it
is characterized by a related predilection for proofs.14 Together, these lead
into a quest for true propositions about everything. Crucially, if proposition-
alist philosophy is to succeed in its task of establishing true propositions,
68 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
do what the camel cannot do. The camel is too reverent and captured by
thou shalt for the task of finding illusion and caprice even in the most
sacred, for behaving like a beast of prey against the most entrenched and
respected concepts of metaphysical truth, being, and subject and against
the taken-for-granted necessity of rules for proper thought.31 No to duty is
no to the propositionalist conscience: it is Nietzsches active nihilism
against the rather different nihilism of life-negation.
In the final metamorphosis, the lion becomes the child who can do what
the lion has prepared for but cannot himself do:
The child, then, has moved beyond the pure destructivity of the lion. The
No of the lion has given way to the Yes of the child: in other words, the
ground has been cleared of the constraints of the tradition by the active
nihilism of the beast of prey and creativity is now possible. The great task,
which is a task of legislating beyond the constraints of all tradition can only
be undertaken as creative play and by the innocent and forgetful child. This
is what Nietzsche means by the child conquering his own world.
Nevertheless, why is the child innocence and forgetting, a new begin-
ning, and a first movement? These images of freshness and newness
indicate that nihilism is only overcome by the most radical break from its
legacy. Otherwise, nothing is really created and the products of ones will
remain only reworkings of the tradition or, as is the case with the lion,
destructive engagements with it which are parasitic upon it. Only when
there is a sacred Yes does one really will ones own will: this is necessary for
the game of creation. This in turn means that only when one affirms life is real
creative originality possible and real legislation possible. How so?
The crucial association here is that which Nietzsche makes between
forgetting and innocence. Innocence, the suggestion is, is a freedom from
the influence of the past. Now, as Nietzsche has convincingly suggested, the
mainstream philosophical tradition has largely been shaped by a hidden
need for consolation in the face of lifes propensity to cause us to suffer.
This reaction to suffering depends on the action of the past in the present,
for seeing suffering as a problem depends on some sort of memory, on
some sort of loss of innocence. This means that the thinker, insofar as he
remains consciously or unconsciously motivated by his life-negating orien-
72 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Conclusion
Of Existence
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Chapter 5
activity, comprised within one concept. . . .24 He, too, argues that an
unending cyclicality arises out of the opposing forces, with one acting
centrifugally, the other counteracting centripetally.25
A final contribution to Nietzsches thinking and, as will be seen, particu-
larly to eternal recurrence comes from Friedrich Zllner, a physicist whom
Nietzsche read carefully and remarked upon. Zllner was one of the first
physicists to employ Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemanns non-Euclidean
geometry to space, rendering space finite but unbounded. Zllner wrote
detailed discussions of non-Euclidean geometry in relation to time, space,
and force. He argued that the total amount of force in the universe is finite
and that finite force and infinite time are compatible with non-Euclidean
geometry. Most important to Nietzsche was Zllners idea that time and
space curve back into themselves, extending the cyclical pattern of energy
flow that Nietzsche found in Naturphilosophie to the very structure of the
universe.26
These observations suggest that there was a concept developing in
Naturphilosophie as it was influenced by the science of heat as energy in the
mid-nineteenth century, one which we have termed Perpetuum Mobile
employing Munckes language and which was composed of the following
propositions: the conservation of force as a constant quantity, the cyclical
flow of energy, the continuing presence of energy established in paired and
opposing polarities that remain perpetually in a condition of dynamical
disequilibrium, the rejection of the principle of entropy in application to
the universe as a single closed system, and the arrangement of cosmic space
in accordance with a non-Euclidean geometry. It is possible that the
Perpetuum Mobile provided Nietzsche through his reading of, at minimum,
several of these philosophers as well as contemporaneous scientists with a
serious scientific foundation for his vision of an energeticist universe, and
thus the primacy of Becoming over Being. However, although the constit-
uent parts of the Perpetuum Mobile gave him the elements for the first version
of eternal recurrence, as presented in WP, it left Nietzsche with the problem
of a pointless eternity with the meaninglessness that comes when there is
simply no end to things. What he needed to accomplish was a scientifically
founded disproving of normative time he required an elimination of the
meaningless eternity he identified with what he called Turkish Fatalism.27
This is precisely what he accomplished with the concept of eternal recur-
rence, evident when one follows through the logic of the argument and
finds the concept transformed from an engine of endless energy to some-
thing that breaks the very fatalism of time that breaks an intrinsically
cyclical Becoming away from normative, linear time.
80 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
There has been a general difficulty in reading the argument for eternal
recurrence, due in part to the fact that, as is well recognized by now, the
idea is presented in essentially two forms. In the last sections of WP, it is
developed as an intended scientific principle that is supposed to follow logi-
cally and inevitably from our observations of the universe as science reveals
it to us, or did in Nietzsches time, and particularly from the law of the
conservation of energy. The argument, as it is presented in section 1066 of
WP, is familiar and readily summarized: The number of centers of force is
finite, therefore the available combinations of such centers are finite, and
in infinite time, it must follow that the variety of combinations and sequences
of combinations of centers of force will be exhausted, and the overall
sequence of sequences will have to begin again. Such repetition, which
touches everything that happens, including every event in every life, has
already occurred an infinite number of times and will recur endlessly into
an infinite future.
The other form of the thought makes no direct mention in its passages of
the great cosmological repeating of all events. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and
in section 341 of The Gay Science, eternal recurrence appears as a proposi-
tion to be imagined the dream, or myth, of a life that is eternally repeated,
without hope or possibility of redaction or reprieve. It is a conception meant
as a test of resolve, a concept to be seen as, by the title of its section in GS,
the greatest weight, threatening the implication of the darkest Nihilism
the strongest sense of meaninglessness to things, of the absence of any
purpose or end goal, of pointless interminable continuance and carrying
as well a moral lesson, open to endless interpretation, regarding the answer
to such despair.
The two modes of the thought have often been played off against each
other, the moral lesson employed to explain away the scientific concept, for
by many commentators on Nietzsche, eternal recurrence of the same has
been estimated to make little sense as a potential principle of science.
When specific counterarguments have been wielded against eternal
recurrence as a cosmological theory, they have arrived in two species. The
first is the rejection of the conclusion that a finite number of combinations
of centers of force necessarily follows from the proposition that there is a
finite number of centers of force. This complaint carries some weight, but
it is the second species that is the more virulent. It asserts that the scientific
argument leads to an absurd result, and most specifically, that the idea of
the eternal recurrence of the same constitutes an internal contradiction. If
precisely the same event, the same sequence of events, even the same life,
occurs even a second time, identical in every detail, then it is by definition
Nietzsches Ontology of Time 81
not identical, for it comes later in time it has been displaced in the time
sequence and is thus different by dint of position. If it were truly the
same which is what, it appears, Nietzsches argument requires then the
event, or each individual event in a sequence, would recur at the same time
or times as the previous occurrence or occurrences, and thus there would
not be a recurrence. The very phrase eternal recurrence of the same
asserts that there is no recurrence since everything is always the same at
the same time, so to speak, as it asserts that there is a recurrence. What is
worse, since Nietzsche claims that the past is also an eternity leading up to
now and that an infinite amount of time, and an infinite number of recur-
rences of all events, has already passed the eternal recurrence of the same
argues that not only has all we experience already happened an infinite
number of times but it is also happening for the first time, or still happening
for the first time.
In short, the difficulty is that Nietzsches argument demonstrates that the
infinite repetition of everything is both a logical inevitability and a logical
impossibility that it is a paradox intrinsic to events.
Many commentators on Nietzsche take this internal contradiction as a
mark of the implausibility and thus the failure of the argument for eternal
recurrence as a scientific principle.28 But the inference from logical failure
to rhetorical failure is not so easily drawn, for in Nietzsches ontological
philosophy, the world is not logically constituted. It is an explicit position of
the philosopher that the categories of reason do not apply to the world and
thus are not arbiters of truth. Yet, the rigorous application of the proce-
dures of Aristotelian logic are consistently among the guiding principles of
Nietzsches practice, and when he engages in deductive reasoning he is a
precise practitioner.
The implications of applying rigorously executed logic as a surgical probe
for the delving of an illogical world is yet to be fully explored, but for the
moment, a portion of the incisive potential of the procedure can be seen in
one of Nietzsches occasional methodologies the following through of a
line of argument until it reaches a logical contradiction and thereby
uncovers a flaw in our normative vision of the world. It is a method of argu-
mentation that Nietzsche describes in section 634 of WP, in which he defines
his conception of the atom: I call it a quantum of will to power: it expresses
the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order
without thinking away this order itself.29 The method can be considered
comparable as a logical procedure to the process of factoring out when
working a differential equation in calculus, a procedure by which factors of
the equation are arranged to be paired and negating identical
82 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
expressions with one positive and the matching one negative so that
together they come to zero and can be dropped from the equation, thereby
simplifying it. Nietzsches method amounts to locating elements of the
argument that negate their own meanings and eliminating them in favour
of factors that become implied by the ways in which the previous factors
reached negation.
The claim here is that the scientific argument for eternal recurrence as
presented in WP is the foundation of a larger argument that would disprove
the claim of infinite and exact recurrences, on the basis of their evident
absurdity, and assert an alternate ontological conception, one that
Nietzsche was able to present in no other fashion, by no other disquisition.
That larger argument is adumbrated in the story of Z. Yet having been
presented by Nietzsche more explicitly nowhere else presumably, he
would have done so in a projected book, some of the notes for which are
included WP it is difficult to extract. Nevertheless, if one takes into account
all Nietzschean texts referring to eternal recurrence, as well as many of his
ontological observations distributed in the Nachla, one can see the track of
the argument. It can be traced for the notes constitute a chain of islands,
individual summits of thought, that mark the presence of a submerged
mountain range, many of whose peaks never broke the surface of the
written page. One can see that eternal recurrence constitutes one of the
moments Nietzsche promised at the beginning of his public career in BT,
the moment at which science reaches its limits and, from that periphery,
men gaze into what defies illumination, and when they see to their horror
how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail suddenly
the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight. . . .30 Eternal recur-
rence is a tragic insight not merely a Nihilistic contemplation, but a
breaking of ontological norms a Dionysian insight, which defies rational
illumination but which may arrive at the periphery of logic.
The plot of Z indicates a shift occurring in the heart of the argument, a
transformation of implication that follows Zarathustras initial realization
of endlessly repeating, numerically infinite world histories the transfor-
mation of implication into a recognition that is never fully detailed in the
text of the book. In the middle of the text, at the end of Book 2, Zarathustra
comes upon The Stillest Hour, during which the clock of his life drew a
breath31 and Zarathustra is compelled to withdraw into solitude by the
force of his pain.32 At the start of Book 3, in the section titled The
Wanderer, Zarathustra returns, having realized, as he says, now I must face
my hardest path.33 Immediately following, in the section On the Vision
and the Riddle, he meets the dwarf at the gateway between the past and the
Nietzsches Ontology of Time 83
revised in the text of Z and thus may be taken as provisional in its exact
phrasing. In Z, we are told in On the Vision and the Riddle that time
itself is a circle,38 and, in The Convalescent, that Bent is the path of
eternity.39
The difference is a geometric one and is foundational to the proper
reading of eternal recurrence. It marks the reason for the profound
emphasis Nietzsche gave to the thought. The deepest and most far-reaching
revolutions of thought are always those that involve an alteration in the very
geometry of thinking, for thinking does have a geometry, a set of rules for
the space in which it occurs and according to which one thought follows
upon another. Aristotelian logic occurs in a space of Euclidean geometry
thoughts that imply each other follow one upon the next without evident
inflection. They constitute a straight line of logic the further one follows
out the line, the farther one falls from the starting point of the argument.
But such an uninflected intellectual, imaginative space is not the only
possibility.
And it is not the one Nietzsche asserts in the Z text, where time itself is
claimed to be a circle. A different set of inferences follows from there,
different from the inferences that come of assuming that time is straight
whereas events, or configurations of centers of force, repeat in a vast circle.
If time is straight, then events must necessarily slip their time slots in
instance after instance of their occurrence, producing the time displace-
ment, the occurrence at a later point on the time line that makes a logical
contradiction, and an absurdity of the claim that they are the same. They
cannot be the same if one occurrence of an event is later than the one that
preceded it. It is as if the circle of events were a wheel rolling down the
road of infinite time, and each spot on that wheel hits the ground in each
instance at another spot from that of the last instance, a spot further down
that road.
But no such displacement occurs if time itself is also a circle. Like a tire
and a rim, the circle of events and the circle of time are locked together
each event is permanently, and in a sense perpetually, localized in its
moment. Think also of time as a strip of film, of definite length, in which
the two ends have been spliced together. Time is then not infinite but finite
and unbounded. It is limited in its extension, there is a total amount of it,
but it has no edge one never can reach the end of it. It is simply that any
moment one might postulate as the end of time would be followed by the
moment that then would constitute the beginning of time. But in this
geometric conception, the terms end and beginning are arbitrary and
meaningless there is no more an end or beginning of circular time than
Nietzsches Ontology of Time 85
there is an end point and beginning point of a circle: the line of the circle
simply is continuous, and of definite and measurable extension. So too, the
terms past and future are arbitrary and, finally, meaningless. What consti-
tutes the past and future depends upon where or when on the circle of
time one is standing, and, theoretically, the past would eventually follow
the future, and the future ultimately precede the past, for as Zarathustra
tells us, And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment
draws after it all that is to come? Therefore itself too?40 But the word
theoretically is inexact, because, by necessary implication and by
Nietzsches own argument, no recurrence ever occurs, not even theoreti-
cally, no more than any one point on a circle is ever repeated on the same
circle, no more than any frame appears twice in the same film.
Which is also to say that time possesses a Riemannian geometry, or more
exactly, the extension, that is, time has a positive curvature, as it is conceived
by Riemannian geometry, meaning that time curves back upon itself. We, as
occurrences of time ourselves, our lives occupying sections of the loop of
time, are incapable of noticing the curvature. We experience time simply as
proceeding, or ourselves as proceeding through time. Only by having an
overview of time could one notice that it is finite, although it never comes
to an end. But, for Nietzsche who subscribed to a position of thorough
perspectivism there is no overview, there is no outside, no other world
from which to observe this one. This is the only world, all reality is only what
appears to the observer from the observers viewpoint, and this curved time
is the only time.
Which is why there is no recurrence. It is not merely that recurrence is
inherently unobservable, but that it does not in fact occur. Every event
comes once only Nietzsche himself asserts there is no second time41 no
event initiated time or will close time, and whether an event is a part of the
past or of the future is purely a matter of viewpoint. Time, too, is a matter
of perspective, a matter of judgmental terminology within a frame of posi-
tive curvature.
Nietzsches use of Riemannian geometry the same geometry that applies
to space in Einsteins General Theory of Relativity is not simple conjec-
ture or interpretive imposition. Not only does Nietzsche assert specifically
that time is a circle but also that space is spherical and that The shape of
space must be the cause of eternal movement,42 which makes his space
Einsteinian. It is hardly a matter of unfounded conjecture to consider that
Nietzsche may well have understood the mathematical implications of these
assertions, particularly if such an interpretation makes eternal recurrence a
fully reasonable idea, eliminating the internal contradiction so many have
86 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
found in it. Both Capek and particularly Moles have noticed the usefulness
of this approach, and as noted above, Nietzsche was aware of the pertinence
of Riemannian geometry to cosmology from his reading of Friedrich
Zllner. The positive curvature of time is an evident mark of Zllners
impression.
Hence, we have in eternal recurrence a structure of time that is not
eternal and in which nothing recurs. What we do have, other than the logi-
cally inevitable conclusion Nietzsche discovered bereft of its logical
contradiction, is a finite time that will never come to a conclusion or reach
a goal that offers an external justification of the world. And we have some-
thing more.
Neither Capek nor Moles sees anything more in the thought of eternal
recurrence than a circular, finite, and unbounded time an interpretation
that Capek strangely criticizes for leading to stasis. But if one follows through
the same logic that led to the recognition of the positive curvature of time,
one finds that there are further implications.
Under Nietzsches perspectivism, the concept of overall time, of time
per se, is meaningful as a logical extrapolation from the observable facts of
experience, it is meaningful conceptually, but it is meaningless as an expe-
riential reality. There is no perspective, no point of view, from which the
conceptual totality of time whether finite or infinite can be experienced,
not even over the course of the conceptual totality of time. The totality of
the worlds time is thus, in Nietzsches ontology, not a fact. It is merely a
result of logical analysis. From the point of view of any event, any centre of
force, or even the constituencies of any combination of forces, from the
point of view of any interacting system of centers of force, even if splayed
over time meaning any apparent object throughout its existence, or a
human life, our own existence there can only be as much time as the
object, life, centre of force, or system experiences. Within a perspectival
structure, there is no outside to any system, and thus no time can pertain to,
can exist for, the system other than the time that is experienced from the
perspective of the system. Within a perspectival system, time is functionally
an attribute of the system, and it follows that when the system does not
exist, its attributes cannot exist time cannot in fact, and as a fact, tran-
spire. Hence, every moment of the termination of any discrete and persisting
system is followed, from the viewpoint of the system, by the moment of its
beginning. More personally, the moment of death for every human being
is followed by the moment of birth and not for the second time, but for
the first time, for there is no second time. Every life is itself a circular
time span.
Nietzsches Ontology of Time 87
What results is a system of worlds within worlds, each discrete system that
persists through time persisting through its own finite but unbounded time.
And the overall, finite but unbounded time of the world as a whole, within
which one would want to locate all these thereby subsystems of time, does
not exist except as an intellectual abstraction, unless one would wish to
grant consciousness to the world as a whole, which Nietzsche specifically
does not do. This is a conception of the world order to which Nietzsche
does point when he has Zarathustra say, in The Convalescent, immediately
before condemning the animals for misunderstanding eternal recurrence:
To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul
is an afterworld. . . . For me how should there be any outside myself?
There is no outside.44
However, the thought does not stop there. From the point of view of strict
perspectivism when applied to time and it is clear Nietzsche believes it
does apply each moment of time is also a system unto itself and possesses
its own perspective, certainly as much as a centre of force can be said to
possess a unique perspective the perceived Now constitutes a perspec-
tival system. However, if a moment of time is a perspective point and only
that amount of time it addresses as fact is truly time from its perspective,
then each moment of time exists only during itself, within itself as a circular,
cyclical structure of time. The moment is its own time span. In simple
language, this inference positions the moment Now outside of continuous
durational time and makes the Now moment the only time that is real,
that is a fact. This conception can readily be viewed as the significance of
the section On the Vision and the Riddle in Z, in which Zarathustra meets
the dwarf at the gateway between the past and future. The dwarf tells him
that the gateway is named Moment and claims that the lane of the infinite
past and the lane of the infinite future contradict each other. It is evident
from this text that the past and the future, in contradicting each other, do
not make a continuous line they do not combine coherently. The Moment
88 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
stands at their intersection, and therefore apart from both, for at the point
they meet, they do not join together. In short, the passing moment does not
pass; it is not in time.
