Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise 9781472547187, 9781847062215, 9781441116536

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For Zoe, Soren, Venus and Tamara

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Contributors Arno Böhler, Mag. Dr, is a University Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and filmmaker (GRENZ-film). He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Bangalore, the University of Heidelberg, New York University, and Princeton University (Schroedinger fellow). He is the director of the FWF-Research project ‘The Materiality and Temporality of Performative Speech-Acts: Philosophy on Stage’. Thomas Brobjer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Intellectual History at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has written the book Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character (1995), and many articles on Nietzsche. He has, together with Gregory Moore, edited the book, Nietzsche and Science (2004). His most recent books are Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago) and Nietzsche and the ‘English’: British and American Influences on Nietzsche (Prometheus Press). Mark Daniel Cohen is the Assistant Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the European Graduate School, editor, and principal writer for the e-journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, published by The Nietzsche Circle. He has recently completed two books, The Art of Kenneth Snelson and The Judenporzellan of Izhar Patkin, and has contributed chapters to Chawky Frenn: Art for Life’s Sake, Abstraction in the Elements, The Archeology of the Soul, and the second edition of Dictionary of the Avant Gardes. He is currently working on several volumes: The Prosthetic Soul, a book concerning the Florentine art of the Italian Renaissance, and two philosophical works, The Power of the Right and Treatise on Poetic Reason. Vanessa Lemm is a Professor and Researcher at the School for Political Science and at the Institute for Humanities at the University Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. She has published on Nietzsche and, in particular, on the relation between Nietzsche and contemporary political theory. She is currently completing a book entitled, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, forthcoming with Fordham University Press. Paul S. Loeb is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puget Sound. He is the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum)

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and a co-editor/co-translator of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the associated unpublished notebook material (Stanford University Press). He is currently completing a book for Cambridge entitled, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. He is also the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Uschi Nussbaumer-Benz is an independent scholar with special interest in Nietzsche, philosophy of culture, depth psychology, religion, perspectives for the future. He is co-Chair (together with Professor Endre Kiss, Budapest) of Nietzsche and (Post-)Postmodernity, which organizes workshops within the framework of conferences of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) at the universities of Haifa (Israel) 1998, Bergen (Norway) 2000, Aberystwyth (United Kingdom) 2002, Pamplona (Spain) 2004, and Malta 2006. He has published numerous essays and books on Nietzsche. Graham Parkes, a native of Glasgow, is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. He is the editor, (co-)author, and (co-)translator of ten books, and has published over eighty journal articles and chapters in multi-author volumes. He is the editor of Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago 1991), author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago 1994), and translator of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford 2005). Gudrun von Tevenar, after a career as a designer, is a Tutor at University College London and at Birkbeck where she is also a Research Fellow. She contributed to and edited Nietzsche and Ethics (Peter Lang AG), as well as to the second volume of the Nietzsche Woerterbuch (W de Gruyter). Yunus Tuncel, PhD, is co-founder, with Rainer Hansche, of the Nietzsche Circle. He has been teaching philosophy at the New School since 1999. He has recently finished a book on Nietzsche, The Death of God: Nietzsche’s Experiment. His areas of research are art, culture, myth, spectacle, and the fusion of art and philosophy in various cultural formations. Friedrich Ulfers is the Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and Associate Professor of German at New York University. His publications include the book Das Doppelgängermotiv in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts and numerous articles, the most recent of which are ‘From Skepticism to Utopia: Musil’s Idea of “Essayism”’ and ‘Times Square: Memories of the “Crossroads of the World” vs. the Vision of “Main Street, USA”’. Alan Wenham is conducting research in Continental philosophy at the University of Warwick, specializing in Nietzsche and Hegel.

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Peter Yates was awarded a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton. He has lectured on Freud and Nietzsche and conducted seminars on Wittgenstein, philosophy of mind, Sartre, Hegel, and the philosophy of the human being. He is the director, with Anna Ingham, of The Parkdale Yoga Centre and is a practitioner and teacher of Yoga.

Acknowledgements 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.

Introduction

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise James Luchte

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, philosophical 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 specialists 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 Nietzsche’s 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 intimation 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’, Nietzsche’s 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

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Carnap,2 Nietzsche, contrary to bad ‘metaphysical’ musicians such as Heidegger, should be commended for the honesty of Z. In this latter work, Carnap detects an attempt at poetic expression, beyond the strict limits of philosophy, conceived by him as the logical analysis of language. In this charitable reading, Carnap is willing to allow a place for poetry and literature (though not in philosophy), for, although their sentences are in a technical sense meaningless, their expression disseminates ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ in a grammatical, poetic, or historical sense. We could perhaps suggest that such expression is akin to that of the mystical in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, an expression which from within the limits of the world and knowledge, is silent de facto, silent of meaning. Yet, with this last suggestion, we begin to sense a difficulty in Carnap’s position (and, of the ‘analytic’ distinction between philosophy and literature itself) in that Wittgenstein contended that this ‘silent’ aspect was not only part of his philosophy, but it was also the most important part. Such a contention was yet another event (along with the attempts of Heidegger, Blanchot, and others), to give back to philosophy its proper depth (and, to save it from Carnap’s ‘ideal language’). Indeed, towards the late 1920s, Wittgenstein began to articulate this ‘silence’, first, in his ‘Lecture on Ethics,’ and later, in his Blue Book and Brown Book (where he mentions the eternal recurrence of the same), in which his original framework is dissolved into ‘systems of propositions’, or, in the usage of the later Philosophical Investigations, ‘language games’. With such a topological path of thinking, the Carnapian assertion of the limits of meaning could no longer hold (if it ever did outside of the prejudices of philosophers). In the wake of this and other radical challenges to the ‘analytic revolution’ (already anticipated by Nietzsche), however, there has been little reappraisal, outside of the field of the history of philosophy, of the many philosophers who had been unjustly relegated to meaninglessness, such as the German Idealists and Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. At the same time, we must be aware that we ourselves (continental philosophers included) are creatures of the ‘analytic revolution’, and as victims and convalescents of its eliminative strategy, we must attempt to retrieve once again a topos of authentic philosophical questioning. That which is significant however and which speaks to my allusion to irony in the opening lines is that the very difficulties which emerged in the attempt by ‘analytic’ philosophy to should be: ‘set the limit’ were already anticipated by Nietzsche in the development of his work between The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As I have explored at length elsewhere,3 the question, and predicament, for Nietzsche, was how he was to articulate