The point is even clearer when the passage from Zarathustra is matched
to section 1066 of WP, to a portion of it that has been generally overlooked
in the specifications it applies to the infinity of the past. Nietzsche writes:
The movement from the moment Now back through an infinity of the
past is legitimate. However, it is not the same as the incorrect translation,
the unrealizable concept of the progression of time forward through the
past to the Now moment. The direction is not a matter of indifference,
and the movement forward through the past is judged not credible. It is not
the fact of the matter. If one attends carefully to the text, this is precisely
what the dwarf presented as a vision to Zarathustra. The implication is the
explanation of why the lanes of the past and future contradict each other:
they lead in opposite directions; the past does not flow into the future. They
image incompatible abstractions of time. And they flow out from and away
from the present, from Now. The past, as something that happened prior
to now and that incrementally led to it, is a fiction.
This removal of the Moment from the linear flow of time coordinates
precisely with Nietzsches observation in the Nachla concerning the impor-
tance of the infinitely small moment,46 as well as the remark in Z: The
center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.47 Every moment is the
center of time a conception distinctly close, again, to Einsteins cosmology.
Every Moment is the point away from which the past and future stream.
It is an entirety of time, for itself, and unto itself, cut away from the flow of
time as the head of the snake was bitten off by the shepherd in Zarathustras
vision, or by Zarathustra himself.
And so in a very real sense, every Moment is the same Moment, for the
Moment is all the time there actually is. The Moment is all of time, in more
than a metaphoric, poetic sense, for the apotheosis of the Moment breaks
Nietzsches Ontology of Time 89
all sequence. The fact that each Moment provides itself with its only possible
time frame along with the absence of any overall, universal time frame
due to the impossibility of its having any experiential perspective destroys
any possible site for a sequence. There is nowhere and no time within
which a sequence of moments may occur. Each Moment, and each center
of force in the Moment of its occurrence, must relate to and interact with
all others outside of any continuous temporal flow, by principles of interac-
tion that are not themselves temporal. It is as if they are superimposed not
spatially but by dint of the impossibility of any possible displacement in
time from each other, for there is no overall field of time within which they
can be distributed. That the center may be everywhere renders all centers
the same center.
This gives the Moment a sense of great depth, a quality of capaciousness,
a sense of possessing hidden recesses, and begins to explain Zarathustras
numerous observations toward the end of the book that eternity is deep
not long but deep as well as his feeling of the clock of his life drawing a
breath, as if stopping for a moment, as the thought of the eternal recur-
rence begins to dawn on him and his sense in the section At Noon that
the sun had stood straight over his head throughout his dream of the world
becoming perfect, and his question Did time perhaps fly away?48 and his
questions at the very end of the book, Where is time gone? Have I not sunk
into deep wells?49 and his observation that there is no time on earth for
such things,50 referring to the arrival of Zarathustras sign, of his answer
finally arrived. And, as a self-contained, discrete system that, simultaneously,
passes out of itself and leads into itself, although it transpires once only, the
Moment out of durational time becomes the perfected image of Nietzsches
idea of Becoming.
The Moment is the culmination of eternal recurrence, and as its own
entirety of time that passes simultaneously out of itself and back into itself,
it is Becoming divorced from normative temporality. As its own entirety of
time, the Moment cannot pass away from its perspective, which is its only
reality, there is no further time into which it can dissipate. Thus, the
Moment is the image of Becoming that has been permanentized. Here is
the meaning of Nietzsches remark: That everything recurs is the closest
approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.51 In a sense, the
Moment, and with it all of time, is going nowhere. It passes, yet it does not
pass away. And as a simultaneous passing away and recommencement that
never really passes away and never really recommences, the Moment is the
perfected image of Nietzsches simultaneity of destruction and creation, of
his internal contradiction in all things of his criticism of substance, which
90 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The Gateway-Augenblick
Paul S. Loeb
Zarathustras cross-examination
that the two lanes are actually curved and meet together back at our starting
point in such a way that what previously seemed to be opposite directions
are really not such at all. If, for example, we leave from the West and travel
further and ever further to the West on a great circle, we will return to our
starting point from the East.45
On the commonly accepted reading, according to which Zarathustra
urges the dwarf to remain within the gateway-Augenblick, there is really no
way to explain why Zarathustra keeps pointing the dwarf away from the
gateway to the furthest extremes of the lanes extending on either side. But
on the reading I have offered, the reason is clear. Having commanded the
dwarf to give up his self-contradictory assumption of a Gods-eye that is no
perspective at all, Zarathustra now aims to show the dwarf that the limited
perspective of the present moment necessarily obscures the reality of
circular time. Commentators typically assume that Nietzsche could not have
this aim in mind, because only a Gods-eye, transcendent, and extra-
temporal position could possibly show the whole of time.46 But this is
precisely the dwarfs claim that Zarathustra aims to refute. In fact, this is
precisely the claim that according to Nietzsche immediately implies the
illusory character of circular time as compared to the timeless reality involved
in the Gods-eye non-perspectival position that comprehends it. For
Nietzsche, then, it is crucial to show that a fully perspectival, temporally
situated, and immanent human standpoint can, and will, show times circu-
larity.47 And the key to doing this is to notice, once we abandon the Gods-eye
position, that a perspective as such is no longer false, that some perspectives
are better than others, and indeed that objectivity is still possible if by this
we mean the collection of as many and as varied and as appropriate perspec-
tives as possible.48 With respect to time, Nietzsche suggests, the local
perspective of the present moment is inadequate and creates the illusion of
temporal open linearity. But if we assume a much longer and global perspec-
tive, if we collect and compare all the perspectives gathered in our extensive
temporal travels, we will then reach a much more objective and complete
appraisal of the nature of time. Eternal recurrence, on this reading, is a
doctrine about closed circular time, and about the implications of this kind
of time for human life and meaning.
Dialectical victory
Socrates in GS 340341: that his death will not afford him any escape from
the life that he has just finished living, but will instead return him to living
it once again exactly as before. As commentators have noted, Zarathustras
argument for this conclusion corresponds closely to some of the deductive
proofs Nietzsche considered in his unpublished notebooks of 1881 and
1888.49 These are proofs that resemble those offered by the Stoics, and that
depend upon the assumptions of an infinite time and a calculable number
of possible force-combinations.50 Since these proofs have been found
wanting since the earliest days of Nietzsche interpretation,51 commentators
have tended to dismiss Nietzsches depiction of Zarathustras dialectical
victory. Alternatively, some have argued that Nietzsches contempt for
dialectical reasoning leads him deliberately to present grounds for this
victory that are weak but nevertheless sufficient to defeat Zarathustras
dwarfish Socratic opponent.52
If we suppose, however, that Zarathustras archenemy is Platos Socrates,
then we must assume that Nietzsche intended Zarathustras argument to
have world-historic validity and significance. This point cannot be deflected
by noting Nietzsches usual depreciation of Socratic reasoning. For the
context of the struggle between Zarathustra and his archenemy is
Zarathustras courageous decision to awaken the thought of eternal recur-
rence that is, to bring it up from the dark depths of his unconscious to the
daylight surface of conscious rational knowledge.53 Since this decision is
meant to defeat Socrates hope for release from the eternal cycle of rebirth,
Zarathustras argument should consist in an appropriate refutation of
Socrates dialectical grounds for this hope.
On my interpretation, Zarathustras argument does attempt such a refuta-
tion. For, speaking from the perspective of his impending death, Socrates
argues that life and death are contradictory opposites and that there must
therefore be a cyclical relation between the living and the dead. Since the
living come from the dead, there must be a timeless place outside this cycle
of eternal rebirth where the disembodied souls of the dead exist before
coming to life again. This is why Socrates hopes that his purified soul will be
permanently released into this timeless place at the moment of his death.54
Against this proof, however, Nietzsche begins by noting Socrates short-
sighted perspective on the beginning and end of life. If Socrates had taken
a longer perspective and asked instead about the temporal beginning and
end of the world itself, he would have deduced that time is a circle and that
life and death do not really contradict each other. Indeed, leaving aside his
suffering-based fantasy of a timeless alternative reality, Socrates would have
deduced that all things are knotted together in such a way that the world
100 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
eternally recycles itself and all living things within it.55 But this means that
the living do indeed cease to exist when they die, and that there is no need,
and in fact no room, to posit a place outside the cycle where the disem-
bodied souls of the dead exist before coming to life again. This is why
Zarathustras hypothetical deathbed speech begins as follows: Now I die
and fade and in an instant I am a nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But
the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs, it will create me again!56
At this point, Socrates would have been forced to realize that there was no
place to escape from his eternally recurring life and that he had lost his
dialectical grounds for hoping otherwise.
Having exposed his archenemys ignorance of the thought of eternal
recurrence, and having undermined as well his archenemys dialectical
attempt to avoid this thought, Zarathustra can claim to be vindicated in his
expectation that his archenemy did not know this thought because he could
not bear it. However, this claim raises the question as to how Zarathustra
himself knows his most abysmal thought. This question actually has two
parts, since Zarathustra first communicates his thought while recounting a
vision in which he foresees himself coming to know this thought. First, how
does Zarathustra come to know the truth of eternal recurrence within his
prevision? Second, how does Zarathustra come to have this prevision?57
Prophetic victory
Nietzsches reply to the first question has its source, I believe, in Platos
suggestion throughout the Phaedo that the time before death is a special
time that can grant prophetic powers to the one who is about to die. Plato
emphasizes this suggestion during an interlude in which Socrates disciples
raise objections to the dialectical grounds he has just finished summarizing.
Noting his failure to convince with proofs, Socrates now compares himself
to Apollos swans:58
Indeed, Socrates suggests that the true source of his cheerful hope for
release is not the dialectical investigation that takes up most of the Phaedo,
The Gateway-Augenblick 101
but rather the prophetic power given to him on the day of his death by his
master-god Apollo. This suggestion is extended by Socrates allusion to his
famous Apollonian prophetic daimonion, together with his claim that at the
moment of death the daimon allotted to him in life will guide him on his way
to Hades.60 Further, Socrates account of himself as singing with joy over the
prospect of joining his master is anticipated at the start of the dialogue
when he admits that he has been composing a hymn to Apollo. This, he
says, is something he has never done before but was prompted to do in an
effort to obey the message of a recurring Apollonian dream (60d61b).61
In GS 340341, however, Nietzsche had already challenged this aspect of
Platos representation of the dying Socrates. He speculated instead that
Socrates heard his daimonion prophesying to him at the last moment that
there would be no release after all, and that indeed he would have to relive
exactly the same life he had just completed. Since Socrates says that this
divine voice is the true source of his convictions, Nietzsche speculated that
only this sort of final prophesy could have shattered the hope for release that
had enabled Socrates to live and face death with such good cheer. Socrates
last word, he conjectured, reflected his dying impulse to throw himself
down, gnash his teeth, and curse the daimon who spoke to him thus.
Let us return, then, to Zarathustras vision-riddle, and to the point where
he has just defeated his archenemy with his concluding dialectical ques-
tions. Although we are led to understand that his opponent had to answer
these concluding questions in the affirmative, it is significant that
Zarathustra unlike the demon in GS 341 does not actually announce the
truth of eternal recurrence. Instead, Zarathustra recounts how he spoke
ever more quietly because he feared his own thoughts and background-
thoughts. Then, suddenly, he heard a dog howling nearby and he wondered
if he had ever heard a dog howl like that. His thoughts ran back to when he
was a child, in the most distant childhood, when he had heard a dog howl
like that and had seen him too.62 After seeing and repeatedly pitying this
howling dog, Zarathustra wonders where the dwarf, the gateway, the spider,
and all the whispering had gone.
In thus turning our attention from Zarathustras concluding dialectical
questions toward the shift in his vision, Nietzsche suggests that the
confirming answer to these questions, and thus the true source of
Zarathustras knowledge of eternal recurrence, can be found in a proper
interpretation of this shift in vision. The key to this interpretation lies in
Nietzsches suggestion that Zarathustra has just crossed the gateway-
Augenblick. Thus, having just indicated that he and his opponent were
whispering together inside the gateway (im Thorwege), Zarathustra asks the
102 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
dwarf his final question: and [must we not] come again and run in that
(jener) other lane, outward, ahead of us, in this (dieser) long horrible lane
must we not eternally come again? 63 Nietzsches precise phrasing here
lets us know that Zarathustras last question was asked just as he was step-
ping from inside the gateway and onto the lane extending out ahead of the
gateway. This gateway is inscribed Augenblick and Zarathustras step across it
thus causes a sudden (pltzlich) shift in his vision that leaves him wondering
where the gateway had gone.
On the traditional interpretation of the gateway-Augenblick as a symbol for
the generic moment, it is difficult to see why Nietzsche should thus high-
light Zarathustras step across the gateway. Indeed, as we have already seen,
interpreters usually follow Heideggers suggestion that the vision-riddle of
the gateway-Augenblick is designed to teach us how to remain within the
eternal moment. But if we suppose, as I have argued, that the gateway-
Augenblick is a symbol for the presently experienced moment of death, then
Nietzsches emphasis may be read as a poetic device for suggesting
Zarathustras dying prophetic vision. This interpretation is supported by
Nietzsches allusion to the ancient Greek image of the Cerberus-hound
guarding the gateway to Hades, together with his related allusion to Homers
tale of a courageous Odysseus who must descend into Hades to find out
how to return home.64 It is supported as well by Zarathustras new vision,
which is saturated with death-imagery: during the stillest midnight, when
even dogs believe in thieves and ghosts, a terrified dog bristles, trembles,
and howls as the full moon, deathly silent, stands still like an intruder upon
the roof of what is presumably the dogs house. In addition, Zarathustra
mentions the horrible (schaurige) nature of the lane into which he has just
crossed, the fear he feels while making this crossing, and his sensation of
having just awakened from a dream. This last sensation, which persists from
the start of Zarathustras vision-riddle, is traditionally associated with the
image of coming to life after having died, and alludes to Socrates own such
association in the Phaedo.65
On the exegesis, I have offered so far, however, there would seem to be a
conceptual difficulty in this Platonic suggestion that the dying Zarathustra
is in a position to prophetically observe his own process of coming to life
again. For Zarathustras dialectical questions were aimed at refuting
Socrates contention that the souls of the dead have some kind of existence
in the time between dying and coming to life again. Indeed, in his hypo-
thetical deathbed speech, Zarathustra declares that souls are as mortal as
bodies and that in the instant of death he will become a nothing (ein Nichts).
And although he declares next that the knot of causes in which he is
The Gateway-Augenblick 103
entangled will recur and create him again, this recurrence and his
Re-creation cannot take place until an immense period of time has passed in
which he has no existence at all. So how could Zarathustras dying conscious-
ness possibly extend across this immense period of time to observe his own
Re-creation? Such a longer perspective is what Zarathustra asks the dwarf to
consider if he is to notice that the two lanes do not contradict each other at
the gateway, but we may wonder whether this perspective is possible after all.
I think Nietzsche anticipated this important question in a note he wrote
shortly after discovering the thought of eternal recurrence a note that
prefigures his later symbol of the gateway-Augenblick:
You think you will have a long rest until rebirth but do not deceive your-
self! Between the last moment of consciousness [dem letzten Augenblick des
Bewusstseins] and the first appearance of new life [dem ersten Schein des neuen
Lebens] there lies no time it passes by as quickly as a flash of lightning,
even if living creatures were to measure it in terms of billions of years, or
could not even begin to measure it. Timelessness and succession accom-
modate themselves to one another as soon as the intellect is gone.66
sudden shift from the sights and sounds of his dying consciousness to the
sights and sounds of his awakening consciousness in his very early child-
hood.67 Finally, this argument helps to explain why Zarathustra experiences
his shift in vision as taking place in the stillest midnight (im stillest
Mitternacht). For Zarathustra poetically conceives the individual human life,
and even the life of the human species, as progressing through the various
sun-centred hours of a 24-hour day: daybreak (childhood consciousness),
morning (youth), afternoon (adulthood), twilight-evening (middle age),
and night time (old age). On this conception, the twelfth bell of midnight
simultaneously designates the end of the day (death) and its re-beginning
(coming to life again). Just as the hand of a clock crosses a single unique
moment that is at once the last and the first moment, so too Zarathustra
experiences a single unique moment in which he is at once dying and awak-
ening. Indeed, if we count the number of separate paragraphs in Zarathustras
dialectical proof that he will come again, we find that his step across the
midnight-gateway enacts the twelfth and concluding step of this proof.
Reading the above unpublished note as a kind of addendum to the
demons announcement in GS 341, as well as to Zarathustras whispered
questions at the gateway, we are in a position then to sum up Nietzsches
grounds for declaring Zarathustras prophetic victory over Platos Socrates. It
would appear at first that Socrates has an advantage in claiming foreknowl-
edge of the afterlife, since he believes that when the person has died, his
soul exists, and that it possesses some power and wisdom.68 But this advan-
tage quickly evaporates when questions arise, as they do right away among
Socrates interlocutors, as to how his disembodied soul could possibly
survive, much less possess any wisdom. Paradoxically, it is Nietzsches belief
in his souls mortality that allows him to avoid just these questions and to
claim an immediate connection between his dying consciousness and his
reawakened consciousness. Certainly, this claim would founder if Nietzsche
accepted Platos assumption of an absolute later time in which a person is
reborn after he dies. But since Nietzsche holds that time is circular and
perspectival, he is led to depict a final gateway-moment of consciousness
that grants Zarathustra foreknowledge of his lifes eternal recurrence.
Mnemonic victory
Zarathustra next recalls and wonders about the present whereabouts of the
dwarf, the gateway, the spider, and all the whispering.
Let us suppose now, as I have argued, that Zarathustra had just seen
himself crossing the gateway-Augenblick and experiencing a transition from
his dying consciousness to his first childhood consciousness. So far, I have
noted that this experience grants Zarathustra a dying foreknowledge of
coming back to life. Nietzsches emphasis above, then, leads us to notice
that this same experience also grants Zarathustra a most distant childhood
memory of having died and come back to life. Since Zarathustra was not
dying when he saw the vision he is recounting to the sailors, his vision must
have consisted in a recollection of this most distant childhood memory.
However, Zarathustras consciousness is a closed circle in which the endpoint
must return to the starting point from which it set out. Therefore, this child-
hood memory must also be of his future and Zarathustras recollection of
this childhood memory may also be regarded as a prevision (Vorhersehen)
of his death and recurrence.72
Following Platos lead, then, Nietzsche theorizes that Zarathustras
knowledge of the afterlife is forgotten or repressed as soon as he comes to
life again.73 Also like Plato, Nietzsche hypothesizes that Zarathustra is obliged
to interpret the latent memories that surface during his involuntary dreams
states.74 Finally, Nietzsche follows Platos lead in supposing that Zarathustras
knowledge of the afterlife has its ultimate source in his recollected experi-
ence of death. This supposition is most vividly expressed by the Once More
roundelay [Rundgesang] in which Zarathustras soul, to the accompaniment
of the 12 bells of midnight, warns humanity to pay heed to the speech of
deep midnight. In this speech, deep midnight recalls awakening out of a
deep dream in which the world was revealed as deeper than the day had
thought.75 But Zarathustra had just awoken his most abysmal thought so that
it would speak to him, and midnight is the hour of Zarathustras eternally
recurring death. Nietzsche thus leads us to understand that Zarathustras
most abysmal thought, the thought that arises out of his infinitely deep
subconscious well, is his deathbed revelation of the worlds infinite depth a
revelation that had so far been kept concealed from his daylight conscious
rational thought. Although others do not of course possess Zarathustras
particular memory of this revelation, they can be taught to recall their own
such ancient memory. This is why, after they have become drunk with sweet
wine, Zarathustra introduces his roundelay to the higher men as follows:76
You higher men, midnight approaches: then I will say something in your
ears, as that old bell says it in mine,
The Gateway-Augenblick 107
Still! Still! Then many a thing is heard that by day may not become loud;
but now in the cool air, when even all the clamor of your hearts has
become still,
now it speaks, now it is heard, now it steals into nocturnal over-awake
souls: ah! ah! how it sighs! how in dreams it laughs!
do you not hear, how secretly, fearfully, cordially, it speaks to you, the
ancient deep deep midnight?77
Where Nietzsche departs from Plato, however, and what allows him to
declare Zarathustras mnemonic victory, is his claim that Zarathustra can
recollect wisdom about the afterlife without ever having existed outside his
body. This means, again, that there is no need, and indeed no room, for
Zarathustras archenemy to postulate a place where his disembodied soul
can exist outside the cycle of eternal rebirth. This difference helps to
explain Nietzsches speculation in the GS aphorisms that Socrates was
surprised and dismayed to hear his daimonion announce to him at the last
moment that he would have to relive even that last moment itself. Supposing
Socrates was able to recollect his wisdom about the afterlife, he should have
recalled hearing this announcement before and should not have been
surprised to hear it again. Since Socrates dismay shows that he is not strong
enough to bear this deathbed revelation, Nietzsche infers that the source of
his surprise was his life-long denial and suppression of the memory of this
deathbed revelation. Indeed, Nietzsche implies, Socrates fear of this buried
knowledge was such that his reason had been forced to invent a fantasy
memory in which his soul had escaped eternal recurrence and been trans-
ported from its body and from the earth into a happier existence.78 Hence,
Nietzsche suggests, the shattering effect of this final daimonic revelation
upon Socrates psyche: besides refuting his dialectical grounds of hope for
release, and besides reversing his previous prophetic certainty of release,
this revelation destroyed all of the defences he had built up against his
subconscious knowledge that no release was ever possible.
For Nietzsche, then, the truth expressed in Zarathustras vision-riddle is
that we are caught in a cycle of eternal recurrence back into our identical
life, but that we do not exist and are therefore not aware in the immense
stretches of time between our death and recurrence. This means that we
can never have any experience of definitive death, but only of an eternal
108 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
To the extent that, historically, what is called philosophy has employed and
valorized reason and critique, it has often been taken as the natural enemy
of religion and authority. For Nietzsche, however, this has always been
essentially a superficial opposition, one that is symptomatic of the Wests
inability to actually see itself. For, if Nietzsches thought is about preparing
the way for a radical innocence, we must recognize that it does so by first
trying to fully overcome a fundamental naivety; and this means its becoming
able to begin to fully see itself: its hidden Gods, its secret masters. For we
have forgotten today that the pure nature of a horizon is precisely to never
be seen, and that its becoming visible, its stepping into the foreground, is
always already the prophecy of its own destruction. Thus, as soon as God
becomes a Man, and begins to walk among us, he has already been cruci-
fied, already disfigured by the shadow of pluralism. Yet, part of the
contradiction of Christ is that, at the same time, He is not dead, He has
risen again, and will always continue to rise so long as philosophy remains
a slave. This paradox indicates nothing other than that killing God today
remains thoroughly Christian, and, more importantly, that this is really only
indicative of a broader and deeper, more malicious historical movement:
Nihilism the self-destructive structure inherent within Western culture
itself (its popular masochistic emblem: God on the cross). From this
perspective, we begin to see how the full scope of what is called Christianity
was charged and amplified from the very beginning to include much of
that which supposedly opposes it as part of its necessary structure. Not only
does secular philosophy remain thoroughly religious today if by that we
mean Christian as a form of popular Platonism but hitherto its supposedly
critical nature can now be seen merely as a nave expression of the genetic
masochism inherent within the fundamental structures of Western culture
as such.
110 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This is the stage upon which Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra in its
own eyes arrives. It is against this background that it can be seen as a
radical attempt at overcoming the homogeneous horizon of Christian slave
thinking that, for Nietzsche, still secretly dominates the Occident. Yet, at
the same time, what is vital and what must be made immediately clear about
Z, in terms of the well known status of its yes-saying, is its irony and
tragedy the fact that, with its second and third parts, the book contains its
own crisis. For we can see that Zarathustras most abysmal thought, which
leads to the thought of the eternal return of the same, initiates a profound
change in Zarathustra at the end of the second part of the book, and actu-
ally stands, in a certain way, against the bermensch; its weight falls against
the noon-tide, against the desire for a new epoch. For with the stillest hour
now, the greatest weight, it is grasped that there can be no fundamentally
redemptive historical movement, that not only can history no longer be
seen as a moral drama, in the Judeo-Christian manner, but that it simply has
no final goal or resolution. In this way, any move towards the overcoming
of this epoch itself is at risk of only being a further expression of it.
In Zarathustras anguish about himself being the shepherd in his dream, or
a guardian of tombs, we can see quite clearly a concern about being a
secret last-man: still a slave once more. In this light, the work contains
within itself an increasing self-consciousness of its orientation against a
tradition which is already orientated against itself.1
This aim of this chapter is to explore the grounds of Nietzsches consid-
erations concerning master and slave morality so as to underline what is at
stake for his thought with respect to the greatest weight. Doing so brings
with it an articulation of what we will call the essential drama that unifies
and centres his thinking.2 That this becomes itself problematic in Z, as we
will try to show, will indicate not only one of the most profound ironies of
this work, in terms of its form, but also perhaps the greatest challenge to
Nietzsches thought, on its own terms.
It is perhaps interesting to note here the fact that Wagner dies in close
proximity to the completion of the first book of Zarathustra (1883), and
that in so far as this old master quite literally, in some sense at least, if you
glance at the formalities of their correspondence long overcome by
Nietzsche, now perishes, perhaps we cannot help but ask the question: what
is it to escape ones master and then to have him die? This is not to suggest
that this chapter is interested, in the slightest, of making a biographical
reduction out of the crises of Z no doubt, of course, an ironic reduction,
in the same way that pathological reductions of Nietzsches thought are
always somewhat of an amusement rather, we find here only a further
The Hammer and the Greatest Weight 111
presuppose, to some degree, what they seek to explain. With creation myths,
for example, if the beginning of the universe is accounted for in anthropo-
morphic terms, in terms of a great battle, or a nonchalant all-powerful
being, this seems absurd to us today because it seems to overtly presuppose
that which it is supposedly explaining. Yet, in a more sophisticated way, does
philosophy in so far as it tries to retreat, or dig down, to the ultimate
ground or limit as such not always rely on language and meaning which is
itself contingent upon that about which it attempts to think critically?
Socrates too, in the end, must give us signs and images, metaphors and
allegories (in the very dialogues themselves, which are of course also signs):
circles within circles.
This is exactly what is at stake when Nietzsche makes claims that language
may be essentially metaphorical, as in his early essay Truth and Lying in the
Extra-Moral Sense. For, if we say that experience presupposes certain basic
and fundamental concepts, for example, but then we find, from an etymo-
logical perspective, that such words can be traced to a higher order
understanding, or even higher order mundane experiences, and this
seems to strongly suggest to us that our understanding of these terms may
be founded here, then we are faced with the problem that our most funda-
mental concepts are understood in a way that actually presupposes them.
For, if we say that a concept such as unity may be understood in meta-
phorical terms, which is to say in terms of an everyday experience, then we
are immediately left with the problem that such concepts are understood in
terms of metaphors which supposedly presuppose them.
It is always with such things in mind that we should hear and read the first
aphorism of the introduction to On the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche
writes:
We are unknown to ourselves because the West, for Nietzsche, has never
been able to really ask itself the question about itself, or rather, it would
never accept its own answer as such, that is, as its own (within its own limits).
It will not look for itself because it first wants to stabilize itself, to seize the
immutable, to establish its own ultimate and sublime ground, that master,
the undoubtable, the presuppositionless. In effect, it is the God of the
philosophers who we have always implicitly asked, who are we? never
ourselves. This is the epitome of slave morality: the subjugating act that
The Hammer and the Greatest Weight 115
wants to trap and fix itself within a horizon that it will not admit that it
creates. Thus, we have never really sought ourselves at all and this is because,
in effect, we have never been able to see ourselves, we have always tried to
view ourselves from within a supra-historical framework, essentially fixed
and immovable, a guaranteed and groundless ground: the ultimate ground.
Proceeding then, from our anti-starting point, and wishing to take the
inscription above the cave of the oracle of Delphi seriously and begin to try
to know ourselves one must say to oneself: I will cut off the branch I am
sitting on in order not to make it God!, quietly whisper,
I will not confine myself to the depths, attempting, and yet always failing,
to speak at the lowest level, dryly and formally as possible, always squeezing
my belly as close as I can to the ground; rather, instead, I will go higher!
After all, is this not what philosophy has always done, has always, in the
end, had to do?
In Nietzsches time, and still in our own, science already makes such move-
ments. With the concept of innate, for example, especially when thought
in terms of cognition or thinking, the problem of meeting an inner limit
with material reductions is not conceived as objectionable, if it is conceived
of at all. If, for example, an account of the development of mankinds
thinking is reduced to theories concerning tool-use and the possession of
opposable thumbs, such reductions always encounter a certain circularity,
in so far as they essentially limit the possibility of their own task: their
own roots are reduced to their fruit, the very possibility of the theories
they produce is undermined, or at least limited, by the content of the
theories themselves so it goes with all pragmatic views of cognition and
consciousness.
It is precisely here that we can begin to answer our question concerning
the possibility of accounting for fundamental values, of knowing ourselves.
For, in the face of the death of God, and with desire to radicalize this move-
ment to know thyself (to go beyond ourselves), an account of fundamental
values is given in this way, that is, in the manner of a climbing higher.
Thus, we could say that the historical typology of master/slave morality is
similar to the reduction made by science, in so far it is driven by this desire
to go higher, to reverse the foundational direction, the digging down, in
its usual manner, of traditional philosophy. However, and this is absolutely
key, Nietzsches typology of master/slave morality is not a scientific reduc-
tion, for the scientist always implicitly posits a stable and an immutable
reality already established and settled, unquestioned and, of course,
116 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
through this Nietzsche wants to show how these values arose, to turn them
on themselves, to make them see themselves, make them self-conscious, in
effect. If the subject, or that which resents, is necessarily itself part of an
interpretation engendered by slave morality and its conditions (resent-
ment, bad conscience etc.), the typology of master and slave morality
becomes an expression of the problem of where to begin. For precisely
because that which resents can be picked out and known, and because the
potential for such an interpretation always remains equivocal, something
like resentment becomes one way of interpreting interpretation, or rather,
one of knowing that the hermeneutic which remains a horizon against
which things such as that which resents can be made intelligible.
Second, with the specific question concerning resentment, it is important
to emphasize that this is not, of course, the primary reduction in
Nietzsches thinking. Rather, what is first at stake is Nietzsches reduction to
fundamental values as such in terms of the determinative role he gives
them. For here, Nietzsche already reduces a ground to a prejudice, which
must itself be explained somehow, and thus already threatens to under-
mine itself in a certain way. While the Will to Power is key in this regard as,
in a certain way, a metaphysical expression of this reduction it is
important to see that even this cannot ultimately escape, in terms of its
intelligibility, the horizon it gives an account of, and thus, it is not an exclu-
sive expression of the primary Nietzschean reduction.6 Indeed, with this
primary reduction of a ground to a prejudice in Nietzsches thinking, we
are faced with an extremely important disjunct. For, not only does it seem
that to deny such a reduction sets itself on a slippery slope towards such
problematic concepts, or non-concepts, as disinterest a non-prejudicial
perspective, immaculate perception, and so on but more importantly, it
seems that something like language, strictly speaking, by the very same logic
that denies the reduction of a ground, would now have to be something
that we can never actually come to know (except from out of itself), some-
thing necessarily without a history, ineffable, sublime, a God a Master. Of
course, not only is this absurd but it also ignores the fact that, strictly
speaking, as we have tried to show, we have always been on high seas, that
such movements are in fact unavoidable one only needs to think, perhaps,
about what is going on when someone actually begins to teach formal logic,
for example, or, as we have already suggested, when someone tries to know
knowledge.
Nietzsches reductions are ungodly in a radical sense, they attack the
metaphysical movement that sublimes certain fundaments, that wants to
turn them into an ultimate ground. The slave desire for Ontological
118 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
II
The only thing that remains is perhaps to try to take some sort of account
of what we have said:
Modern philosophy faces three main crises in terms of where to start:
Nietzsches thinking overcomes the first two crises through its instrumen-
tality, through the Hammer as well an awareness of the empowering
consequences of death of God. The reason to begin in thinking, however, is
more problematic, and threatens to dissolve the Hammer. This crisis is dealt
with by Nietzsche in Z.
In the light of this, one way of viewing the story of Z, Zarathustras
journey, his wandering, his problem with trying to express his message,
and with the message itself, is as a form of self-knowledge, an attempt to
examine the third crisis listed above.
Coming to an understanding of ones own motives and their historical
complicity in what they seek to overcome does not necessarily put an end to
a thinking that wants to radically critique Western culture. Yet it is at the
same time one that transforms any subsequent attempts to do so. Thus
and to restate we do not mean to imply with our talk of the crisis of Z that
it is a negative work. Indeed, if it is the case that a nascent question often
arises as to where to place the negative and destructive elements of Nietz-
sches thinking generally, given that he is such an optimist; one that
simplistically asks why, given its inherent self-destructive character, is it
necessary for Nietzsche to aggressively strike at the value-foundations of the
West at all? The answer to the first part of this question simultaneously
wipes away another common objection: the simple point that if the slaves
(and their fundamental values) have overcome their masters, how could
this be anything other than through a strength and how this is appropriate
for a thinker who seems to estimate power and strength, as Nietzsche
appears to do, to thus criticize this? Hopefully, we have shown that the
126 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
problem, of course, is not that the slaves are victorious, it is how. To win
through losing, to rein as a slave: it is the eyes of weakness that bother
Nietzsche. And herein lies the self-destructive character we see embodied
in the emblem of Christ: the messiah who returns and is victorious through
his own crucifixion, the God who sacrifices himself to himself, the bad
conscience that pays itself off with suffering, through guilt, for the pleasure
of doing so the underground man. It is this victory, and what it bases itself
on, that is fated for Nietzsche, one he wishes not only to expose but also to
accelerate in its own destruction. Thus overcoming the naivety of the West
means hyper-christianity, it means the one God that became man, the
horizon that stepped into the foreground, and the destructive essence
therein, must be seized instrumentally, rather than simply, and of course
naively, opposed. Yet in pursuing this Nietzsche takes it to its upper most
limit, in so far as he finds in the eternal recurrence a problem, and a level
of awareness, that makes the air hard to breath, that challenges not only
the bermensch but also the very binding element of this thinking as such.
Though we must remain silent about how exactly these problems are
dealt with (we have already tried to say too much), what is vital here, and
what we have tried to show, is that a strong reading of Z must begin by
understanding its central crisis, specifically expressed in its formal reso-
nance: the Hammer and its greatest weight.
Part III
Of Life
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Chapter 8
Zarathustra on Freedom
Gudrun von Tevenar
[1]
In this chapter, I will stay exclusively within the text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
and will venture to other Nietzsche texts only for clarification and elucida-
tion. This will most readily safeguard, I believe, the uniqueness of
Zarathustras message on freedom. In part, this uniqueness lies in its distinc-
tive delivery within the elevated and somewhat exaggerated tone of
Zarathustrian rhetoric. In addition, the message is also subject to a distinc-
tive Nietzschean device, namely, dispersing the substance of any message
throughout a text, thus demanding active engagement by the reader in its
assembly. But more importantly, Zarathustras message on freedom is
unique because it proclaims, or so I will argue, two distinctive kinds of
freedom. While Nietzsche does not, in fact, consistently name them one
way or the other, their distinctness will reveal itself by the answers given to
two clarifying questions. The first kind of freedom answers the question:
free from what? (frei wovon?), while the second answers the question: free
for what? (frei wozu?). This is how Zarathustra puts it:
Free you call yourself ? Your ruling thought (herrschender Gedanke) I want
to hear and not that you have escaped a yoke.
Are you indeed one of those allowed to escape from a yoke? There are
some who threw away their last value when they threw away their
servitude.
Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra? But brightly should
your eye proclaim to me:
Free for what?1
[2]
And from those still greater than all saviours have ever been, must you,
my brothers, be saved, if you want to find the way to freedom!6
[3]
However, there is still more to liberation than simply the fight against
oppressive values, which, though internalized, are nonetheless external to
the extent that they are generally widely accepted within ones society and
culture. And according to Zarathustra, freeing oneself from the bonds of
traditional values is just part of the process, the other is the coming to terms
132 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
with ones own inner instincts and drives. And so, when talking to a youth
yearning for freedom, Zarathustra warns:
Free you are not yet, you are still searching for freedom. You have become
overtired and worn out through this search.
You desire the free heights, your soul thirsts for stars. But your bad drives,
too, thirst for freedom.
Your wild dogs too want freedom; they bark with joy in their cellar when
your spirit intents to open all prisons.
You are still a prisoner to me, one plotting his freedom: alas, to such a
prisoner the soul becomes clever but also deceitful and bad.
The liberated spirit must still purify itself. Much prison and prison dust is
still about him: his eye has to become pure.7
Zarathustra here describes the other part of the liberation battle, where
one has to fight, constrain, rule, and purify the wild dogs of ones inner and
often wayward and disruptive drives, usually precariously chained up in
ones cellar. When the prison-doors of values and mores are thrown open,
then the wild dogs of ones drives too, sensing the general loosening of
constraints, clamour for freedom. They too are eager to escape the restric-
tive you ought and replace it with the liberating I will. Here Nietzsche touches
upon the difficult issue of liberty and licence and their potentially dangerous
confusion, something that already occupied him, for instance, when writing
Human All Too Human.8 In Z he gives this advice:
Once you had wild dogs in your cellar: but in the end they changed into
birds and lovely singers. . . . And nothing evil grows henceforth out
of you, except it be the evil that grows out of the fight amongst your
virtues.