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a Dionysian wisdom through a philosophy that must trace its context of emergence amid the long genealogy of ‘theoretical men’, from Plato, Aristotle through to Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer. The question of the rebirth of the Dionysian, of forgetting, of creativity, and of the unhistorical is eventually resolved with the poetic creation of Z. With this work, Nietzsche subverts the restricted economy of the principle of sufficient reason through a return to mythos and poiesis, not as a destruction of reason, but rather as its re-contextualization amidst the broader topos of human existence. The irony is that Nietzsche has transfigured his writing into that of literature for philosophical purposes. And, indeed, contrary to Carnap, Nietzsche, as we can readily see in his own words, regarded Z as the central work, the poetic topos, of his philosophy. The return to the indigenous topoi of poetry and music is an affirmation, for Nietzsche, of the contingency of existence, and it is an honest renunciation of the illusions and simulacrums of unproblematic conceptions of ‘permanence’, ‘objectivity’, ‘morality’, and ‘God’. In this way, the poetic revolution of Z, in its defiance of the idols of religion, science, philosophy, and the state, intimates more than just a different way of speaking. Indeed, the poetic (and musical) return stands as a challenge to those, like Badiou, who have become ‘pious again’, captivated by the resurrected Platonic idol of infinity. For those others, like Blanchot, Bataille, Irigaray, and Derrida, who have resisted this captivation, the poetic return is an evasion of godlike discourses which attempt to seduce us to a new truth, a new ‘objectivity’. Nietzsche’s poetic expression is an affirmation of becoming, and its indications and signs open up differing perspectives amid finite existence, while returning others to the truth of their scandalous origins. It is in this context that Zarathustra’s speeches in Parts I and II can be read as specific articulations of Nietzsche’s philosophical revolution, of which the question of style is only one, though important, aspect. Nietzsche, through his innovations in philosophical language, invites his reader to think differently, in different ways, and about differing ‘things’, questions, and perspectives which were, until the door was unlocked, hidden from view. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a challenge to the hegemony of logic and reason in philosophy, and with his articulation of a topos beyond the principle of sufficient reason, Nietzsche is inciting us to liberate ourselves from the epochal trajectory of ‘theoretical man’. Nietzsche once predicted that in the future, once he had found posthumous readers, his children, that a university chair would be established for his great work. To date, this prediction has not yet been realized, despite the sustained century long influence of his writings, including his poetry, upon

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Continental philosophy and other diverse regions of human knowledge, culture, and politics. Moreover, despite his pervasive influence upon the philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and his own zealous regard for Z, there has been relatively little serious study of his magnum opus. At the same time, the little work that has been, and is still being, done in the Englishspeaking world, though scattered and quarantined from the mainstream discourse of philosophy, displays the vitality and depth of what Schacht calls ‘Nietzsche’s way of doing philosophy’,4 one that forces us to call into question the very tools of logical reasoning which dominate Western thought. This volume, Before Sunrise seeks to address the paucity and scattered character of current research by gathering together efforts to explore Z not only with regard to its significance for an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy per se, but also in light of the deeper questions of the meaning of philosophy itself and its relation with poetry, life, and existence. Before Sunrise presents chapters by twelve international Nietzsche scholars in which Z is explored with respect to its myriad philosophical questions, aspects, and implications for existence and life. This volume shows the relevance of Z to questions articulated in contemporary philosophy, from deconstruction, hermeneutics, and critical theory to phenomenology, existentialism, and post-structuralism; cosmology and contemporary physics; and finally, ethics, religion, and politics. The volume interprets Z as a provocation to a technical philosophy that, as Nietzsche contends, has removed itself from authentic questioning and, thus, relevance for the new millenium. The volume is laid out in three parts, Of Method, Of Existence, and Of Life. Of Method will explore Z with respect to its compositional structure and style as a philosophical and poetic text, and the implications of its radical innovations to pertinent meta-philosophical questions amid the broader horizons of philosophy. Of Existence will explore the question of the significance of the eternal recurrence of the same to an interpretation of cosmic and human existence. Of Life will explore various aspects of the ethos of Zarathustra and the myriad questions and implications arising from Z on the meaning of freedom, convalescence, and the overcoming of nihilism, the sources of affirmation, and the virtue of gift-giving. Part I, Of Method begins with ‘The Symphonic Structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Preliminary Outline’ by Graham Parkes, in which he excavates the contention that Z has a symphonic structure and seeks to show what this contention means in light of musical theory. He contends that we will be better able to understand this Dionysian text in light of its musical background.

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In ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche’s Autobiography’, Thomas Brobjer laments the lack of attention paid to Z as a philosophical text, and suggests that one way to consider this work as philosophical, is to regard it as autobiographical. In this way, this work is set forth by Nietzsche as an example of how philosophy should be practised, as a poetic sublimation of personal and situated experiences. In the next chapter, ‘Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s Typology’, Yunus Tuncel explores the question of type, or typology, in Z and Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. He outlines three typologies: cultural, characteriological, and historical. The first concerns forces of culture (artistic, priestly), the second, traits and tendencies (spirits of gravity and revenge), and the third, epochal principles as the trajectory of the historical becoming of nihilism and its overcoming. In the final chapter of Part I, ‘The Three Metamorphoses and Philosophy’, Peter Yates explores the status of Z as a philosophical work against the background of the question of poetic expressivity in philosophy. Yates raises the metaphilosophical questions: What then is philosophy? Who then is a philosopher? He traces the maturation of philosophy from technical, or propositional, to literary, or poetic, expressivity against the background of the three metamorphoses of the spirit, of the camel, the lion, and the child. Part II, Of Existence begins with ‘Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time’, in which Mark Daniel Cohen and Friedrich Ulfers offer an interpretation of eternal recurrence as an overt ontological principle within an ontology of time and existence. They argue that eternal recurrence is a Dionysian reinterpretation of nineteenth-century physics in which is disclosed a theory of the moment as a continuous opening. In ‘The Gateway-Augenblick’, Paul S. Loeb lays out the doctrine of eternal recurrence as the Dionysian mystery faith to which Plato was opposed. Loeb juxtaposes the dying Zarathustra to the dying Socrates in a contemplation of the distinction between eternal recurrence, on the one hand, and reincarnation (with its eventual release), on the other. Alan Wenham, in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Hammer and the Greatest Weight’, argues that in preparation for the radical innocence and freedom envisaged in Z, human beings must first awaken themselves from their blindness to their own enslavement within the nexus of Christian fatalism, slave mentality, and masochism. Wenham proposes, however, that we interrogate the figure of the Übermensch as to its apparent repetition of the temporality of the slave.