My brother, if you are fortunate then you have just one virtue and no
more; that way you will cross the bridge more easily.
It is excellent to have many virtues, but also a difficult task; and some have
gone into the desert and killed themselves because they were weary of
being the battle and battlefield of virtues.
My brother, are war and battle evil? Necessary is this evil, necessary is the
envy and suspicion and betrayal among your virtues.9
Zarathustra on Freedom 133
Initially, it might be surprising that virtues are treated on the same level
as the wild dogs of drives. Yet when we remember from [2] above that
so-called virtues too have to be questioned and treated with contempt, then
this is no longer strange. And, it gives us a clue, furthermore, as to how the
battle of drive-liberation is to be conducted. It is to be conducted by vigi-
lance, envy, and suspicion as well as through contest and competition. But,
unlike the traditional attitudes Nietzsche is arguing against, where powerful
mores often forced repression or annihilation upon ones drives, this is not
the case here. Zarathustra claims that one does not win the battle with ones
drives by repressing or annihilating them but only when they are ordered
and ranked, that is mastered. So, drives and instincts are to be mastered
and ruled by being placed in an orderly hierarchy. And when ruled well, the
hierarchical structure imposed on them greatly contributes to the freedom
and well-being of their ruler. Nietzsche writes in his notebook from 1888:
The mastery over the passions, not their weakening or annihilation! The
greater the masterly force of our will the more freedom can be given to
the passions. The great man is great to the extent of freedom given to his
drives: because he is strong enough to turn wild animals into domestic
ones.10
Yet, a hierarchical structure promotes not only order but also joy; the joy
issuing from a freely imposed and freely accepted discipline. When wild
dogs become fully tamed and domesticated, they naturally also become
obedient to ones wishes and then are a joy to be with. Nietzsche expresses
an analogous thought in a beautiful section of Dawn.11 There he says that
one masters ones drives as gardeners do their gardens, when they skilfully
select, prune, blend and rearrange their raw material according to their
own tastes and plans, and that this will bring great joy. In the same passage,
Nietzsche also suggests an alternative: instead of order, he says, gardeners
can just decide to let their plants remain in their natural state and compete
for status among themselves, and that such wildness will bring joy too but
also problems. This last suggestion of letting contest and competition
decide the outcome of status is particularly interesting. Competition does
allow the strongest, fasted, best, and so on of participating peers to battle it
out as to who is first, who is the winner. Of course, winners in competitions
are never sole survivors, it is not that kind of struggle, but they are first
among if not always their equals than at least of those of similar or
comparative prowess. In this way competition, too, avoids annihilation and
repression, while at the same time utilizing the drive to dominance or
134 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
victory to impose an order of rank and merit. Yet, note a striking difference
between this kind of competition and gardeners allowing their plants to be
subject to natures raw struggle for space and nourishment. Both are,
indeed, non-interfering, both will produce winners and losers, but the
former contest is rule-governed and aims to promote a specific quality or
goal, in other words, imposes a standard of selection, while the latters
natural exuberance is akin to anarchy. There is ample evidence that
Nietzsche valued both possibilities. In Z, for instance, as well as in On the
Genealogy of Morals, the emphasis is more on mastery and hierarchical rule,
while the famous statement in Ecce Homo12, among others, celebrates the
natural emergence of dominant drives and urges non-interference and
non-selection.
From the above we can see that the free from what? question can be
adequately answered by reference to ones liberation from oppressive values
and wayward drives.
[4]
Before we can discuss the next, the free for what? question, we must pause
and look at the liberated person. There can be little doubt that persons
undergoing liberation in the way discussed above must be, by any descrip-
tion, in a deeply unstable position, one very injurious to ones sense of
identity. With most of the values previously adhered-to now questioned or
undermined, and with ones drives and instincts rearranging themselves
according to still-to-be-explored, still-to-be-secured rules, one must, in a
way, feel uncertain as to who one is and uncertain also as to where to go. Yet,
according to Zarathustra, this is precisely how it ought to be, since the
wrenching away from ones ease and security is a constitutive part of
Zarathustras much-repeated exhortation that man is something to be over-
come. No doubt, overcoming oneself is a fearful challenge, reaching deep
into ones sense of identity, making it problematic as to who one is or wants
to be. Stronger even than in liberation, overcoming oneself is a require-
ment of cutting oneself totally free from everything stable and familiar and
thus seems to imply a leaving behind of oneself so complete as to amount
nearly to self-destruction. The nearly is crucial! Consider here the simile
of burning to ashes and arising again as in the myth of Phoenix, this arche-
typal image of death and rebirth, of loss and triumphal re-emergence, of
destruction and new creation. Ashes are, indeed, mentioned a few times in
Z, and one may wonder whether Nietzsche was here contemplating solely
the Phoenix myth or whether he was also inspired by Goethes famous
Zarathustra on Freedom 135
poem Selige Sehnsucht (Blissful Longing),13 where Goethe speaks of the deep
and profound yearning to have oneself consumed by fire a yearning one
can speak of only to the wise as, invariably, it is mocked by the many. This is
very close to Zarathustras advice to would-be creators:
You must want to burn in your own flame: how can you want to become
new unless you become ashes first!14
[5]
Ashes are first mentioned right at the start of Zarathustras mission: the very
first person he meets on his descent is an old hermit who instantly recog-
nizes him as the one who, years ago, carried his ashes up the mountain.
And now the hermit exclaims: Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has
become as a child.17 Has the triumphant Phoenix come to Zarathustra in
136 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the innocent persona of a child? While this is, of course, an apt simile for a
new beginning, we must note that, in Z, the child is also the last of the three
metamorphoses, following upon the lion. And of the lion and the child
Zarathustra has this to say:
To create new values that even the lion is unable to do: but to create for
oneself the freedom to new creating that the lion had power to do. To
create for oneself freedom and a sacred No even to duty: for that, my
brothers, the lion is needed. . . .
Truly, a preying is it to him and the task of an animal of prey. . . .
But speak, my brothers, what is the child able to do that a lion is unable
to do? What, must the preying lion become a child?
Innocence is the child and a forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a self-
rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying.
Indeed, the play of creating, my brothers, requires a sacred Yes-saying: the
spirit now wills his own will, having lost a world he wins his own world.18
The lion fights for freedom and robs the dragon of his values, and with
reference to these achievements, he can successfully answer the free from
what? question. Yet Zarathustra goes on to state that the lion, nonetheless,
has not reached the sort of freedom suitable to create new values, to start a
new beginning. And this highly astute observation of the lions limitation or
deficiency marks, I suggest, the very point that separates mere liberation
from what we have called above freedom proper. It has become obvious
now has it not? that the capacity to create new values, to make a new
beginning, is the component and characteristic enabling one to give a satis-
factory answer to the free for what? question. We can conclude, then, that
liberation is a necessary but not sufficient condition towards answering that
question, since a satisfactory answer must necessarily contain the purposes
and contents of a new making (neues Schaffen). In other words, to answer
the free for what? question one must, on emerging from the break with ones
past values, have the kind of freedom and creativity which aims well beyond
and above the present, the liberated state towards the making of new values
befitting a new beginning, a new dawn.
Now, if the lion is unable to achieve this task but the child is, what,
then, are the endowments the child has that the lion lacks? The child has,
according to Zarathustra, innocence, forgetting, and playfulness, and
the child is, furthermore, a new beginning, a self-rolling wheel, a first
Zarathustra on Freedom 137
[6]
order on ones instincts and drives. As we have seen, these are precondi-
tions for freedom only. And, while Zarathustra is dismissive about the fact
that someone has escaped a yoke, he is eager to know about ones ruling
thought (herrschender Gedanke). What is a ruling thought? It is best to answer
this question by looking at the kind of person likely to have a ruling thought,
as this will also, most plausibly, be the kind of person Zarathustra is looking
out for. Consider here how, after the abortive attempt to teach a multitude
in a marketplace the message of the bermensch, and after admitting to
himself that he has looked for the wrong person in the wrong place,
Zarathustra makes the following resolution:
It is obvious that the companions and fellow creators Zarathustra seeks are
persons free in the sense discussed above, those that can answer the free for
what? question and are able to create new values. That leaves the herd and
believers. It is obvious, again, that herds are to be dismissed; being
shepherd to a herd is, to Zarathustra, like a priest administering to a congre-
gation. But why are believers dismissed? After all, one could read the whole
of Zarathustra with a convinced sense that here speaks someone looking for
proselytes, looking to convert people to his new ideas and values, in short,
looking for believers. Without doubt, there is much in Zarathustra that
endorses such a reading. Nonetheless, I would suggest, that such a reading
is inadequate because it neglects the role of freedom. Zarathustra says the
following to his believers:
You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra! You are
my believers: but what matter all believers!
You had not began searching for yourself: and you found me. All believers
do thus, that is why all belief amounts to so little.
Now I call upon you to lose me and find yourselves; . . .20
Therefore, believers start believing in others before they have even begun
searching for themselves. And, without searching, there can be no finding;
Zarathustra on Freedom 139
and without finding, how can there be liberation? In other words, believers
just swap one unexamined set of beliefs for another. That is why they matter
so little. They are just followers and in this respect ready material to become
members of a herd; a new herd, no doubt, but a herd nonetheless. One
could object here that, all the same, there is no reason why believers should
not have a ruling thought, and, furthermore, if they have one that it would
be, most likely, a good ruling thought because cloned from their teachers.
But this is precisely the point: it would not be their ruling thought since it
has not arisen out of the ashes of their own liberation.
Zarathustra is looking for companions who are free in the relevant sense.
This being so, it becomes clear why he cannot specify what their ruling
thoughts should be. While Zarathustra can indeed prescribe that his
companions and fellow creators are liberated that is, have searched,
found, and destroyed themselves and also prescribe that they have
ruling thoughts, yet the content of these thoughts he cannot prescribe
without negating his whole doctrine of freedom.
Finally, there remains the problem of the compatibility, or otherwise,
between the creativity of a free persons ruling idea and the cluster of attri-
butes associated with the creativity of the child, which is described by
Zarathustra as predominately innocent play. The way ruling thoughts tend
to exercise their rule does not, on the face of it, seem to have much in
common with the play of a child. Ruling thoughts are, almost by definition,
dominant, sometimes even obsessive; they have content and know what
they aim for. But a childs play, among many other things, is an innocent
openness, ready for whatever might come. This is, indeed, a difficulty. Yet
the difficulty can be diffused, if not wholly solved, if one subscribes to the
thought, suggested at the beginning of this chapter, that free persons will
exhibit in their very lives their answer to the free for what? question. And,
naturally, it would be odd if there were just one possible way to lead a free
life. In addition, we have to consider that the child is a metaphor, usually
a metaphor for a new beginning. Yet, note that in Z, it is also a metaphor for
the culmination of a process, since it is the last epiphany of the three meta-
morphoses. In other words, the child is both a new beginning and a
crowning achievement.
[7]
I have argued that the freedom Zarathustra advocates is not something one
has but something one is. This freedom is not a trophy one can hold aloft
and point to as ones price for much struggle; on the contrary, it is embedded
140 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
into the narrative of ones lived life. Let us now look within the confines of
Z for a person free in this sense. Obviously, Zarathustra is such a person: he
carried his ashes up the mountain and descended having turned into a
child. Besides, he certainly has some ruling thoughts! His followers and
believers we have already dismissed since they were not able even to liberate
themselves. This leaves the higher men of part IV. But they are not
successful candidates either. Consider what it is that they carry up the moun-
tain during their pilgrimage to Zarathustras cave. It is not their ashes but
their anxieties and miseries. Consequently, they look to Zarathustra for
advice, for comfort and security, and for solution of their problems. Indeed,
the explanation as to why they searched for Zarathustra in the first place is
the fact that they already believed in him and now simply seek to solidify
him so as to venerate and follow him. In other words, the higher men do
not sincerely aspire for liberation, rather, they hope for salvation!
Not surprisingly, Zarathustra rejects them outright as potential fellow crea-
tors: how could they possibly reach the required freedom when the
challenging, liberating roar of the lion is already too much for them?
Therefore, it is only Zarathustra who is truly free! A solitary figure, in line
with his much-admired solitary tree on the mountains side, defying the
elements. Yet, surely, this cannot be the final outcome. Zarathustra himself
was full of hope that there were others hence the urgency of his mission
and the delight in his last descent.
Chapter 9
O you buffoons and barrel organs, be silent! . . . How well you know what
comfort I invented for myself in seven days! That I must sing again, this
comfort and convalescence I invented for myself. Must you immediately
turn this too into a hurdy-gurdy song?1
What Zarathustra obviously longed for, during the dawn of his recovery, was
a life which no law could guarantee, no ordinance could prescribe but only
the nearness to the muses would be able to offer him. It was their touches,
their songs, their dances, speeches, and images that he was yearning for. Not
pale, like a shadow of life,5 this was not how he wanted to live further on, as
if he were already dead.6 He had had enough of this false life once and
forever.
Left to his own devices, he was not capable of healing himself. For his
convalescence he would rather have to pursue a new politics of leisure; a
politics of the muses, one that would bring him in contact with just those
new courtesans from which Hesiod had reported in his Theogony, that
they were the deliverers of pure joy. Since Zarathustra himself hoped to
become a deliverer of a new and joyful form of life, of a muse-like sur-vival
(ber-Leben), through the act of his own convalescence.
The author of the text Thus Spoke Zarathustra, who was a philologist of
ancient languages by profession, of course was very familiar with the Greek
meaning of the word metaphor. Meta-pherro means in Greek I deliver or
I bring something. Understood as metaphors of joy, the muses in ancient
Greece are therefore not just symbols of joy, but literally the deliverers of joy.
There, where they appear, where a soul is really touched7 by the muse, there
they do not just represent the idea of a joyful, jovial, exalted existence in an
abstract way, but rather they function directly as the messenger of an ecstati-
cally overwhelming emotional state. The joy that shines from their own
gracefulness and harmony, is contagious extends to those souls which
have been caressed by them.
One who thus has truly been touched by works, inspired from the muses,
therefore will not only be motivated to think of the eidetic essence of joy,
without, during the act of imaging it, also being affected by that which the
soul is imagining: joy. Rather, one that is touched by the muses is emotion-
ally infected and transitively tuned to the joyful harmony expressed in works
inspired from the muses.
Taken as metaphors of joy the muses are at work only where those who have
been touched by them have been affectively stricken, e-motionally moved,
and dispositionally infected in such a way that the tonality of the work is medi-
ally transferred onto the recipients.
If such a transmission truly takes place from the muses onto the works of
the fine arts and onto artistically talented recipients, then each famously
notorious kiss of the muses becomes an event in which the substance of joy
On the Regenerative Character of Dispositions 143
Sing and overflow, O Zarathustra; cure your soul with new songs that you
may bear your great destiny, which has never yet been any mans destiny.
For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become:
behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence that is your destiny!8
To do justice to the life of others that was medially transferred to him in the act
of his birth by others, and therefore, became his fate for his own way of life,
Zarathustra first and foremost needs new songs! After all, the old canon,
which he can take recourse in his own life, is no longer appropriate to really
touch his soul. The old songs/stories have become too museal to reach him
any longer. Do not speak on! his animals answered him again, rather
even, O convalescent, fashion yourself a lyre first, a new lyre! For behold,
Zarathustra, new lyres are needed for your new songs.9
Zarathustras recovery obviously was not just about repairing the function-
ality of the already-existing strings and chambers of his disposition to cure
his chronic malaise. It was not just about repairing old strings and rotten
instruments, but about the regeneration of his entire sensual sensorium. The
entire repertoire of his senses, to which he can momentarily refer, thus the
whole way in which his feelings of being touched, inspired, and moved by
the world, are perceived, pre-reflexively understood through passive synthesis
and finally, pre-ontologically interpreted in a sensitive way, all this is at stake
in the process of his recovery.
But even the automatic way of referring to the sensitive chambers of his
soul in the course of their actual usage, even this habitualized automatism
of his senses has to be broken down, interrupted, and tested for its implicit-
ness in the process of his recovery. This unreflective way of speaking,
thinking, and feeling will no longer be sufficient for Zarathustra. The feel-
ings which are still created by a mechanical recourse onto the existing
chambers of his disposition have to be reconsidered anew, they have to be
144 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
he was also forced to immunize himself against all those who are used to
translate every new song immediately into the same old recurring melody.
How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days, and how that
monster crawled down my throat and suffocated me. But I bit off its head
and spewed it out. And you, have you already made a hurdy-gurdy song of
this? But now I lie here, still weary of this biting and spewing, still sick
from my own redemption. And you watched all this? 13
While Zarathustra freed himself with a resolute bite from the historic
burden of his own it was a beast, about whom he said, that it was the
great weariness regarding humans that strangled him and made him
weary his animals merely watched this dramatic display. Almost as if they
did not have any historic burden which strangled them. Almost as if the
notion of the eternal recurrence of the same in their own animalistic
existence did not burden or bother them at all.
Almost as if they, his animals, could tolerate this idea, without being
ashamed of the eternal return of their own animalistic existence. Nothing
in his teachings seemed to be painful for them. On the contrary, they make
us believe as if some of his teachings correspond to their own animalistic
nature, which does not seem to know any resentful misgivings about their
own lives.
For the majority of human beings, however, Zarathustras teachings
appear to be hard to digest. This is the sore spot, which marks the deciding
146 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
On redemption
Zarathustra also hesitated for a while before obeying his own, most abysmal
thoughts. For many years he did not have the courage to make his teaching
the ruling thought of his own existence (Da-sein). O Zarathustra, your
fruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit. Thus you must return to
your solitude again.25 In his inability to cause his soul to desire his own
eternal return, Zarathustra still resembled the truth-seeker, whom he had
met once and heard once say: All is empty, all is the same, all has been!26
Already at that time, Zarathustra was overwhelmed with an enormous
sadness and exhaustion, and with him all of the crowd who had gathered
around the auger and heard him speak of life. The best grew weary of
their works27 because his speech had something infectious. No one
could affectively deny the illocutionary force of its words. Even the auger
himself was so infected by his own speech that he became weary of his own
life emotionally. He walked about sad and weary; and he became like
those of whom the soothsayer had spoken.28 Although Zarathustra had
learned in the meanwhile that the words of the auger were merely fable-
songs, the self-fulfilling prophecy at the time had become word, and was
still stuck in his throat. Still this prevented him from taking the all-decisive
step, which would have cut the head off his disgust with life and freed him
from his melancholy.
Even if he was not yet capable of completely digesting the bite of poisonous
words that had overcome him at the time, at least Zarathustra wanted to
On the Regenerative Character of Dispositions 149
prevent his own friends and followers from infection by the poisonous
words. Since, in the meanwhile, all of these preachers of madness appeared
to him to be secret necromancers or poison mixers, and spirits of revenge.
In other words, humans who were not capable anymore of detoxifying and
digesting the historic fate that destiny had thrown at their own life by
chance. Too bitter and too difficult appeared this task of metamorphosing
the burden of their past for them. In consequence, they developed a deep
rancor and revulsion against time and its It was, which taught them the
negation of life and the willingness to sacrifice.
I lead you away from these fables when I taught you, The will is a creator.
All it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident until the creative
will says to it, But thus I willed it. Until the creative will says to it, But
thus I will it; thus shall I will it.29
Zarathustras nadir
One morning, during the dawning of his soul, not long after his return to the
cave of his solitude, Zarathustra sprang up from his bed and screamed with
a dreadful voice: Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth! I am your cock
and dawn, sleepy worm. Up! Up! My voice shall yet crow you awake!30 Now,
it was time; now he was ready for an all-decisive, final act.
On this morning, being in such a resolute mood, Zarathustra began to
call his soul-like abysses to hear what they had to say about his most profound
thoughts.31 Similar to his tale On the Vision and the Riddle, in which
Zarathustra once saw a young shepherd lying on the ground, who was
doubled over in pain because a black heavy snake had crawled into his
mouth, in the same way it cried out of him on this morning: Bite! Bite its
head off! Bite!32 Not just any day had begun on this morning, but rather
that day, over which was written the title The Convalescent.
A date, which would mark the singular nadir in the life of Zarathustra.
Then, if Zarathustra wanted to recover by virtue of his own thoughts, then
this morning would have to come to him on which he should be prepared
to not just teach others his own teachings, but when he should be prepared
to perform them on and by himself, by biting the bullet, to free himself
from the burden of his own legacy.
And look there. Today the day has come on which he has been chal-
lenging his own abyss to declare him something of his most abysmal
thoughts. The final act in the drama of his convalescence should be sealed
on this morning and thus become a real event.
150 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
You are stirring, stretching, wheezing? Up! Up! You shall not wheeze but
speak to me. . . . I summon you, my most abysmal thought!33 During the
dawn of his convalescence, Zarathustra dares his own anima to speak of his
most abysmal thoughts. All of the life that was in him that should today
speak to him. His most abysmal thoughts should today testify to his soul.
From them he finally wanted to know, what they themselves have to say about
his teachings. This morning it had finally come to the point where they had
to show their true colours and testify to what touches them in the deepest
depth. It is no longer Zarathustra who speaks to his soul in the dawn of his
convalescence. Rather it is his soul, which speaks to him today. Hail to me!
You are coming, I hear you. My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate
depth inside out into the light. Hail to me! Come here! Give me your
hand!34
For the first time his teachings are reciprocated from the depths of his own
soul. For the first time she echoes him. No longer does his soul fear his own
abysmal thoughts. On the contrary, today even her abysses speak of his
abysmal thoughts to him. Have his teachings in the meanwhile reached the
deepest strings of his soul?
Have they in the meantime reached these depths? Been desirously
received by the deepest chambers of his anima?35
Shaken by the event, that his soul had reciprocated his own teachings,
Zarathustra first remained lying, pale, and stricken. Seven days he needed
to digest that which he experienced during the final act of his convales-
cence. At last, after seven days, Zarathustra raised himself on his resting
place, took a rose apple into his hand, smelled it, and found its fragrance
lovely.36
Chapter 10
Whoever has gained wisdom concerning ancient origins will eventually look for
wellsprings of the future and for new origins. . . . The earthquake namely buries
many wells and causes much languishing: it also brings to light inner powers and
secrets. The earthquake reveals new wellsprings. In earthquakes that strike ancient
peoples, new wellsprings break open.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, On old and new
tablets, nr. 25.)1
Introduction
Let me first mention only a few of those earthquakes that strike ancient
peoples today: in Europe, the peoples of former Yugoslavia are afflicted, in
the Middle East, Palestinians, and Israeli that is peoples of Islamic,
Christian as well as orthodox Christian, and of Jewish faiths; in the Far East,
peoples in the Philippines, in Sri Lanka, and Indonesia primarily of
Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic beliefs; not to mention the earthquakes in
other regions of the world such as central Asia or Africa all of which, in
one way or another, pose a challenge to America as well as Europe.
This chapter concentrates on and tries to answer the question what well-
springs did Nietzsche think were buried, and, above all, what new wellsprings
might he have discovered that are of vital interest to the present and might
even wash away Samuel P. Huntingtons view of a Clash of civilizations a
clash in which Europe and America have to either march together or be
beaten separately; even more so, according to Huntington, in the course of
the greater, the real fight between civilization and barbarism. Along with
Nietzsche, I propose to discuss the thesis that notwithstanding the accom-
plishments these world cultures in fact have attained it is precisely the
152 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In 1882, everything really seemed to fall into place, and Nietzsche decided
to have a picture taken in the studio of the photographer Jules Bonnet in
In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future 153
of almost mystic quality for Nietzsche, and at least to some extent for
Salom, too.8 What she noted down in her diary about three weeks later,
however, looks like her summary, her own version, of Nietzsches vision:
We shall realize one day, she writes, that Nietzsche will emerge as a preacher
of a new religion, a religion that will recruit heroes as followers.9
Nietzsches solution? Let me suggest here that the photo presents
Nietzsches vision, his non-ascetic different ideal intended to serve as a
basis for a new culture, in a nutshell. What precisely did Nietzsche have in
mind and want to express not in metaphors, as he time and again does in
his works, but for once through a concrete, tangible picture that could
easily be understood by people all over the world despite their different
languages? Are there any further signs?
In hoc signo vinces (in this sign you will be victorious) is a subtitle in one of
Nietzsches previous books, The Dawn.10 Here Nietzsche asks: When finally
all manners and customs on which the power of the gods, the priests and
rescuers relies . . . then comes well, what is it that will come? In an apod-
ictic manner, Nietzsche continues to ask: whether it is asking too much that
they, the avant-garde, give one another a sign and declare themselves.
It may be noteworthy at this point that Nietzsche states in Ecce homo, chapter
on Human All too Human (nr 6; KSA 6, p. 327), that as early as in this work
of 1876 he has kept in his hand with an enormous inner certainty the task
of his life and its world historic implication.
In hoc signo vinces once meant: in the sign of the cross. And now? Did
Nietzsche give us such a sign in the hope that we declare ourselves: by
arranging the scene for the picture taken in the studio of the photographer
Jules Bonnet in Lucerne? And what might this sign have in common with
the sign he expects from the avant-garde?
II
I wish to relieve the world of some of its heartbreaking and cruel char-
acter. But in order to continue here, I would have to reveal to you what
I have not yet conveyed to anybody the task lying in front of me, the task
of my life.11
In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future 155
messianic idea. However, in the book edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni
Vattimo, the philosopher of a weak (i.e., post-postmodern) kind of thinking,
which bears the title La Religion (original French edition, editions du Seuil,
1996), Religion (English version),33 (Die Religion in the German translation),
both philosophers, in their style of writing, seem to be caught in their doubt
as to the capacities of language and seem to feel totally at home in the
prison of language, absolutely aloof from real life. This might easily be
conceived as a mere intellectual parlour game, whereas people and
peoples today are still looking for another, preferably another grand
metanarrative. . . . A metanarrative is what Nietzsche in fact provides with
respect to what was formerly known as religion as well as with respect to
history; an emancipatory great narrative that perfectly fits the purposes of
deconstruction and postmodernism. For Nietzsche, history and politics
along with it has not come to an end, quite to the contrary.
III
Taking into account that, first, the renowned expert in Indology Heinrich
Zimmer, in accordance with the latest research, dates back to the origins of
the specific ancient myth/great narrative even to pre-Vedic times, namely
to the third or fourth millennium before our common era, and to non-
Aryan transmission and tradition;34 that, second, the Jewish time starts
3761 years before our common era; and that, third, there are numerous
parallels in the basic teachings/texts and key notions I will concentrate in
the following on further, often surprising, notions such as hand, feet,
nose I dare propose the following twofold thesis:
(a) The Jewish time, starting with the creation of the world according to
orthodox tradition, in fact has its historical origin in the creation of that
ancient great narrative, which is not linked to the belief in
one God.
(b) Nietzsche himself has taken into account this possibility/idea.
power of the gods, the priests and rescuers relies . . . then comes well, what
is it that will come? Will those ten to twenty million people among the
different peoples of Europe who no longer believe in God give one
another a sign and declare themselves? Let me also repeat here Nietzsches
remark in EH, on HH (nr 6; KSA 6, p. 327), that as early as in this work of
1876 he has kept in his hand(!) with an enormous inner certainty the task
of his life and its world historic implication.
According to Nietzsche it occurred in the course of highest self-reflection
that someone (i.e., Nietzsche) redeemed them (the priests) from their
Redeemer-Messiah: not only by virtue of a fearless historical sense but also
by virtue of a detective nose smelling the lie (KSA 6, p. 366) precisely like a
Jewish Messiah who is bound to be able to smell wrongfulness (Klausner,
p. 468)!
In Nietzsches view, everything thought out by Christians and idealists has
neither hand nor foot; we are more radical, Nietzsche asserts in spring
1888.35 Whereas he admits, around the turn of the year 1882/83 (KSA 10,
120; 4[42]), that a certain old and righteous God had had hand and foot,
and a heart as well.
The German Nietzsche CD-ROM lists 455 hits for the notion Hand, and
a few hits in combination with Fuss. Hand stands in the context of
teaching, leading, the state, the genius and so on, of having in grip the
great notions, being capable to reorganize perspectives and lying itself on
millenniums. Well, the right hand stretched out in a snappy way became the
sign of the latest aspirant to the sacred Aryan world rulership supposed to
last a thousand years. Eventually for this aspirant in hoc signo vinces did not
become fully true.
May we assume after all that the left hand, the hand of the heart, the
hand of Buddha which traditionally, time and again, is represented with a
wheel impressed in its palm is the other sign, the sign of the other ideal
to which Nietzsche refers?
It is true, the left hand, too, has a long history, which remained largely in
hiddenness. The left hand figures as the mystic Jewish hand, is at home in
the Kabbalah (the original Jewish but also the Christian one), and is worn
in the Middle East in form of an amulet.
Heidegger spoke of the Hand was it the right one or the left? And in
Paris of the 1930s the sociology of the left hand was flourishing. In its
Collge, Klossowski spoke about Marquis de Sade, Walter Benjamin turned
up sometimes, and Georges Bataille, the theoretician and practician of
transgression, was one of its founders. Batailles intention was to oppose
fascism but Julius Evola, too, the fascist theoretician of spirituality, claimed
In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future 163
the way of the left hand for his perspective of transgression, for
transgressing social rules.36
Sure, small digressing actions are very necessary; they are even of greater
value than tolerant ones, according to Nietzsche in The Dawn,37 whereas
some books later, Zarathustra decided to wait having realized that his teach-
ings were in danger. First must the signs come to him that it is now his
hour namely the laughing lion together with the flock of doves.38
So do we have another sign now, the laughing lion together with the flock
of doves? Or, was the former one (hand) only transformed somehow into:
thoughts that come on doves feet (they guide the world)? Again, the
answer is to be found in the ancient narrative: According to Rhys Davids
translation of the Pali text (p. 137), it is one of the traits or signs of the
perfected great being, of a Buddha (traditionally often associated with a
lion), that on the soles of his feet, wheels appear thousandspoked, with
tyre and hub. Does it really come as a surprise now that in the conception
of the Jewish Messiah, too, there is talk about his footprints, about his feet
that herald peace? (Klausner, pp. 442, 468.)
The wheel which as a sign of perfection of the great wise man enters the
scene and, after having been sprinkled by him, without any direct physical
contact, starts rolling out of itself into all four directions of the world. This
wheel rolling out of itself just like Zarathustras wheels, the true individuals,
may be understood as containing an inner drive propulsion that can be
interpreted and defined according to Nietzsche as a physical power (Kraft),
to which one must adjudicate (zusprechen) an inner world (innere Welt)
which Nietzsche calls will(s) to power Willen zur Macht.39
The turn-around to the better is achieved in the ancient narrative and in
Nietzsches texts (as well as in the Jewish and Greek traditions) by highest
respectively deepest self-reflection.40 Let me add here that there is another
similarity in Greek tradition and in the Dighanikaya: This ancient text tells
us about outstanding men as well as of women about true exemplars,
who have been elevated, even over monks, so-called holy men, reborn as
Gods and transformed into stars.
Conclusion
I assume that, after having pointed out all these parallels and signs, the
findings presented in this chapter seem stringent enough to form a fairly
strong chain of circumstantial evidence that proves the validity of this new
perspective for the interpretation of Z. I further assume that because of its
richness it will, however, not leave the rest of Nietzsches texts totally
164 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
unaffected, quite similar to a crime thriller where just one single new
finding may change the comprehension of the whole.
Since there is some evidence for Nietzsche, too, that the ancient great
narrative originating in the third or fourth millenium before our era
was created by Jews (the Jewish era starting 3760 years before the birth of
Christ) and thus can be considered as lying at the heart of so many civiliza-
tions, even if not present in their consciousness but hidden in their collective
memories, I would like to suggest that this other, this different ideal be
conceived as a basis for a New Renaissance. In contrast to the World Ethos
project of the dissident Swiss Catholic Hans Kueng, it very easily integrates
non-religious individuals. It might even answer the question of identity
posed by secular Jews, strengthen the positions of secular Europeans and
the tradition of Enlightenment, as well as those of moderate Muslims who,
for example, interpret the notion of holy war primarily as an inner struggle.
It could help us in trying to come to grips with the great dangers of a New
Renaissance, which would and could (being one with fewer flaws41) be
understood as a New Humanism.
With Z, this book with a voice over several millenniums hinting to the
wellsprings of the future discovered by Nietzsche, he provides us with an
emancipatory, transcultural, (post-)postmodern great narrative challenging
and competing not least by means of a picture its other version still
prevailing to date.
In the Greek contest, the character of an individual is involved, or
according to Nietzsche: the individuals own internal competitive forces
become manifest, and a more profound consciousness and greater sensi-
tivity concerning personal traits (mostly also involving the social or political
community to which the individual belongs) are likely to be fostered. There
is some reason to hope that a more acute sensitivity for corrupted virtues,
for the dangerous character traits of an individual will develop alongside
the New Ideal.
Let me render here a remark that precedes Nietzsches proclamation in
the letter to Heinrich von Stein, a follower of Richard Wagner, mentioned
above (I wish to relieve the world of some of its heartbreaking and cruel
character): I tell you honestly, Nietzsche writes, alluding to von Steins
special liking for cruelty, that I myself have too much of this tragic
complexion in my body for not cursing it often.42 With these words, resulting
from deep self-reflection Nietzsche indicates what finally kept him aloof
from von Stein, whom he had formerly wished to win as an ally.
Chapter 11
But, how I could I wish to be just from the ground up! How can I give each his
own! To me, this is enough: I give each my own.
Thus Spoke Zarsthustra, On the Adders Bite 1
Introduction
This final chapter analyzes the relation between gift-giving and justice in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It argues that the gift-giving virtue stands at the
centre of a new idea of justice which has gift-giving as its source.2 The inti-
mate relationship between gift-giving and justice is contained in the
meaning of the term rechtschaffendes Gastgeschenk used by Nietzsche in The
Welcome scene of Z. It conveys the idea that justice is a gift-giving virtue
and, conversely, that gift-giving is justice. A rechtschaffendes Gastgeschenk is a
gift that creates justice, schafft Recht; it hosts, accommodates, and receives
the other justly.
In accordance with this view, justice as gift-giving presupposes not only
that one has something to give but also that one desires not to keep it.
Justice as gift-giving thus needs to be distinguished from the Christian prac-
tices of charity and alms giving for they are, according to Nietzsche, based
on poverty and a lack of genuine generosity. Charity and alms giving are
practices which poison both the one who gives and the one who receives
insofar as they bind them in a hierarchical relationship of domination
which not only reinforces dependency and injustice but also stirs feelings of
resentment and revenge (AOM 224; BGE 168).3 Gift-giving, by contrast,
promotes freedom and justice: it has a liberating effect on both the one
who gives and the one who receives. This is also why justice as gift-giving is
incompatible with ideas of justice based on punishment and judgment
which presuppose the moral superiority of the one who gives over the one
who receives. Justice as gift-giving moreover needs to be distinguished from
166 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
He envied the wildest, most courageous animals and robbed all their
virtues: only thus did he become human. This courage, finally refined,
spiritualized, spiritual, this human courage with the eagles wings and
Justice and Gift-Giving in Zarathustra 167
The gleaming character of the virtue of gift-giving illustrates the idea that
gift-giving reflects an openness to the other, a reaching out to the other.
The virtue of gift-giving shares this characteristic with the sun which is also
turned towards that which lies outside of itself. Nietzsche describes the way
the self positions itself towards the other both as a going-under (untergehen)
and as a going-over (bergehen).9 These movements are related to each other
insofar as the going-under of the self is at the same time a going-over to the
Justice and Gift-Giving in Zarathustra 169
other (including the other of the self).10 In the prologue to Z, the double
movements of gift-giving, a going-under and a going-over, are captured in
Zarathustra praise to the golden sun which he also names the great star
(Z: 1 Prologue). Zarathustra is grateful to the sun for it has shown him
that to give means to go under (untergehen), and to carry everywhere the
reflection of your light, just as the sun carries everywhere the reflection of
its light (Z: 1 Prologue). Zarathustra expresses his admiration for those
who live like the sun, that is, those who do not know how to live, except by
going under (Untergehenden), for they are those who cross over (Hinberge-
hende) (Z: 4 Prologue). Gift-giving shares this characteristic with virtue in
general because virtue is the will to go under (Z: 4 Prologue), or the
desire to give and spend oneself for the sake of virtue.
Like the movement of sunlight, gift-giving is a movement which overflows
from its source to the other, spreading itself evenly everywhere without
drawing distinctions between people or places. The metaphor of gleaming
light indicates that gift-giving de-centres the self to generate a relationship
with the other that is free from social, political, or moral discrimination.