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Part III, Of Life, begins with ‘Zarathustra on Freedom’, in which Gudrun von Tevenar argues that only those who have liberated themselves both from external constraints as well as from such inner constraints as attachment to past values can be deemed suitable candidates for freedom. Yet, real freedom also requires having a vision as to future goals [the famous Freiheit wozu ?], plus the rare ability to find one’s own way towards those goals. Only then is one free and can thus qualify to be one of Zarathustra’s true fellow-creators. In ‘Nietzsche – On the Regenerative Character of Dispositions’, Arno Boehler examines Zarathustra’s convalescence as a pre-condition for the affirmation of eternal recurrence. He sketches out a difficult struggle which exposes the transformation of the performative speech of Zarathustra to an openness which allows his own soul, his own abyss, to speak. In the next chapter, ‘In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future and of New Origins’, Uschi Nussbaumer-Benz argues that one of the sources for the Zarathustra legend is the ancient narrative of the Dighanikaya which speaks of a wise individual who rolls out of himself like a wheel, as a symbol of his own perfection. She argues that this narrative served as a wellspring for the philosophy of Nietzsche and may shed some light on his attempt to set forth a competing grand narrative to those of the monotheistic religions. In the final chapter, ‘Justice and Gift-Giving in Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Vanessa Lemm examines the practise of gift-giving as an alternative to both utilitarianism and to exploitation and domination. She argues that giftgiving is distinct from Christian alms or charity which is not giving at all, but a poisoning which creates dependencies and shores up relations of injustice. Drawing connections between Derrida and Nietzsche, Lemm contends that gift-giving is an animal virtue and that it is in a competitive friendship with animals that there will be an enhancement of life.

Chapter 1

The Symphonic Structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Preliminary Outline Graham Parkes1

You will be able to tell from the Finale [of Zarathustra] what the whole symphony is really saying.2

The power of music ‘Without music life would be simply an error, exhausting toil, exile’. This well known pronouncement makes a fitting motto for Nietzsche’s 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 Mendelssohn’s 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 encounters with the sublime in the town’s churches and cathedral while listening to works by Händel, 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

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mother from boarding school: ‘Everything seems dead to me when I can’t hear any music.’4 In another letter from the same period: ‘I look for words for a melody that I have, and for a melody for words that I have, and these two things I have don’t go together, even though they come from the same soul. But such is my fate!’5 Nevertheless, during his teens and twenties he wrote prolifically for piano and voice, producing close to a hundred compositions, most of them short piano pieces and Lieder somewhat in the style of Schubert and Schumann.6 Nietzsche’s desire to compose music seriously remained strong, though it was of necessity dampened in the course of his decade-long friendship with Richard Wagner, the world’s most famous composer at that time. Nietzsche’s joy in composing reasserted itself through his presenting compositions to Wagner’s wife, Cosima, and sustained a violent setback when Cosima’s former husband, the conductor Hans von Bülow to whom he had given one of his stormier scores, famously called it ‘a rape and violation of Euterpe [the muse of music]’. – Ouch. More charitable was Heinrich Köselitz, one of Nietzsche’s longest standing and most faithful friends, and a composer (under the artistic name Peter Gast) of fairly undistinguished operas. Nietzsche and Köselitz discussed music constantly during their years of correspondence, and whenever they met in person they would play music together if there was a piano available. After eventually giving up composing, Nietzsche continued to play the piano when the opportunity arose, and he remained a frequent concert- and opera-goer throughout his career. As far as social intercourse was concerned: ‘In the whole history of philosophy it would be impossible to find another philosopher who frequented musicians [composers, conductors, pianist, musicologists, music publishers] to such an extent.’7 Nietzsche’s aesthetic attitude towards existence is exemplified in his idea that we are tasked as human beings to make our lives into works of art, and in some cases works of music. Writing about the way certain rare moments in life ‘speak to our hearts’, he talks of ‘the symphony of actual life’. In denigrating ‘idealist’ thinkers who reject that this world revealed to the senses in favour of ‘the cold realm of ideas’, he claims: ‘A genuine philosopher [in those days] could no longer hear life, insofar as life is music, and so he denied the music of life.’ For Nietzsche, insofar as all life is will to power, which manifests itself through the drives (Triebe) or affects that operate mostly beneath the level of consciousness, music can reveal those operations: Only now is the human being coming to realize that music is a signlanguage of the affects: and we shall later learn to recognize clearly the

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drive-system of a musician from his music. . . . There are many more languages than one thinks . . . What does not speak to us! – but those who hear are becoming ever fewer.8 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 Köselitz: ‘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 Nietzsche’s 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 Köselitz 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 [Beethoven’s] 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 Köselitz 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

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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 responsions and so forth’. Three weeks later, another letter to Köselitz 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 Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen, not to mention the challenge to the world’s 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 sculptor’s 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 Köselitz, ‘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 Köselitz: ‘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 Zarathustra’s voice over all the others, why not an oratorio with a dominating soloist, or even a concerto with Zarathustra’s voice as the solo instrument? Yet no lesser authority than Gustav Mahler confirms Nietzsche’s 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 independent works, they usually consisted of three movements, in a pattern of fast – slow – fast. The pre-classical symphony, as developed by numerous