Gift-giving is a love that knows no distinctions. It is excessive, all-inclusive,
and thus stands in contrast to the Christian love of the One, in which
Nietzsche sees a barbarism; for it is exercised at the expense (auf Kosten) of
all others (BGE 67).11
In the Prologue, Zarathustra confirms that the love of gift-giving has
provoked a change (Verwandlung) in Zarathustra (Z: 1, 2 Prologue). He is
changed by the experience of his own lack of self-sufficiency. In solitude, he
becomes aware of the fact that the human individual is not a self-sufficient,
solitary being, but rather a being that needs others. In other words,
Zarathustra no longer believes that the self-sufficiency of the solitary one
stands higher than friendship (GS 61). Zarathustra also realizes that this
need to relate to others concerns human life more generally: human life
does not constitute an isolated and self-sufficient form of life, but rather
stands in continuity with other forms of (animal) life.12 More significantly,
it is the future of human becoming which depends on affirming the rope
which ties the animal to the human and the human to the overhuman
(Z: 4 Prologue). It seems important to note that Nietzsches insight into
the lack of self-sufficiency in the human life form results from a reflection
on the relationship between humanity and animality, that is, on the role
played by the human beings animality in the formation and transformation
of human life. In contraposition to the Western traditions of humanism
and Enlightenment which assume that freedom and justice are the result of
an emancipation of the human from the animal, Nietzsche holds that they
170 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Verily, I found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the gift-giving
virtue . . . This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourself; and
this is why you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. (Z: 1 On the
Gift-Giving Virtue)
whole and holy, for he believes this egoism is inseparable from their
insatiable desire in wanting to give (Z: 1 On the Gift-Giving Virtue). What
distinguishes the egoism of the squanderer from the selflessness of the
charitable person is that it results in an excessive overflowing and explo-
sion of the self that displaces and ultimately ends up destroying the self in
view of enriching the other (see also TI Skirmishes 44).16 Zarathustras
disciples appropriate and accumulate riches, but always only in view of what
Bataille called the subordinate function of expenditure (I will return to
this a-economic character of gift-giving below).17
In addition, the riches that are being accumulated are riches of the soul
(Z: 1 The Gift-Giving Virtue) and hence what is given over to the other
should not be confused with a distribution of objects, as in the practices of
charity and alms giving. Instead, for Nietzsche, the riches of the soul, when
given over to the other, generate a bond that has a liberating and elevating
effect on the other, precisely because what is given over are neither material
(money, goods, etc.) nor spiritual (dogmas, idols, maxims, etc.) objects. In Z,
Nietzsche articulates that it is the sight of Zarathustras virtue of gift-giving, of
his example of life and thought, which inspires the higher human beings
(Z The Welcome). Zarathustra uplifts others by showing them how he
uplifts himself. The aim is not to directly impose a message on the other, but
to content oneself with the offering of an image of an admirable way of life,
such that only those who have the eyes to see it will have the hands to receive
it. The figure of the self-healing physician best illustrates the idea that gifts
are liberating only when they teach the other to liberate him- or herself:
Physician, help yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let this be his best
help that he may behold with his own eyes the one who heals himself
(Z: 2 On the Gift-Giving Virtue). This explains why, for Nietzsche, virtue
must be ones own invention, ones own most personal defence and neces-
sity, in any other sense it is merely a danger (A 11) for only those virtues
that are my own invention are carriers of freedom, not something imposed
on me but something brought forth by me. The key is that gift-giving does
not, in contrast to charity and alms giving, generate dependencies or nourish
already existing dependencies, but instead challenges the becoming of
the others own liberation. This is why Nietzsche has Zarathustra exclaim
that: . . . beggars should be abolished entirely! Verily, it is annoying to give to
them and it is annoying not to give to them (Z On the Pitying; see also The
Last Supper). Begging and alms giving conflict with justice as gift-giving
insofar as both are practices that are obstacles to attaining genuine freedom
for both practices poison by binding those who live off alms in such a way
that they will always remain dependent on those who give them.
Justice and Gift-Giving in Zarathustra 173
event, or, in the words of Derrida, that there is no gift without the advent
of an event, no event without the surprise of the gift (Derrida, Given Time,
p. 119).
The event character of the gift is also implicit in Zarathustras departure
from his disciples at the end of book one when he separates from his disci-
ples and returns to solitude. We are told that Zarathustra still has things to
tell and to give to his disciples. This makes Zarathustra wonder about
himself and ask: [w]hy do I not give it? Am I stingy? (Z The Stillest Hour).
The reason for Zarathustras hesitation to enter into a gift-giving relation-
ship with his disciples is not that he is stingy, but that the right moment, a
moment which he earlier described as the great noon, when the human
being stands between the animal and the overhuman (Z: 3 On the Gift-
Giving Virtue), has not yet come. Later, in The Honey Sacrifice, when the
right moment seems to be approaching, Zarathustra follows the suggestion
of his animal friends and climbs up the mountain to offer the honey sacri-
fice. Once he has climbed the mountain, Zarathustra explains that he is
waiting for the sign that the time has come for his descent and going-under.
He describes himself as patient and impatient at the same time, as oversatu-
rated with gifts. He is like the cup that wants to overflow but lacks what will
finally make it flow over (Z: 1 Prologue). Zarathustra knows that every-
thing depends on the great Hazar (Z The Honey Sacrifice). He reassures
himself that [o]ne day it must yet come and may not pass . . . Our great
Hazar: that is our great distant human kingdom (Menschenreich), the
Zarathustra kingdom of a thousand years (Z The Honey Sacrifice).
Zarathustras vision of a human kingdom to come confirms the political
significance that I have been attributing to the virtue of gift-giving which
constitutes the basis of a political association which generates both freedom
and justice. Since the event of gift-giving is contingent, what distinguishes
this political association, along with the freedom and justice it promotes, is
its lack of an absolute foundation. Zarathustras human kingdom, a rule of
freedom and justice should, therefore, not be confused with a goal to be
attained in the future. Rather it has, much like Nietzsches vision of a higher
aristocracy to come, the future as its temporal dimension. Consequently,
the event of the gift, that is, the emergence of a human kingdom based on
gift-giving, must be understood as an open-ended struggle which requires
those who are willing to fight for freedom and justice to come. The fight for
freedom and justice will be confronted with the task of giving a new
meaning to the earth (Z: 2 On the Gift-Giving Virtue), with breaking old
tablets and replacing them with new ones (Z: 2 On the Gift-Giving Virtue).
The challenge, here, is not simply a transvaluation of all values, but, as
Justice and Gift-Giving in Zarathustra 175
This is the manner of the noble souls: they do not want to have anything
for nothing; least of all, life. Whoever is of the mobwants to live for
nothing; we others, however, to whom life gave itself, we always think
about what we might best give in return. And verily, that is a noble speech
which says, What life promises us, we ourselves want to keep to life. (Z: 5
On Old and New Tablets)
In this view, giving to life in return for the gift of life exceeds a calculation
of costs and benefits. The virtuous do not give back because they feel guilty
and obliged by a debt, but rather give back for no reason, innocently, as it
were. They do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and
be a sacrifice (Z: 4 Prologue). Reason and the virtue of gift-giving neces-
sarily exclude one another if, by reason, one means calculating in terms of
176 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I love him whose soul squanders (verschwendet) itself, who wants no thanks
and returns none (nicht zurckgiebt): for he always gives away (schenkt) and
does not preserve (bewahren) himself. (Z: 4 Prologue)
the Gift-Giving Virtue). Being the highest virtue here means that it cannot
be judged in comparison to other virtues. The gift-giving virtue stands, like
the singular individual, out and alone, over and above all comparison. Just
as virtue permits no one to judge it, because it is always virtue for itself
(WP 317), so does the singular individual permits no one to judge it, because
it is its own standard of value (GS 3). Nietzsche rejects an evaluation that is
based on judgment and comparison because it underrates, almost over-
looks and almost denies the value of the singular individual in itself
(WP 878).
The value of the singular individual should not be compared, for to
compare is to approach, to do away with distance and, thus, to do away with
the value and significance of the singularity of virtue. Nietzsche insists that
the value of higher natures, for example, rests on being different, incom-
municable, in distance of rank (WP 876). Accordingly, the virtue of
gift-giving cannot be named (Z: 2 On the Three Evils) and does not
communicate itself (WP 317); it can only be appreciated in silence and at
a distance. This is, moreover, the reason why the virtue of gift-giving does
not provide a new standard of measure. The virtue of gift-giving cannot be
measured or compared, but also does not measure or compare.
friendship but also to gift-giving insofar as they are silent and solitary acts:
Oh, the loneliness (Einsamkeit) of all givers (Schenkenden)! Oh, the tacitur-
nity (Schweigsamkeit) of all who shine! (Z The Night Song).
Gift-giving should, therefore, not be confused with an exchange based on
reciprocity and symmetry or comparison and mutual sharing. Instead, the
practice of gift-giving constitutes a bond that has all the features of a rela-
tionship between friends which does not make two singular individuals
common to each other. What friends have in common is what distinguishes
them. What they share is what cannot be shared. Friendship stands for the
love of the other, where love does not lead to the fusion and confusion of
me with you (AOM 241). Friendship is the opposite of concord and
consensus, for it protects the plurality of the friends by affirming that the
respective ways of two singular individuals are irreducibly distinct (AOM
75). Against the Christian notion of love for ones neighbour (Nchsten-
liebe), Nietzsche upholds the love that relates friends, for the latter overcomes
the greedy desire of two people for each other towards a new desire and
greed, a shared higher thirst of an ideal above them, namely, that of friend-
ship (GS 14). Friendship preserves freedom through distance, it is a flight
from the neighbor and love of the farthest (Fernsten-liebe) which functions
as an antidote against the desire for the appropriation and domination
hiding behind the love of ones neighbor (Z On Love of the Neighbor).
Nietzsche warns not to give into proximity and identification, to the
fusion or the permutation of you and me, but, instead, to keep a distance
between the self and the other, for he sees in the proximity of the neigh-
bour a ruse for property and appropriation (GS 14). Such a desire for
ownership hides behind the Platonic idea of justice as a giving to each his
own. Nietzsche replies to Plato with a pun: But how could I think of being
just through and through? How can I give each his own? Let this be suffi-
cient for me: I give each my own (Z On the Adders Bite). To give to each
his or her own requires not only that one knows what constitutes the others
proper but also how to evaluate and judge it presupposing the superiority
of the judge over those he or she judges. In contrast, when we consider
justice as gift-giving, the pathos of giving is a pathos of distance and, hence,
giving each ones own means neither judging the other nor imposing
oneself on the other.
Friends are against each other (gegen), which literally means to be at the
same time the closest (gegen) and the furthest apart (gegen) from each other.
Friendship overcomes difference and distance, but, at the same time,
preserves it. Accordingly, what reveals the friends affinity and relatedness
to each other is not the way they approach each other, but the way they part
Justice and Gift-Giving in Zarathustra 179
Not contentment (Zufriedenheit), but more power (Macht); not peace at all,
but war; not virtue, but proficiency (Tchtigkeit) (virtue in the Renaissance
style, virt, virtue free of moralic acid). (A 2)
Justice as gift-giving is gentle because it rejects the idea that justice is equal
retribution, for what you do nobody can do to you in return (Z: 4 On Old
and New Tablets), which can be attained through judgment and punish-
ment, for to judge is the same thing as to be unjust (HH 39; see also GM I,
180 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra
II; TI Errors 7; WS 68; and AOM 33). A passage from The Adders Bite
illustrates this idea:
I do not like your cold justice; and out of the eyes of your judges there
always looks the executioner and his cold steel. Tell me, where is that
justice which is love with open eyes? Would that you might invent for me
the love that bears not only all punishments but also all guilt! Would you
might invent for me the justice that acquits everyone, except him who
judges! (Z The Adders Bite)28
Introduction
1
Translation from Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in Zaei
Banden, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, p. 659.
2
Carnap, Rudolf (1959) The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical
Analysis of Language, Logical Positivism, ed. by A.J. Ayer, Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
3
Luchte, J. (2007) Wreckage of Stars: Nietzsche and the Ecstasy of Poetry,
Hyperion: The Future of Aesthetics, Nietzsche Circle; (2003) Preface, The Peacock
and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, trans. by J. Luchte and E. Leadon, Lampeter:
Fire & Ice Publishing.
4
Schacht, R. (1983) Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
23
For the Christmas after his twelfth birthday Nietzsche received a folio of 12 four-
handed symphonies of Haydn (Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten
[Munich and Vienna, 2000], p. 38). Six years later, he notes: During the first
part of the year played 12 Haydn symphonies (Friedrich Nietzsche Jugendschriften,
2: 333).
24
Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik, pp. 41, 121, 123.
25
Nietzsche, Z, trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford 2005).
26
Letter of 13 July 1883 (KSB 6: 397).
27
Hesiod and Theognis (1979) Works and Days, line 116, trans. by Dorothea Wender,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 116.
28
EH, Preface, 4.
29
EH, Zarathustra, 7.
30
The term Zurckwollen can also mean willing backwards, but I have included
wanting back to emphasize the allusion to the willing of eternal recurrence.
Compare the recurrence of this verb at the end of section 10 of The Drunken
Song (4.19).
31
EH, Zarathustra, 7.
32
The last 25 sections are addressed explicitly to my brothers, with the exceptions
of 17 (to you who are world-weary) and the last section (to my will). There
is no mention of my brothers in 22 and 23, but they seem to be addressed to
the usual, imagined audience.
33
Nietzsches early evaluation in a letter to Kselitz from December 1881 I am
close to thinking that Carmen is the best opera there is; and as long as we live it
will be on all the repertoires in Europe (KSB 6: 147) made at a time when
Bizets opera was relatively unknown has turned out to be highly prescient.
34
Mark, 10: 30.
35
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) BGE, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, p. 246.
36
KSA 9: 4[285] (1880).
37
Zarathustra, Prologue 2; Revelation 1: 8; Zarathustra, 3: 16 6.
26
Beitrge zur Quellenforschung mitgeteilt von Paolo DIorio, Nietzsche-Studien,
22: 395397 (1993).
27
Von Hellwald, Friedrich (1876) Culturgeschichte in ihrer natrlichen Entwicklung bis
zur Gegenwart, Augsburg: Lampart & Co., p. 128.
28
Ibid., p. 129.
29
EH, Why I am a Destiny, p. 3.
30
Compare Zarathustras speech to the sun, and his introduction of the will to
power in the section Of Self-overcoming (p. 130 ff.) and Z, Von tausend und
Einem Ziele, p. 131. Nietzsche also restated this slightly differently in EH,
Schicksal, p. 3.
31
Hellwalds book is strongly Darwinian, and it is also, in print, dedicated to the
greatest German Darwinist, E. Haeckel.
32
This section is also dealt with more philosophically by Peter Yates below.
33
In the summer or autumn of the following year Nietzsche again repeated
basically the same developmental view in his notebook, KSA 11, 26[47], summer
autumn 1884. I have used the translation of C.F. Wallraff and F.J. Schmitz here,
given in Jaspers Nietzsche (New York, London: Lanham, 1965), pp. 4446.
34
Though, as stated above, Nietzsche had planned to write a book of this kind
already before he even met Lou in the spring of 1882.
35
Quoted in Gilman, Sander L. (1987) Begegnungen mit Nietzsche2. Aufl., Nachdr.
Bonn. Bouvier. 819 S. Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik,
p. 478.
36
Surprisingly, I have not encountered any reference or discussion to her account
of the whip-scene among the many discussions of this passage in Z.
37
See Gilman, Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, 429 f.
38
See also KSA 10, 23[1], end of 1883. The importance of this section from Also
sprach Zarathustra and this note have been discussed by Aldo Venturelli (1998)
in Nietzsche-Studien, 27, pp. 2951 and by R. Perkins (1997) in Nietzsche-Studien,
26, 361 ff.
39
See KGW VI.4, p. 887 which shows that the bird originally symbolized Lou.
40
Unfortunately, the biographical information related to Also sprach Zarathustra
seems not to have been collected together at one place anywhere.
41
See KSA 14, p. 306.
42
See Nietzsches letters to Franziska and his sister, 1 April 1882, and to Overbeck,
8 April 1882, and Peter Gasts comments about the journey, KGB III.7/1,
p. 203.
43
Compare EH, Zarathustra, p. 1, where Nietzsche claims that this idea constitute
the centrepiece of the work.
44
This is visible, among others, in letters to Lou Salom, in the text on the cover of
The Joyful Science where he states that this book ends his free spirit phase and most
clearly in the last two sections of the book, 341 and 342, where he introduces the
central idea of the book and the figure of Zarathustra. The very first notes which
suggest the work are from August 1881, the time when he discovered the eternal
recurrence and the figure of Zarathustra. The title and the expression Also sprach
Zarathustra do not occur until he worked on it in January 1883, but he used the
expression So sprach Zarathustra in KSA 9, 12[225] already in the autumn
1881. Early versions of 68, 106, 291 and 332 of GS contained references to the
188 Notes
name or figure Zarathustra, but these were withdrawn before the final version
because he realized that he wanted to save the figure of Zarathustra until his next
book. Nietzsche introduces the name Zarathustra in 342. That whole section
he essentially restates at the beginning of Z, which shows that he already in 1882
knew he was going to write Also sprach Zarathustra.
45
For example, while reading Emersons Versuche (Essays) (1858), p. 351, Nietzsche
has underlined and made marginal lines along this text, and written Das ist es,
that is, That is it in the margin. Compare KGW VI.4, p. 950.
46
Some of these major influences are so little known, even among the best German
Nietzsche commentators, that, for example, Hellwald, Lipiner, and Spitteler are
not even mentioned in the otherwise highly informative and interesting commen-
tary of over 400 pages, Also sprach Zarathustra, ed. by Volker Gerhardt (Berlin
2000), in the series Klassiker Auslegen. These authors are also not mentioned
in relation to Z in the Nietzsche-Handbuch (2000). For Spittelers possible influ-
ence on Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra and the discussions of this question,
see Curt Paul Janz Nietzsche biography, II, pp. 224228. Spittelers Prometheus
und Epimetheus [1881] is in Nietzsches private library, but may have been sent to
him in September 1887, see Widemanns letter to Nietzsche, 13 September 1887,
KGB III.6, p. 78f. Janz also briefly discusses Lipiner as a possible source on p. 229.
See also Werner Stauffachers Carl Spitterler und Friedrich Nietzsche: Ein
Ferngesprch, in Nietzsche und die Schweiz (Zrich 1994), ed. by David Marc
Hoffmann, pp. 133139, and the references therein. Curt Paul Janz, in his
standard biography of Nietzsche suggests as another fundamental stimulus
Shelleys The Revolt of Islam which Nietzsche wished for Christmas 1861, and
which according to Janz contains several interesting parallels to Z, including the
presence of an eagle and snake flying together. However, this book is not in
Nietzsches library, and we have no knowledge that he received it (it seems
unlikely). Even if he had received and read it, the time-span of 20 years here
makes it unreasonable to regard that as a probable influence (at least until other
possible influences can be excluded).
47
Unfortunately, these and other sources to Also sprach Zarathustra seem not to
have been collected together and discussed at one place anywhere.
48
Nietzsches Reading at the Time of Morgenrthe: An Overview and a Discussion
of his Reading of J. Popper. This paper will be published in conference proceed-
ings about Nietzsches Morgenrthe during 2007 or 2008, ed. by Paolo DIorio.
49
Letters to Reinhart von Seylitz, 12 February 1888, to Naumann, 25 November
1888 and to Jean Bourdeau, 17 December 1888. He uses these expressions in
several letters and also several others. Even as early as 1885, he makes similar
claims, for example, in letters to Marie Kckert, middle of February 1885 and to
Fritzsch, 29 August 1886.