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composers in Paris, northern Italy, Mannheim, and Vienna, favoured this three-movement structure until the 1760s. After 1770, four movements became standard, with the insertion of a minuet between the second, slow movement and a final, dance-like movement in rondo form. Half of Haydn’s early symphonies (Nos. 1–30), for example, are in three movements, while almost all of those he wrote after the mid-1760s have four. The world of Zarathustra scholarship divides into those who think the work properly ends at the conclusion of Part III (which Nietzsche certainly thought was the end at the time he finished it) and those who think it includes fourth part, which he wrote around a year later but chose not to publish. If one is of the three-part persuasion, the book’s structure would reflect the pre-classical symphony in three movements: a first movement in sonata-allegro form; a second, slow movement (andante or adagio) usually consisting of a theme and variations; and a third movement either ‘in the tempo of a minuet’ (sometimes minuet or scherzo and trio) or else in a faster dance-like tempo (allegro or presto). For those who include the fourth part, the form would be that of the later classical symphony in four movements, where the third would be a minuet and trio in ternary form, and the final movement dance-like in rondo. But since Nietzsche writes of ‘the finale of [his] symphony’ in four different letters after completing Part III, it makes sense to compare the structure of the first three parts of Zarathustra with that of the early classical symphony in three movements. As a young boy, Nietzsche used to play piano transcriptions of Haydn symphonies for four hands, some of which would have been in three movements.23 For his thirteenth birthday, he requested a score of Mozart’s Symphony No. 4 ‘with fugue’, which is one of 20 among Mozart’s 41 symphonies that have three movements. Seven years later, he heard that symphony in concert, and also Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (‘Paris’) which, like No. 38 (‘Prague’), is an epitome of the three-movement form.24 It is probable that Nietzsche had one or more of these works in mind when he pronounced the symphony of Zarathustra completed after the third movement.

First movement The first movement of this symphony is in sonata-allegro form – which often has an introduction leading into the first part, the exposition, after which a transition leads to the development, which is followed by a closing section leading to a recapitulation. The introduction to the first movement tends to

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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 ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, which introduces the major places and themes to follow: the solitude of Zarathustra’s 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 Zarathustra’s speeches, ‘On the Three Transformations’ (1.1), is like a second, much shorter introduction, 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 Thousand Goals and One’) as transitions, the exposition, development, and recapitulation would each consist of six chapters (2–7, 9–14, 16–21), with the last chapter (16.22) understood as a coda. The exposition in a symphony’s first movement presents two or more themes, or groups of themes, which are often repeated after a shift in key. The exposition chapters (2–7) 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 professorial 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 sacrificers’. 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 Zarathustra’s 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.

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‘On the Tree on the Mountainside’ introduces a closing theme with a cadential function by showing the reaction of a young man who has been powerfully drawn to Zarathustra’s teaching: namely hatred and envy of Zarathustra as ‘one who can fly’, incited by what Zarathustra will call ‘the spirit of heaviness’. For the first time we hear a dialogue between teacher and student, and we are shown a milder aspect of Zarathustra as he explains to the young man that he is still ensnared by conflicting drives that have not yet been mastered. The conclusion to his speech effects a transition to the next section insofar as he exhorts the young man to emulate the noble man and avoid succumbing to the despair that enveloped noble types who lost hope: ‘Hold sacred your highest hope!’ The next six chapters (9–14) make up the ‘development’ section, in which Zarathustra elaborates the themes of the exposition in a more combative set of speeches addressed mostly to an audience he refers to as ‘my brothers’, attacking in the spirit of the lion such adversaries as priests and politicians. ‘On the Preachers of Death’ opens forcefully, with a direct attack on the priests of the old religions: 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.

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Zarathustra’s next speech, ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’ (1.15), constitutes a transition to the recapitulation, in which the previous themes are revisited in the spirit of the spontaneity of the child and in the light of the overcoming of the human by way of the Overhuman. ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’ is a crucial speech that brings together the first movement’s two theme areas by inquiring into the origins of the virtues and moral evaluations such as good and evil – and finding them to come not from some God or heavenly realm but from interpretations of peoples in the form of ‘will to power’ (first mention in the book). The recapitulation returns to themes laid out in the exposition and also alludes to their elaborations in the development section. Whereas two chapters in the exposition and two in the development mention the Overhuman, four chapters do so in the recapitulation. There is for the most part a close correspondence with the six chapters of the exposition. ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’ (1.16) is a responsion to the ‘wise man’s’ maxim, ‘Peace with God and one’s neighbour’ (1.2), which exposes love of the neighbour as false selflessness and ‘bad love of oneself’ and commends instead love of the friend and thereby the Overhuman. ‘On the Way of the Creator’ (1.17) replaces the suffering creator God of chapter 1.3 (‘On Believers in a World Behind’) with a suffering human creator, who corresponds on the level of the solitary individual to the creator peoples discussed in ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’. Now, the ‘creating, willing, valuing I’ of the third chapter is replaced by a multiplicity consisting of ‘yourself and your Seven Devils’. The next speech, ‘On Old and Young Little Women’ (1.18) counters the despisers of the body (1.4) who are ‘no bridges to the Overhuman’ with a woman in whose love the light of a star shines, and whose hope is to ‘give birth to the Overhuman’. The next two chapters correspond to the next two of the exposition in reverse order. ‘On the Bite of the Adder’ (1.19) revisits the theme of justice first announced in ‘On the Pale Criminal’ (1.6), except that the criminal who was earlier the victim of a petty and vengeful justice, is replaced by the solitary Zarathustra, for whom ‘a little revenge is more humane than no revenge at all’, and who demands a justice that is ‘love with seeing eyes’ and that wittily gives to each his – Zarathustra’s – own. ‘On Children and Marriage’ (1.20) reprises the discussion of the virtues in ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’ (1.5): whereas the singular ‘brother’ in the earlier chapter was liable to become ‘a battle and battlefield of virtues’ driven by ‘envy and mistrust and calumny’, Zarathustra’s later question for ‘you alone, my brother’ is whether he is ready for marriage through having become ‘commander of the senses, master of your virtues’. To have one’s