50
See the letter accompanying Jenseits von Gut und Bse to Jacob Burckhardt,
22 September 1886.
51
See letter to Fritzsch, 29 April 1887: Meine Absicht dabei war, ihm [i.e., the fifth
book of Die frhliche Wissenschaft] noch mehr den Charakter einer Vorbereitung
fr Also sprach Zarathustra zu geben.
52
Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, 25. This is the whole of the last section of the second
essay of Zur Genealogie der Moral, which originally was meant to end the work (but
Notes 189
Nietzsche later wrote and added the third essay). This was obviously written to
get the reader to also read his Also sprach Zarathustra. See also Nietzsches letter
to Overbeck, 17 September 1887.
53
See the longer discussion in my article, Nietzsches magnum opus, History of
European Ideas 32 (2006), pp. 278294.
54
This is something which Nietzsche all along works on. To mention just one
example, see KSA 10, 24[4].
55
Letter to Overbeck, 8 March 1884, and the two letters quoted in the text.
56
Letter to Overbeck, 7 April 1884.
57
Letter to Meysenbug, early May 1884.
58
See, for example, Nietzsches letters to Overbeck, 18 August 1884 and
14 September 1884, and to Franziska, 29 January 1885.
59
Letter to Gast, 2 September 1884. It is possible that the scheme Nietzsche speaks
of is the one he refers to in several notes from this time, for example, KSA 11,
27[58 + 67 + 79 + 80 + 82].
60
KGW VI.2, p. 257.
61
Letter to Elisabeth and Bernhard Frster, 2 September 1886.
62
Letter to Overbeck, 24 March 1887.
63
Letter to Helen Zimmern, 8 December 1888: Mein Leben kommt jetzt zu einem
lang vorbereiteten ungeheuren Eklat: das, was ich in den nchsten zwei Jahren
thue, ist der Art, unsere ganze bestehende Ordnung . . . ber den Haufen zu
werfen.
64
Nietzsche planned a continuation of Also sprach Zarathustra, a fifth book, in which
Zarathustra dies, until the autumn of 1885. This is reflected in a large number of
notes, among others KSA 11, 35[7375] and 39[3 and 22]. See also KGW VI.4,
pp. 972 ff.
65
Nietzsche, F. (1988): Gtzen-Dmmerung: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt,
Streifzge eines Unzeitgemssen, 49, KSA vol. 6, 55161.
66
Gtzen-Dmmerung, Streifzge, p. 51.
67
Letters to H. Taine, 8 December and to Naumann, 20 December 1888.
68
EH, Verhngniss, 8: Ich habe eben kein Wort gesagt, das ich nicht schon vor
fnf Jahren durch den Mund Zarathustras gesagt htte.
69
This is most obvious for Zur Genealogie der Moral, which is described as three
decisive preliminary studies of a psychologist for a revaluation of all values.
70
See KSA 13, 14[89], 16[32], 19[8], 22[14] and 23[8 and 13].
71
GS, p. 345.
72
KSA 9, 6[448], from the autumn 1880.
73
I have discussed this extensively in my book Brobjer, Thomas (1995) Nietzsches
Ethics of Character: A Study of Nietzsches Ethics and its Place in the History of Moral
Thinking, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.
74
EH, Zarathustra, p. 8.
75
Die frhliche Wissenschaft, p. 290. See also, for example, Also sprach Zarathustra, III,
Of Involuntary Bliss: must I perfect myself .
76
Morgenrthe, p. 548:
I mean the spectacle of that strength which employs genius not for works but
for itself as a work; that is, for its own constraint, for the purification of its
190 Notes
imagination, for the imposition of order and choice upon the influx of tasks
and impressions.
77
Nietzsche, F. (1988) Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christenthum. KSA vol. 6, 165254,
11.
78
KSA 11, 37[11]. Also published as Der Wille zur Macht, p. 125.
79
Letter to Fritzsch, 29 August 1886.
80
Letter to Deussen, 26 November 1888: Darin wird zum ersten Mal Licht ber
meinen Zarathustra gemacht.
81
Letter to mother, 29 January 1885: ein Vorbild abzugeben, nach der Art meines
Zarathustra.
82
Letter to Paul Lanzky, end of April 1884.
83
See Karl Spitteler review (which is generally positive) of all of Nietzsches books,
from Die Geburt der Tragdie to Zur Genealogie der Moral (with the exception of
Jenseits von Gut und Bse), published in the Swiss newspaper Der Bund, 1 January
1888.
contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended
into a new unity. (EH, pp. 304305)
29
KSA 6, p. 370. I would modify this translation by doing a literal translation of the
text: he does not conceal the fact that his type of man, a relatively more
overmanly type, is overmanly exactly in relation to the good that the good and the
just would call his overman devil. This would bring the bermenschlich and the
bermensch of the original into English.
30
There are two works which can be mentioned here: Jungs lectures on Z and
Laurence Lamperts comprehensive study, Nietzsches Teaching: An Interpretation of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
31
AC (1954) trans. by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking
Penguin, 34, pp. 570571.
32
GS, Book V, p. 382.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Stanley Rosen (1995, p. 81) suggests this interpretation of ghost in his line-
by-line reading of Zarathustra.
24
Z, On the Three Metamorphoses, op. cit.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., my italics.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
40
Ibid., On the Vision and the Riddle.
41
Nietzsche, KSA 12: 1[119] (12.38) (translation by the authors).
42
Nietzsche, WP, 1064.
43
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[318] (9.564) (translation by the authors).
44
Nietzsche, Z, The Convalescent.
45
Nietzsche, WP, 1066.
46
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[156] (9.500) (translation by the authors).
47
Nietzsche, Z, The Convalescent.
48
Ibid., At Noon.
49
Ibid., The Drunken Song.
50
Ibid., The Sign.
51
Nietzsche, WP, 617.
The Gateway-Augenblick
1
See Small 2001, p. 52; KSA 13: 14[188]; WP 1066; and Shapiro 2001.
2
See Small 1998 (pp. 84 ff.) and 2001 (pp. 4158) on Nietzsches use of optical
and perspectival language in his description of the gateway-Augenblick and of
the influence of Gustav Teichmller (whose book he was studying at the same
time as he was composing Part III of Zarathustra). See also Shapiro 2001 and
Moles 1989, pp. 233234.
3
Also, repeating his allusion to Fausts pact with Mephistopheles concerning the
midnight Augenblick of his death, and alluding to the whispering demon of GS
p. 341, Nietzsche depicts Zarathustras whispering archenemy as the devil (II.10).
See also Nietzsches D and his earlier association of the devil and the deathbed
that anticipates GS p. 341 (D p. 77).
4
While Lampert (1986, pp. 160169) also focuses on the last three Aphorisms of
the first edition of GS, and the extension of their themes into the Vision-Riddle
chapter of Zarathustra, and correctly associates Zarathustras archenemy with
Socratic rationalism, I am arguing that Nietzsches allusions lead us more
precisely to identify this figure with the dying Socrates.
5
Loeb (1998) The Moment of Tragic Death in Nietzsches Dionysian Doctrine of
Eternal Recurrence: An Exegesis of Aphorism 341 in GS, International Studies in
Philosophy, 30: 3, pp. 131143.
6
Zarathustra hears a voiceless daimon speaking to him whom he calls his stillest
hour (Z. II. 22). As Lampert notes (1986, p. 335, n. 106), Zarathustras stillest
hour seems to speak through the 11 strikes of the clock at the midnight
hour.
7
Compare Shapiro, 2001 (pp. 2122) for a tracing of Augenblick to Luthers
translation of Pauls First Letter to the Corinthians 15: 5152. See also Salaquarda,
pp. 326, 331322, who links Nietzsches transformative Augenblick-vision of
eternal recurrence with Pauls mystical and blinding experience on the road to
Damascus (D p. 68).
8
Zarathustra, III, 13, 2.
9
Ibid., Prologue, 1.
10
Ibid., II.18.
196 Notes
11
Ibid., III.12 17, III.14, III.15 1.
12
Ibid., II.19.
13
Ibid., II.22.
14
Ibid., III.13 2.
15
See Heidegger 1984, pp. 4142; Lampert 1986, p. 164.
16
Zarathustra, II.20.
17
For more on the significance of this contradiction, see Heidegger (1984, p. 56),
Stambaugh (1972, p. 40), and Small (1998, pp. 8082). I contend that each fails
to comprehend that the gateway-Augenblick represents a non-generic present
moment, that is, the present moment of death.
18
Plato (1993) Phaedo, trans. by David Gallop, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
71cd, 105d.
19
Ibid., 71c72e, 105c107a.
20
Ibid., 107d108a. Although Nietzsches emphasis on the sameness of what
eternally recurs seems an obvious departure from the ancient Dionysian doctrine
of cyclical rebirth cited by Plato (70c), he might be assuming that the Pythago-
rean background of Platos dialogue points to their common source, see Barnes,
p. 88.
21
Loeb, 2008.
22
Plato, Phaedo, 58e59a, 67e68b, 84d85b.
23
Zarathustra, III.2 1.
24
Plato, Phaedo, 81c.
25
Zarathustra, III.12 2.
26
The dwarf had threatened the high-climbing Zarathustra with a similar death
when he whispered to him that he was destined to be crushed by his own philos-
opher-stones heavy weight as he fell back down upon himself.
27
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1979) EH, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, III: BT 3. Nietzsches term, Kreislauf, alludes both to the dwarfs
mention of time as Kreis and to Zarathustras questions about what can run
(laufen) on the lanes behind and ahead of the gateway-Augenblick.
28
Zarathustra, III.13.
29
Ibid., III.16. For similar ring-images, see II.5; III.12 2; and IV.10, IV.19 11.
30
Ibid., III.13 2. Heidegger (1984, pp. 5455) and others (see White, pp. 8993)
are wrong to equate the dwarfs interpretation of the gateway-vision with the
account of eternal recurrence offered by Zarathustras animals. See also Loeb
(2005), p. 99, n. 55.
31
Plato, Phaedo, 72ab.
32
Zarathustra, II.2.
33
Gooding-Williams (2001, pp. 196197, 215, 217) rightly notes Nietzsches allu-
sion here to Luthers translation of Ecclesiastes 7: 13.
34
According to Zarathustras Blessed Isles speech, to think this, and to think that
all that stands turns, is dizziness (Wirbel), vertigo (Schwindel) and vomiting to
the stomach; he calls this teaching about the one and the perfect and the
unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory the turning sickness (die
drehende Krankheit). In the vision-riddle, Zarathustra alludes back to this
remark when he invokes the courage needed to defeat his dwarf-archenemy and
calls it the courage that slays vertigo (den Schwindel) over abysses.
Notes 197
35
Although Small notices Nietzsches allusion back to Zarathustras first speech on
time, he argues that by time being gone (die Zeit wre hinweg) Zarathustra
means that the distinctions among past, present and future are all illusory (1998,
pp. 8891).
36
Plato, Phaedo, 78c79a. While strongly supported by Smalls discovery (1998,
pp. 8791; 2001, pp. 43, 5255) that the dwarfs interpretation very closely
resembles that of Nietzsches former Basel colleague, Gustav Teichmller, in
Darwinismus und Philosophie, pp. 39 ff., I argue that Nietzsche rejects only
Teichmllers further Platonist contention of some possible non-perspectival
standpoint.
37
Plato, P, 77b81a, 109b111b, 114bc.
38
Lampert (1986, pp. 164167) is an exception, but he misses Nietzsches allusion
to Zarathustras first speech on time, and hence is led to claim that Zarathustras
most abysmal thought is merely an intensification of the dwarfs correct inter-
pretation. Berkowitz (pp. 196 ff.) also misses Nietzsches allusion and thinks that
the dwarf genuinely believes that time is a circle.
39
See, for example, Heidegger, 1972, pp. 4143; Stambaugh, 1972, pp. 3839;
Moles 1989, p. 30; Small, 1998, pp. 8691, 2001, pp. 21, 5254; White, pp. 8687,
9192; Shapiro 2001, pp. 2930. All these commentators infer Zarathustras
rejection of circular time from his rejection of the dwarfs response.
40
In contrast, see Heidegger (1984, pp. 4344, 5657, 135140, 176, 181183);
Stambaugh 1972, pp. 3941; White 1990, pp. 8687; Ansell-Pearson 1994,
pp. 110112; Small 1998, pp. 9091, 96.
41
Small (1998, p. 91) rightly emphasizes the universalist language (All that is
straight lies, all truth is bent) that shows the dwarfs attempt to avoid the perspec-
tival standpoint of the gateway-Augenblick. See also Nietzsches earlier
unpublished note: Kontur-Phantom. Zu jeder Krmmung den vollendenden
Kreis ziehen (KSA 8 29: [13]).
42
See Small 2001, p. 47, on Nietzsches praise of long perspectives as the best
means of knowledge (e.g., GS p. 78).
43
See Riemann, p. 10 on the analogy of the sphere. See also Hawking,
pp. 139146. For a more detailed treatment of the discussion of the Riemannian
non-Euclidean conception of space, see Moles (1989; 1990, pp. 277283, 291
ff.); Stack (p. 39); Moles, Abel (pp. 397400); and Small (2001, pp. 6567), espe-
cially on the influence of astrophysicist Friedrich Zllners 1872 book, ber die
Natur der Komete on Nietzsche. Also see Stack (pp. 3738) on the influence of
Riemanns non-Euclidean geometry through F.A. Langes History of Materialism,
and on Nietzsches unpublished notes which argue that the conception of
Euclidean space is non-necessary (WP p. 515).
44
In keeping with the implication of his vision-riddle, Zarathustra imagines the
cosmos as a round golden ball or apple (I.21, I.22 1, III.10 1, IV.10).
This image alludes to Wagners symbol of eternal youth in The Ring of the
Nibelung (The Rhinegold, Scene 2) and thus suggests Nietzsches quasi-
Platonic interest in eternal recurrence as a doctrine of immortality (KSA 10:
16[63]).
45
See Teichmllers analogy (pp. 4243) and Smalls commentary on this
Teichmller connection (1998, p. 88; 2001, p. 53).
198 Notes
46
See Fink, pp. 8788, 92, 98100; White, pp. 8687; Moles 1989, p. 30; 1990,
p. 418 n. 63; Small 1998, pp. 8891.
47
In the Schilpp volume, Einstein contends that Gdel has found such a cosmo-
logical solution (a global closed timelike curve) to his GRT field equations
(although it remains to be seen whether it is to be excluded on physical grounds)
p. 688. Also see Yourgrau (1999) and the essays by Paul Horwich and John
Earman in Savitt (1995). For a physics-based examination of other possible
global closed timelike curves, see Gott (2001).
48
GM, III: 12.
49
See KSA 9: 11[202]; KSA 13: 14[188] (=WP 1066). See Lampert 1986,
pp. 165166; Abel, Gnter (1984) Nietzsche: die Dynamik, der Willen zur Macht, und
die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, pp. 249253.
50
For the Stoic argument, summarized by Lucretiu, compare Book 3, lines 854858.
In EH, Nietzsche says that his doctrine might have been suggested earlier by the
Stoics (EH, BT: 3).
51
See Moles (1990), pp. 305310; Rogers (pp. 86, 8990); Lampert (1986,
pp. 165166); and Small (1983, pp. 9596) on Nietzsches proofs of the eternal
recurrence and the finite number of force combinations.
52
See Small, 1983, pp. 9599; Lampert, 1986, pp. 166167.
53
Zarathustra, III.13 1. See TI, The Problem of Socrates and How the True
World Became a Fable (KSA 9 11: [148]).
54
Plato, Phaedo, 70a72e, 77bd. I agree with Hackforths analysis (p. 80) of Plato
that the time before birth is the time after death.
55
See Zarathustra, III.13 2. See also KSA 13: 14[188] (=WP 1066). For a contem-
porary hypothesis, see Gott (2001). Also see Deleuzes (1994, pp. 241 ff.), Krell
(1996, pp. 158176) and also Small 2001, pp. 127128.
56
Zarathustra, III.13 2.
57
I will explore how Zarathustras pre-vision is actually fulfilled in my forthcoming
book, The Death of Nietzsches Zarathustra.
58
In an interesting aside, Socrates confesses that he may even be advancing false
arguments in support of his continued existence (91a91c).
59
Plato, Phaedo, 84c85b. See also Socrates remark in Platos Apology: I have now
reached a point at which people are most given to prophesying that is, when
they are on the point of death (39c).
60
Ibid., 107de. See Apology 31cd, 40ac, 41d. Nietzsche refers to the dying
Socrates prophetic daimonion in BT, pp. 1314.
61
Nietzsche refers to this passage in BT 15. See also Socrates reference to a dream
prophesying to him the day of his death, in Platos Crito, 44ab.
62
Nietzsches precise phrasing, Mein Gedanke lief zurck, alludes to Zarathustras
earlier description of the long lane behind (zurck) upon which every possible
thing has already run.
63
Hollingdales translation omits Nietzsches noteworthy shift here from jener to
dieser.
64
The Odyssey, Books 1011: 539731.
65
Plato, Phaedo, 71c72d.
66
KSA 9:11[318].
67
See Loeb (2002) for my interpretation of the dwarfs fate.
68
Plato, Phaedo, 70b.
Notes 199
69
Ibid., P 66e.
70
Ibid., 72e77a, 91e92e.
71
GS, pp. 340341.
72
In Loeb (2005), I argue that this account coheres as well with Nietzsches account
of memory in the Genealogy and I explain at more length Nietzsches psycho-
analytic depiction of Zarathustras struggle and confrontation with his deeply
buried childhood memory of death and recurrence. In Loeb (2006), I show how
Nietzsche leads us to interpret the demons message in GS 341 as a recollection
of lifes eternal recurrence.
73
Plato, Phaedo, 75de. Nietzsche, however, is led to affirm the claim that Platos
Socrates dismisses as nonsensical, namely, that this knowledge is forgotten at the
very same moment in which it is acquired (P 76d).
74
Ibid., 60e61b. In his earlier D Nietzsche had claimed that in the fantasizing of
dreams a persons memory goes sufficiently far back to rediscover that prehis-
tory and those primal experiences which were forgotten for the sake of evolving
into an adult civilized condition (D, p. 312).
75
Zarathustra, III.15 3.
76
In citing Zarathustras Sleepwalker Song as expressing views that Nietzsche
takes seriously, I disagree with Rosen (1995, pp. 242244) and Gooding-Williams
(2001, pp. 20, 280, 288290) that this song is a caricature of Zarathustra.
I discuss my ground for this disagreement in Loeb (2007).
77
Zarathustra, IV.19 3.
78
Ibid., I.3.
79
See Nietzsches remark to Overbeck, on 22 October 1883: Dear old friend, in
reading Teichmller I am ever more transfixed with wonder at how little I know
Plato and how much Zarathustra . (KSB 6, p. 449).
Zarathustra on Freedom
1
Z, I, On the Way of Creators. All translations from Nietzsches texts in this essay
are mine.