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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 The second movement of the early classical symphony is a slow movement, usually consisting of a main theme which recurs in alternation with variations in two or more ‘episodes’ which develop and transform the theme rhythmically, melodically, and harmonically. The slow movement often begins with an introduction, and ends with a coda that is distinct from the main theme. Taking wisdom as the primary theme, the structure of Part II would look like this: introduction (chapter 1), main theme (2), first episode (3–7), main theme developed (8–12), second episode (13–19), final statement of main theme (20), coda (21–22). The motto that stands at the head of

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Part II of Zarathustra is a repetition of a sentence-and-a-half from the last page of the previous part: ‘ . . . 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 comments in a letter to Köselitz: ‘From this motto there emerge – it is almost unseemly to say this to a musician – different harmonies and modulations from those in the first part. The main thing was to swing oneself up to the second level – in order from there to reach the third’.26 The upswing happens through Zarathustra’s departure from his disciples for the solitude of his mountaintop cave, followed by a sojourn in a site far from the marketplace and town of Part I: the Isles of the Blest. According to Hesiod, these islands are inhabited by departed heroes who ‘live untouched by sorrow in the isles of the blest along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, and for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods’.27 A suitably serene setting, then, for the slow exposition of the theme of wisdom. Whereas all the chapters in Part I bear titles beginning with ‘On . . . ’ as befitting their status as speeches, Part II begins with ‘The Child and the Mirror’ and ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’, alluding to a mythic story and a mythical place or state of mind, respectively. The beginning of ‘The Child and the Mirror’ (2.1) echoes the beginning of the Prologue, with Zarathustra spending ‘months and years’ in his mountaintop solitude until one morning he is awakened by a frightening dream, in which a child shows him his reflection in a mirror. This alludes to the story about the infant Dionysus (Zagreus) whom the envious Titans distract by giving him a mirror to play with, so that they can kill, dismember, and devour him. Concluding that his friends have denied him and that he should therefore return to them, Zarathustra resolves to go back down – by way of an Orphic-Dionysiac dissolution into forces of nature: he becomes a mountain torrent plunging into the valleys and a hailstorm with lightninglaughter pealing into the depths. There is a lot of Dionysiac Rausch here for the beginning of a slow movement – conveyed in the German by a steady stream of sibilants (a surge of initial ‘s’ and ‘sh’ sounds over a page-anda-half) – but it eventually resolves into the calmer image of Zarathustra’s ‘Wild Wisdom’ in the form of a lioness wanting to put her young to bed on the soft greensward of his friends’ hearts. Zarathustra’s Wild Wisdom will be contrasted with the various traditional wisdoms it will replace.

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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 slowness is the tempo of these speeches.’28 A tender slowness indeed, in which Zarathustra’s wisdom presents itself as an understanding that God is a thought, a supposition, while the Overhuman is a possibility that can actually 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 (2.3–7) constitute the first ‘episode’ by introducing 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 rabble’s 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 exposé, 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).

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With ‘On the Famous Wise Men’ and the next four chapters (2.8–12), 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 people’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 one’s 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 sunlikeisolation in light would be “Ariadne”’ – and we hear it near the symphony’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 traditional 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

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‘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 SelfOvercoming’ (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 annihilates old and creates new values. The second episode (2.13–18) 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 mountaincastle 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 interpretation 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.

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The next chapter, ‘On Redemption’ (2.20), shows the culmination of Zarathustra’s wisdom in Part II, which affirms his premonition at the beginning of the movement (2.2) of creating as ‘the great redemption from suffering’ and willing as the ultimate ‘liberator and joy-bringer’. Now he can proclaim to his disciples: ‘To redeem that which has passed away and to re-create all “It was” into a “That is how I wanted it!” – that alone should I call redemption!’ The bridge to the highest hope, ‘that humanity might be redeemed from revenge’ (2.7), might be crossed now that Zarathustra realizes revenge’s profoundest form: ‘the will’s ill-will toward time and its “It was”’. The question remains – keeping this section in a minor key – whether Zarathustra has recovered from the tarantula’s bite, which threatened to make his ‘soul whirl with revenge’ (2.7). After all, he confessed in ‘The Night-Song’ to devising revenge himself (2.10). But his wisdom asserts itself in the last sentences of his last speech in this chapter, which contain the last mention in the book of ‘will to power’ and bring that idea together with the thought of eternal recurrence: ‘Something higher than any reconciliation the will that is will to power must will – yet how shall this happen? Who has taught it to will and want back as well?’30 No one as yet – though Zarathustra will, as soon as his own will can ‘unlearn the spirit of revenge’. The last two chapters of Part II, ‘On Human Prudence’ and ‘The Stillest Hour’ (2.21–22), constitute a kind of coda to the slow movement. Having given direct voice to his wisdom in the speech ‘On Redemption’, Zarathustra now lowers the volume and intensity to talk about three instances of a more modest attribute: his ‘human prudence’. And in the final chapter the mood becomes quieter still as he prepares to leave his ‘friends’ again and return to his solitude, telling them of another dream, in which he is addressed by his Stillest Hour who speaks to him 11 times – but always ‘without voice’. She urges him to say what he has learned from Life and Wisdom and ‘command great things’, but to do so piano (or pianissimo) rather than forte, on the grounds that: ‘It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet direct the world.’ But he claims not to be ready, and after a bout of weeping he takes leave of his friends once again.

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

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dance-like. While it is possible to regard Part III of Zarathustra as having a minuet/scherzo and trio structure (with chapters 9–11 as the trio), it is more illuminating to see it as having the form of a rondo (A-B-A-C-A) with chapters 1–4, 9–11, 13–16 sounding the main theme (A) of eternal recurrence, and chapters 5–8 and 12 supplying contrasting episodes (B and C). ‘The Wanderer’ (3.1) shows Zarathustra speaking to his heart (as Odysseus often does) while climbing the ridge of mountains on the Isles of the Blest, standing on top contemplating the other sea on the far side, and descending to the foot of the cliffs on the farther shore. When his Hour says to him, ‘Summit and abyss – they are now joined in one!’ this anticipates the finale with its conjunction of opposites that comes from thinking the thought of eternal recurrence: ‘the farthest to the nearest and fire to spirit and joy to pain and the wickedest to the kindest’ (3.16 §4). The scene for the next three chapters (3.2–4) is on board a ship that takes Zarathustra over the open sea back to the mainland. In ‘On the Vision and Riddle’ he recounts to the seafarers on board (‘whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon terrifying seas’) his first vision of eternal recurrence, in which the thought is intimated through a series of questions: ‘Are not all things knotted together so tightly that this moment draws after it all things that are to come?’ ‘Must we not eternally come back again?’ ‘Who is the shepherd into whose throat the snake thus crawled [and] all that is heaviest and blackest will crawl?’ (3.2). The answer will come at the beginning of the main theme’s final iteration in ‘The Convalescent’ (3.13 §2). In the next speech, ‘On Blissfulness Against One’s Will’, Zarathustra speaks to his ‘jubilant conscience’ and rebuffs the ‘blissful hour’ that has approached him, since he knows that he has yet to find ‘the lion’s voice’ strong enough to summon up the thought of eternal recurrence. In ‘Before Sunrise’ (3.4), still out on the open sea, he addresses the open Heaven above him shortly before dawn. Nietzsche later characterizes this speech too as a dithyramb: ‘Let one hear how Zarathustra talks to himself before the sunrise: such emerald happiness, such divine tenderness was never given voice before me.’31 The speech touches on the profoundest matters, insofar as Zarathustra evinces the supremely affirmative attitude towards the world which comes from the thought of recurrence: 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.

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The speech ends with an affirmation of still deeper wisdom: The world is deep – and deeper than ever the day has thought. The next four chapters (5–8) 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 people’s ‘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 blessèd 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 ‘Zarathustra’s ape’ delivers a harangue on ‘the slaughterhouses and soup-kitchens of the spirit’ (3.7). Zarathustra’s response deprecates the revenge evidenced by the fool’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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,

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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 selfknowledge 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 discovered 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 (one’s) evil is necessary for and necessarily connected with (one’s) 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 suitable for an episode in the fast final movement of a symphony. While the first five sections seem continuous with the preceding three chapters,

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insofar as Zarathustra is ‘recounting himself to himself’ in solitude, the tone changes with the sixth, which begins ‘O my brothers’, and ushers in a long series of speeches in which Zarathustra addresses an imaginary audience of his brothers in preparation for going down to humanity once again.32 Some two dozen previous themes return here, some appearing on old tablets that are to be broken, others on new tablets that are to be brought down to humanity, even the occasional new tablet that already deserves to be shattered. Remember that such tablets are the ‘voices of will to power’ (1.15). Towards the end of the episode, Zarathustra’s voice reaches its highest pitch when he inveighs against ‘the good and the righteous’ who ‘crucify [the creator] who writes new values on new tablets’ (3.12 § 26). The good and the righteous thus pose ‘the greatest danger for all human future’, so Zarathustra shouts fortissimo: ‘Shatter, shatter for me the good and the righteous! – O my brothers, have you understood these words too?’ (§ 27). Surely the hardest tablet for his imagined disciples to swallow. But with the last speech, which Zarathustra addresses to his Will, comes a diminuendo – although the wild richness of the poetic imagery here reaches an intensity as high as anything in the book. The last four climactic chapters (13–16) return to the theme of eternal recurrence, as we see Zarathustra finally confront and incorporate the thought. The confrontation nearly kills him, and it takes seven days for the supine ‘convalescent’ to recover – just enough time for a Buddha to attain Enlightenment or a God to create a world (3.13 §2). His eagle and serpent speak for the first time in the book, addressing seven speeches to Zarathustra in which they encourage him to sing instead of speak, and to fashion a new lyre for his new songs. He replies to the first six, but by the time they finish the seventh – ‘he lay still with his eyes closed . . . conversing with his soul’. That conversation is recounted in the next chapter, ‘On the Great Yearning’ (3.14). The last three highly lyrical chapters show us a Zarathustra who has successfully confronted and incorporated the thought of eternal recurrence. They also echo, in sequence, the previous three most lyrical chapters in the book, the ‘Night-Song’, ‘Dance-Song’, and ‘Grave-Song’ from Part II, which anticipated the transformation of Zarathustra’s will as a force that will ‘break through all graves’ and resurrect ‘what is unredeemed from [his] youth’ (2.11). The original title of ‘On the Great Yearning’ (3.14) was ‘Ariadne’, which signals that the ‘great releaser’ that Zarathustra tells his soul (Ariadne) to anticipate is Dionysus. After he reminds his soul of all he has given her, she replies to the Night-Song’s lament over ‘the wretchedness of all who bestow’ by asking him: ‘Should

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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-crack’s brisk tempo! I did not forget the whip, did I? – No!’ The song also has overtones of the duets between Don José and Carmen in Bizet’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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.