2
TSZ, Prologue, p. 3.
3
Ibid., p. 5.
4
Ibid., I, On the Three Metamorphoses.
5
KSA 1, UB 4, p. 506.
6
TSZ, II, Of Priests.
7
Ibid., I, Of the Tree on the Mountain.
8
HH, I, 542.
9
TSZ, I, Of the Passions of Joy and Pain.
10
KSA 13, p. 485, 16[7].
11
D, p. 560.
12
EH, Why I am so Clever, p. 9.
13
The first verse of Goethes poem Selige Sehnsucht reads: Sag es niemand, nur den
Weisen,/Weil die.
14
Menge gleich verhhnet,/Das Lebendge will ich preisen,/Das nach Flammentod sich
sehnet.
15
TSZ, I, On the Way of Creators.
16
Ibid., I, Of Thousand and One Goals.
17
Ibid., II, On Self-Overcoming.
18
Ibid., Prologue, p. 2.
19
Ibid., I, On the Three Metamorphoses.
20
Ibid., Prologue, p. 9.
21
Ibid., I, On the Virtue of Giving, p. 3.
5
Nietzsche characterizes the morbid life of his biological father in EH, trans. and
ed. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, p. 222.
6
On the theme of being present during the modus of a self-prescribed absence,
compare Derrida (1978) As if I Were Dead. Als ob ich tot wre, Vienna: Turia
& Kant.
7
On touching as a metaphysical sensibility, see Jacques Derrida (1978) On
Touching, trans. by Christine Irizarry, ed. by Werner Hamacher, Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press.
8
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 220.
9
Ibid.
10
On the experimental character of life under postmodern conditions see
Avital Ronell (2005) The Test Drive, Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
11
On Nietzsches unheard of ear, which also hears the unheard, see Jacques
Derrida (1978) Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of
the Proper Name, trans. by Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other, ed. by Christie
McDonald, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
12
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference And Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press,
p. 94.
13
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 218.
14
Ibid., p. 139.
15
Ibid., p. 141.
16
Compare Nietzsche, F. (1874) The Use and Abuse of History For Life, Kritische
Studienausgabe Band 1, p. 270.
17
The term self-affection appears specious because a living creature does have to
be the life that is transmitted to him, but in a way that it medially experiences the
mimetic reproduction of the other life. This is rather an alter-auto-affection of the
life with oneself.
18
See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 94. See also Arno Boehler (2005)
Singularitten. Vom zu-reichenden Grund der Zeit, Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
19
Agamben, G. (1999) Potentialities, Stanford: Stanford Univesrity Press, p. 267.
20
Nietzsche (1974) On the Use and Abuse of History, pp. 243334.
21
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 141.
22
On performative speech-acts, see John L. Austin (1962, 1975) How to Do Things
with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
23
On the medial performance of linguistic dispositives, see Judith Butler (1997)
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge.
24
On the mediality of being-in-the-world in the mode of Everyday Being Ones
Self and the They, see Martin Heidegger (1996) Being and Time, trans. by Joan
Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, pp. 118122.
25
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 147.
26
Ibid., p. 133.
27
Ibid., p. 133.
28
Ibid., p. 134.
29
Ibid., p. 141.
30
Ibid., p. 215.
202 Notes
31
Compare the following passage. Stop, dwarf! I said. It is I or you! But I am the
stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought. That you could not
bear! (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 157).
32
Ibid., p. 159.
33
Ibid., pp. 215216.
34
Ibid., p. 216.
35
On the act of the double affirmation as a form of appropriation of a history that
is related to oneself, see Jacques Derrida (1988) Otobiographies: The Teaching
of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name, trans. by Avital Ronell, in The
Ear of the Other, ed. by Christie McDonald, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
p. 13.
36
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 216.
14
Nietzsche, EH, Preface, nr. 4; KSA 6, p. 259. See also Z, Part II, The Stillest
Hour; KSA 4, p. 189.
15
In his letters to Heinrich von Seydlitz and his wife Irene, Nietzsche refers several
times and quite hopefully to their Japonisme, even to their propaganda fr
Japon; in spring 1886, Nietzsche also mentions the apparent victory of the
Japonisme in Berlin.
16
Compare Dialogues of the Buddha. Translated from the Pali of the Digha Nikaya by
T.[homas] W.[illiam] and C.[aroline] A.[ugusta] F.[oley] Rhys Davids, Part III
(first published in 1921 by the Oxford University Press), London: Luzac &
Company Ltd, 1965. German edition: Franke, R. Otto, compare nr. 17.
17
Compare Dighanikaya. Das Buch der langen Texte des buddhistischen Kanons. In
Auswahl bersetzt von Franke, R. Otto, Gttingen/Leipzig: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht/J.C. Hinrichssche Buchhandlung, 1913, p. 199 f.
18
Nietzsche, GM, III, nr. 23; KSA 5, p. 396.
19
Nietzsche, Die frhliche Wissenschaft, Fnftes Buch, nr. 382; KSA 3, p. 636.
20
Compare Dialogues of the Buddha, Part III. German edition: Dighanikaya, Franke,
R. Otto; compare Nr. 8.
21
Z, Part I, On the Three Metamorphoses; KSA 4, pp. 31, 80.
22
Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. III, p. 139 f.
23
KSB 6, p. 282.
24
KSA 13, pp. 439 f., Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frhjahr 1888 15[45].
25
Compare Brian Victoria, Zen, Nationalismus und Krieg. Eine unheimliche Allianz,
Berlin: Theseus-Verlag, 1999. Book review by Dominique Eigenmann, Die totale
Kollaboration des Zen-Buddhismus, in: Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, 25 November
2000.
26
Franke adds: Vielleicht eignete sich bermensch am besten als bersetzung,
wenn dieses Wort Goethes nicht durch die modernste Philosophie eine ganz
spezielle Frbung und durch die Manie einer literarischen Mode einen Stich
ins Lcherliche erhalten htte (p. 87, nr. 10).
27
Compare Joseph Klausner (1956) The Messianic Idea in Israel from Its Beginning to
the Completion of the Mishnah. Translated from the third Hebrew edition by W.F.
Stinespring, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., pp. 483 ff.
28
Ttender Messias; in Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, 7 May 1999: Funde aus der Wsten-
bibliothek. An exposition of original documents from Qumran by the Dead Sea
in the Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen.
29
The footnote in his book Glaubenswelt Islam occurs in the context of Schaefers
explanations concerning the Mahdi in the orthodox Islam: The Mahdi will resti-
tute the Islam, enforce the Koran in the whole world and subject mankind under
its law. It is noteworthy, though, that, according to Schaefer, the heterodox Shia
comprises the idea of a new book with a new law (Sharia), which will prove to be
a serious trial for Arabs. Here Schaefer refers to Abulaziz A. Sachedina (1981)
Islamic Messianism. The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shism, Albany, NY, pp. 175 ff.,
and Moojan Momen (1985) An Introduction to Shih Islam. The History and Doctrines
of Twelver Shism, Oxford, p. 169.
30
KSA 13, p. 440, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frhjahr 1888 15[45]. See also Hein-
rich Zimmer, Religion und Philosophie Indiens, Zrich 1961, 1979, p. 130 f.;
204 Notes
according to Zimmer the pre-Aryan Cakkavatti was given traits of a second ideal
corresponding rather to the context/tradition of the horse than the elephant(!).
These characteristics must have been developed by the Aryan semi-nomads
before they moved from Afghanistan across the Khyber Pass to India.
31
SS-circles showed great interest in Tibet, especially with regard to the practice of
power and the dogma of the Gelugpa Lamas. (Hitler and Himmlers admiration
for the rigid power structure of the Catholic Church sprang from similar
motives.)
32
See John D. Caputo (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without
Religion, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Caputo stresses,
however, that he is not trying to get Derrida to go back to Hebrew school or to
start attending synagogue, far from it. That would reinscribe him in the circle of
violence that drives the concrete messianisms, of the positive religions that are
too positive for their own good (p. 337).
33
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (1998) (eds) Religion, Cambridge/Oxford:
Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
34
Zimmer, Religion und Philosophie Indiens, p. 130.
35
KSA 13, p. 236; Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frhjahr 1888, 14[37].
36
Steven Wasserstrom (1999) Religion after Religion. Gersholm Scholem, Mircea Eliade,
and Henry Corbin at Eranos, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
37
Nr. 149. KSA 3, p. 141 f.
38
Nietzsche, Z, Part III, Of Old and New Tablets; KSA 4, p. 246.
39
KSA 11, p. 563; Nachgelassene Fragmente, JuniJuli 1885 36[31].
40
Nietzsche, EH, Warum ich ein Schicksal bin, nr. 1; KSA 6, p. 365 f.
41
Compare Nietzsche, HH I, nr. 237; KSA 2, pp. 199 f.
42
Compare KSB 6, p. 288, letter to Heinrich von Stein, Genua, beginning of
December 1882.
5
For more animals and gift-giving, see The Honey Sacrifice, The Cry of Distress,
and The Welcome.
6
For more, see also Alan D. Schrift (1996) Rethinking Exchange: Logics of the
Gift in Cixous and Nietzsche, Philosophy Today, p. 199.
7
On the notion of the gift, see Jacques Derrida (1995) The Gift of Death, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, and (1992) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
8
See in comparison Gary Shapiro (1989) Nietzschean Narratives, Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, pp. 5359, and Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gift, Noise
and Women, pp. 6869.
9
For a discussion of the various meanings of Untergang and bergang in Z, see now
Martha Kendal Woodruff (2007) Untergang und bergang: The Tragic Descent of
Socrates and Zarathustra, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 34: 6178.
10
For a different reading of the relation between gift-giving and going-under, see
Gooding-Williams, Zarathustras Dionysian Modernism, p. 125.
11
For a discussion of the difference between Christian love and gift-giving love as
reflected in the conversation between Zarathustra and the saint (Z : 2 Prologue),
see Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gift, Noise and Women, p. 22.
12
See, Michel Haar (1995) Du symbolisme animal en gnral, et notamment du
serpent, Alter. Revue de Phnomnologie, no. 3, p. 324.
13
For more on the meaning of Zarathustras descent, see Gooding-Williams,
Zarathustras Dionysian Modernism, p. 62.
14
Bataille bases his notion of general economy defined as an unproductive
expenditure of excess on the unreciprocated expenditure of solar energy, see
Georges Bataille (1991) The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. by
Robert Hurley, vol. 23, New York: Zone Books.
15
Later, in The Honey Sacrifice, the animals describe Zarathustra as one having
overmuch of the good, as someone who is becoming ever yellower and darker.
Zarathustra confirms it is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker and
my soul calmer.
16
Lampert does not interpret gift-giving as a giving oneself over to the other that
generates a bond between the self and the other that is both just and liberating,
but only as a means to the progression towards a better future, rather then an
end in itself (Lampert, Nietzsches Teaching, p. 79).
17
Georges Bataille (1985) The Notion of Expenditure, in Visions of Excess, Selected
Writings 19271939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 116129.
18
For Derridas conception of the gift in relation to this idea in Nietzsche, see
Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, p. 24. For a contrary view, see Alexander Nehamas
(2000) For Whom the Sun Shines: A Reading of Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Z,
ed. by Volker Gerhardt, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 165190.
19
In agreement with Nietzsche, Derrida also insists that the gift can take place
only along with the excessive forgetting or the forgetful excess, Derrida, Given
Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, pp. 101102.
20
See in comparison Heideggers notion of the gift in the context of a
reflection on Ereignis as the gift-event of Being, and Shapiros commentary on
Heideggers reading of Nietzsche, On Presents and Presence: The Gift in Thus
206 Notes
Love, Frederick R (1963) Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill,
NC: University of Carolina Press.
Lwith, Karl (1997) On the History of the Interpretation of Nietzsche (1894
1954). In Nietzsches Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. by
J. Harvey Lomax, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lucretius Carus, T. (1976) On the Nature of the Universe, trans. by R.E. Latham,
New York: Penguin.
Moles, Alistair (1989) Nietzsches Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology,
International Studies in Philosophy, 21: 3: 2135.
Nehamas, Alexander (1985) Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. (GM)
(1990) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin. (BGE)
(1990) Nietzsches Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, New York: Peter Lang.
(1979) Ecce Homo, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (EH)
(1976) Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann, Harmondsworth:
Penguin. (Z)
(1974) The Gay Science, trans. by W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. (GS)
(1968) The Will to Power, trans. by W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, New York:
Vintage Books. (WP)
Parkes, Graham (1991) Nietzsche and Asian Thought, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Perkins, Richard (1980) Between a Fool and a Corpse: Zarathustra and the Overcoming of
Man, Mount Pleasant, SC: Enigma Press.
Peters, H.F. (1985) Zarathustras Sister: The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich
Nietzsche, New York: Markus Wiener Publishing.
(1974) My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou-Andreas Salome, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Pfeffer, Rose (1972) Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, New Jersey, NJ: Associated
University Press and Bucknell Univeristy Press.
Plato (1997) Defence of Socrates/Crito, trans. by David Gallop, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
(1993) Phaedo (=P), trans. by David Gallop, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London & New York: Routledge.
Rogers, Peter (2001) Simmels Mistake: The Eternal Recurrence as a Riddle about
the Intelligible Form of Time as a Whole, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 21: 7795.
Rosen, S. (1995) The Mask of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Russell, B. (1946, 1984) A History of Western Philosophy, London: Unwin.
Safranski, Rudiger (2003) Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Salaquarda, Jrg (1989) Der Ungeheure Augenblick, Nietzsche-Studien, 18: 317337.
Salter, W.F. (1968) Nietzsche, the Thinker, New York: Unger.
Savitt, Steven F. (1995) Times Arrows Today: Recent Physical and Philosophical Work on
the Direction of Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
210 Bibliography and Further Reading
abyss, abysmal 6, 23, 24, 51, 94, 96, 100, Birth of Tragedy, The 2, 48, 50, 78
106, 110, 121, 122, 124, 1445, Bizet, Georges 27
14850 Blanchot, Maurice 2, 3
affirmation 4, 25, 34, 64, 72, 120, 124, body 14, 16, 17, 28, 65, 94, 96, 99, 100,
147, 178 108
Agamden 147 Boehler, Arno 6, 14150
alms (or, charity) 6, 165, 167, 1702, Bonnet, Jules 152, 154
179 Brobjer, Thomas 4, 2946
Ambapali 1568 Buddha, Buddhist, Buddhism 26, 151,
amor fati 147 152, 15564
analytic revolution 12 Burnouf, Eugne 155
anarchy 134 Byron, Lord 39
animal passions 17
animal virtue 6, 16581 camel 36, 66, 6871, 72, 131
animalistic interpretation of eternal Carnap, Rudolf 1, 2, 3
recurrence 147 Case of Wagner, The 40, 43, 52
animality 16970, 173 cave 14, 18, 24, 62, 83, 140
anti-christ 40 Cerberus 102
Anti-Christ, The 43, 44 character typology 53, 60
antiquarian history 56 Charon 92
Apollo, Apollinian 58, 90, 100, 101 child 16, 18, 36, 66, 71, 72, 1056,
archetype 48, 152, 160 1357, 13940
Ariadne 20, 26 Christ, Christian, Christianity 5, 6, 19,
Aristotle 3, 63, 81, 84 20, 64, 65, 69, 70, 93, 109, 110,
art, artist 10, 28, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61 123, 126, 151, 158, 162, 165, 167,
artist-philosopher 61 169, 171, 178,
asceticism 51, 52, 58, 65, 69, 152, 154, Cohen, Mark David 5, 7590
1578 contempt 1303
Autenrieth, J. H. F 78 continental philosophy 1, 3
autobiography 4, 5, 9, 29, 31, 32, 36, 45 convalescence 4, 6, 23, 84, 87, 93, 94,
avant-garde 154 14150
cosmology 4, 50, 55, 57, 61, 80, 88, 90,
Badiou, Alain 3 146
Bataille, Georges 3, 162, 172 creativity 3, 15, 16, 22, 33, 54, 55, 60,
Beethoven, Ludwig van 11 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 89, 116, 120,
Benjamin, Walter 160, 162 122, 130, 1369, 14150, 167
Beyond Good and Evil 29, 32, 38, 39, 41, critical history 56
43, 46, 51, 63 critical theory 4
212 Index
singing 20, 143, 144 value(s) 49, 50, 54, 57, 61, 64, 113, 115,
slave mentality 5, 10926 116, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131,
Socrates 5, 21, 33, 49, 50, 51, 92108 134, 136, 137, 138, 177
solitude 14, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, Vattimo, Gianni 161
35, 41, 58, 67, 92, 93, 140, 1489, virtue(s) 14, 16, 17, 19, 24, 57, 130,
169, 174, 178 133, 16581
Sophists 119 Von Blow, Hans 10
Spinoza, Baruch 39 Von Hellwald, Friedrich 34, 35
spirit of gravity (or, heaviness) 5, 15, Von Helmholtz, Hermann 77
17, 20, 21, 25, 50, 56, 61, 93, Von Schirnhofer, Resa 36
94108, 124, 141 Von Seydlitz, Reinhart 37, 156
Spitteler, Carl 38 Von Stein, Heinrich 32, 1545, 164
Stoics 99 Von Tevenar, Gudrun 5, 12940
suffering 14, 15, 17, 19, 22, 34, 65, 71,
99, 111, 130, 170, 179 Wagner, Cosima 10, 43
Suzuki 158 Wagner, Richard 10, 11, 12, 33, 34, 39,
symphonic structure 4, 928, 29 43, 52, 110, 1546, 164
symptomatology 47, 109, 116, 118 war 15, 137
Wenham, Alan 5, 10926
technical philosophy 5, 63, 667 Wilde, Oscar 45
theoretical man 3, 50, 51 wild wisdom 18, 20
three metamorphses of the spirit 5, 14, will to power 10, 16, 17, 22, 26, 30, 64,
36, 39, 6372, 14150 81, 117, 118, 119, 155, 163, 179
tragic, tragic insight 82, 90, 164 Will to Power, The 41, 59, 75, 80, 81,
transgression 1623 82, 88
Tuncel, Yunus 5, 4762 Windisch, Ernst 152, 156
Turgenev, Ivan 37, 39 wisdom 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27,
type, typology 5, 11, 4762, 112, 115, 28, 56, 58, 61, 62, 68, 151
117, 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 63
Twilight of the Idols 29, 40, 43, 46 woman, women 16, 20, 34, 36, 41,
163
bermensch (Overman) 5, 14, 16, 17,
19, 30, 35, 47, 48, 57, 58, 59, 60, Yates, Peter 5, 6372
64, 110, 122, 123, 124, 126, 138,
158, 174 Zagreus 18
Ulfer, Friedrich 5, 7590 Zen-Buddhism 156, 158
unhistorical 3 Zend-Avesta 34
Untimely Meditations 33, 56, 131 Zimmer, Heinrich 161
uselessness 168, 175 Zllner, Friedrich 79, 86
Utilitarianism 6, 166, 1756 Zoroaster 29