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Coda Therefore, what do we learn from trying to read and hear Zarathustra as music, and to discern its symphonic structure? When Nietzsche tells us that a condition for understanding the wisdom in the book is that ‘One has above all to hear properly the tone, this halcyon tone, that issues from [Zarathustra’s] mouth’, he is suggesting that the meaning of the text is conveyed not only by the syntax and semantics of the language but also by its music. In the book that he wrote to elucidate the meaning of Zarathustra, Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of listening with ‘the third ear’ if one is to appreciate ‘the art in every good sentence’: A misunderstanding of its tempo, for example – and the sentence itself is misunderstood! Let there be no doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables . . . let us lend a subtle and patient ear to every staccato, every rubato, let us divine the meaning in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs and how delicately and richly they can take on colour and change colour as they follow each other.35 This passage suggests we are unlikely to divine Nietzsche’s meaning unless we read Zarathustra aloud, paying close attention with the reading ear to how the sentences sound over time in the imagination. Taking our cue from Nietzsche’s claim, ‘I have always written my writings with my whole body and life’, we can try reading with more of our bodies than usual.36 We can enlist the musculature in the process of reading by letting the pitch and tempo of the imagery faintly innervate a play of the muscles, in a variation of the ‘ideokinesis’ practised by dancers. At the beginning of the book, Zarathustra is said to ‘walk like a dancer’, and at the end we hear, as if from a new book of Revelation, his Alpha and Omega: ‘that all that is heavy become light, all body become dancer, all spirit become bird’.37 The better one’s sense of Zarathustra’s symphonic structure, the more, quite simply, one can appreciate the work. Some aspects of the book’s structure remain indistinct: why, for instance, is this particular chapter right here, following that chapter and preceding the one after? To the extent that one can imagine the kind of symphony Nietzsche had in mind when he was writing Zarathustra, one can more fully experience, somatically as well as imaginatively, the myriad interrelations and correspondences that inform the book. Considerations of space restrict the amount of resolution possible in this chapter, which is just a preliminary outline – but one that calls for other eyes and ears to make out, and other voices and hands to fill in, the worlds of detail in Nietzsche’s masterpiece.

Chapter 2

Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche’s Autobiography Thomas Brobjer

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is probably Nietzsche’s most read work, but it is rarely dealt with in scholarly and philosophical discussions of Nietzsche’s 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. Nonetheless, 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 philosophical 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 embarrassing 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 Nietzsche’s 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,

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seen by some, but surprisingly often forgotten or ignored. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is Nietzsche! Or better, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the sublimated Nietzsche! The answer may at first appear almost trivial and platitudinous. Of course, Nietzsche is behind Zarathustra. Just like Goethe is behind Faust, Thomas Mann behind Adrian Leverkühn, and Robert Musil behind Ulrich. However, I want to show that Nietzsche’s Z is autobiographical to a much greater extent than these other works and than has been realized, and that this has consequences. Furthermore, where most novelists and poets base their figures on some kind of model, or on phantasy, Nietzsche consciously constructed Zarathustra out of himself, out of his experiences, and his thinking. This claim says something important about how Nietzsche worked, how he thought one should work, and it has consequences for how one should read the book. I believe that there is no need to question the almost total agreement between Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s teachings – unlike in the case of Goethe–Faust, Mann– Leverkühn, Musil–Ulich. To mention just one example, in EH Nietzsche writes: ‘On one occasion Zarathustra strictly defines his task – it is also mine.’2 No convincing important difference between Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s teachings has been proposed.3 The main teachings of Z are in very brief summary the death of God and the Übermensch in book one, the will to power in book two, the idea of eternal recurrence in book three, and the danger of pity in book four. I will also show and discuss that in spite of the fact that Nietzsche was very satisfied with Z, he nonetheless strove and had specific plans to go beyond this work and this symbol. I will attempt to show the extent to which Z is based on Nietzsche’s own life and his view of Bildung and self-development: first by summarizing many of Nietzsche’s own statements about Z and thereafter by showing some of the many parallels between Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s lives. I will then briefly mention some of Nietzsche’s fairly extensive relevant reading at the time of writing the book and which are likely to have influenced it. I will in that section thus relate Z back to Nietzsche’s reading, and to his life and biography. Thereafter, I will discuss the place of Z among his other works and then finally draw some conclusions.

I The extent to which Z is based on Nietzsche’s life can be seen in a number of different ways. We see it in his own claims about the book, in the many

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 miniautobiographies. 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: Men at present begin by entering the realm of culture as children affected religiously, and these sensations are at their liveliest in perhaps their tenth year, then pass over into feebler forms (pantheism) while at the same time drawing closer to science; they put God, immortality and the like quite behind them but fall prey to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. At last they find this, too, unbelievable; art, on the other hand, seems to promise them more and more, so that for a time metaphysics continues just to survive transformed into art or as a mood of artistic transfiguration. But the scientific sense grows more and more imperious and leads the man away to natural science and history and especially to the most rigorous methods of acquiring knowledge, while art is accorded an ever gentler and more modest significance. All this nowadays usually takes place within a man’s first thirty years.7

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An interest in biographical and autobiographical texts and material, including journals and letters, is also prominent in Nietzsche’s reading, and such books are common in his library. It is an important part of Nietzsche’s psychological approach to philosophy and of his manner of working. Nietzsche’s intensive personal relationship to the work Z, much more so than was ever the case with any of his other works, is visible in many notes and letters at the time of its conception. The work is not just a way for Nietzsche to state his philosophy but also the expression of profoundly personal experiences as well as the overcoming of these often negative experiences. Nietzsche, for example, writes about it: ‘sometime everyone shakes his heart out’,8 ‘in the details there is unbelievably much which is personally experienced and suffered in it, which is only comprehensible to me’,9 and ‘everything which I have thought, suffered and hoped is in it, and in a manner such that my life will appear justified’.10 He also refers to Z as a sort of ‘bloodletting’ which helped him recover his health after the Lou-, Rée- and family affair of 1882/83.11 Along the same lines, he writes in a letter to his sister on 29 August 1883 (after having finished the second book and working on the proofs of it): ‘ . . . and behind almost every word there is a personal experience, a self-overcoming’. In 1887, he writes to Overbeck and says that his whole Z is grown out of a lack of friends, sympathy, and love.12 In the poem at the end of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) he states that Zarathustra was born out of himself after he had been too long in solitude: This song is done – desire’s 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 Nietzsche also frequently refers to Zarathustra as his son,14 and to himself as Zarathustra’s father (and sometimes mother),15 and occasionally he refers to Zarathustra when he is actually referring to himself or wants to explain himself.16 He claims that only those who have lived through similar experiences can understand Z, When Doctor Heinrich von Stein once honestly complained that he understood not one word of my Zarathustra, I told him that was quite in order: to have understood, that is to say experienced, six sentences of that book would raise one to a higher level of mortals than ‘modern’ man could attain to.17

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While discussing the third and fourth Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen about Schopenhauer and Wagner in EH, he admits that these texts are really much more about himself than about them: It was in this way that Plato employed Socrates, as a semiotic for Plato. – Now, when I look back from a distance at the circumstances of which these essays are a witness, I would not wish to deny that fundamentally they only speak of me. . . . admitting that what is being spoken of is fundamentally not ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ but his opposite, ‘Nietzsche as Educator’.18 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 selfovercomings. 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 On first impression, there are few similarities between Nietzsche and Zarathustra, except that Z is situated in a metaphorical landscape with few connections to nineteenth-century Europe. However, on a closer look, and underneath the surface, there are ample parallels between Nietzsche’s life and development and those ascribed to Zarathustra. Like Nietzsche, Zarathustra longs for company, praises friendship, although having difficulty finding it, hesitates to teach ‘eternal recurrence’, and has as his most terrible threat, pity.22 Both have been scholars but have moved beyond that stage. Both are poets, although critical of mere poets. Both have spent too much time in solitude and long to be human again. They both live a life of chastity, but know the power of sexuality. Both had

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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 Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s lives. 1. Nietzsche’s 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 fröhliche 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. Nietzsche found the figure of Zarathustra in his reading of the cultural historian and anthropologist Friedrich von Hellwald’s Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entstehung bis zur Gegenwart (Augsburg, 1874, 2nd. edn 1875), 839 pages, in the summer of 1881.26 Nietzsche’s first reference to Zarathustra in 1881, quoted above, is an excerpt from this work. 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

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 development of culture has been of incalculable value.’28 Compare Nietzsche’s 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 experimental 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 In Hellwald’s account of Zarathustra there are several further aspects that Nietzsche picked up and used in Z, such as that Zarathustra addresses the sun, the praise of truth and honesty, and that life is struggle (will to power).30 It is not unlikely that Hellwald’s book, which Nietzsche seems to have read three times, with its strong emphasis on struggle, sympathy for aristocracy (in different forms), and its critique of religion, also more generally influenced many other aspects of Z, but that appears not to have been well examined. For example, especially the first book of Z (and in particular the concept of Übermensch) appears rather Darwinian-inspired to many readers. Nietzsche later, in EH, repudiates this, but it is not wholly improbable that he was more influenced by Hellwald’s Darwinism than he was aware of.31

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Some specific aspects of Z is thus less autobiographical than has generally been believed. 2. The perhaps most memorable and most discussed and quoted passage in the first book of Z is the first one after the prologue, ‘Of the Three Metamorphoses’, in which Zarathustra speaks about the three stages of the development of the spirit or the soul; camel, lion, and child.32 This whole passage is in fact modelled on Nietzsche’s view of his own development, which he already held at this time and later discusses in several late prefaces and in EH.33 It is thus reasonable to closely associate the metamorphoses of the spirit with Nietzsche’s view of his own development. 3. An important background for the whole of Z is that Nietzsche had been deserted by his beloved Lou Salomé and his friend Paul Rée in October or November 1882 and at this time also had a severely strained relationship with his mother and sister over Lou, whom they regarded as immoral. His writing of the first book of Z, in January 1883, was part of his self-treatment of this personal catastrophe.34 We have some indications that the most well known and infamous part of Z, the whip-scene in the section ‘Of Old and Young Women’ in the first book of Z, where Nietzsche lets an old woman give Zarathustra a little truth: ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget the whip!’ has its origin in connection with this episode. The first time we encounter a whip, a man, and a woman together in connection with Nietzsche is before he wrote Z, when Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and Nietzsche took the famous photograph of the three of them – where, on Nietzsche’s suggestion, Rée and he were placed as draught animals before Lou, standing in a small cart with a makeshift whip in her hand. This surely reflects Nietzsche’s and their playfulness but also – again playfully – that men can be made into fools (animals) by women (and love). In Z, Nietzsche now reverses the scene, and lets the whip be directed at Lou. At least Resa von Schirnhofer claims that Nietzsche told her shortly after Z had been published, that the scene should not be understood as generally applicable, but as referring to a single particular (but not named) person – that is clearly, Lou Salomé.35 It is probably this sort of sublimated revenge feelings, also directed at his own family, that Nietzsche referred to when he in his letter to Overbeck, 25 December 1882 states: 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

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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 Förster-Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the whipscene in her two-volume biography of Nietzsche.36 She there describes how she in early 1882 read Ivan Turgenev’s 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 father’s behaviour, but that she defended it and argued that some women need to have the threat of a symbolic whip to prevent them from misbehaving. One or two years later she read in Nietzsche’s 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 consolations of my youth’ and vaguely mentions a large number of events from Nietzsche’s life and childhood.38 The text is based around some words by Emerson, which Nietzsche frequently quoted and made into the motto of Die fröhliche 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 Salomé and his high expectations on her,39 his family (‘my kindred and neighbours’) who turned into ‘abscesses’ and trials, that Rée ‘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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 January–July 1883, the third part in January 1884, and the fourth and final part during January–March 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 ‘discovered’ 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 Böse 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 stimulated Nietzsche to write the work in the prophetic-metaphorical-poetic manner he did. Most relevant are, apart from Hellwald, Nietzsche’s 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 Lipiner’s Der entfesselte Prometheus: Eine Dichtung in 5 Gesängen (Leipzig, 1876), and Carl Spitteler’s

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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, Hölderlin, 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, Burckhard’s Der Cicerone, Roux, Mantegazza, Byron, Baumann, Vogt, Galton, Taine, Turgenev’s First Love, and Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen.47 I have attempted to make some of this material known by listing and briefly discussing all of Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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. Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s own view of his development (as also reflected in the ‘three metamorphoses’) we can see that it represented Nietzsche’s 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 Böse and Zur Genealogie der Moral, as commentaries to Z, and as preparatory for understanding it.50 This was also true for the fifth book of Die fröhliche 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

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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’: But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point it behooves me only to be silent; or I shall usurp that to which only one younger, ‘heavier with future’, and stronger than I has a right – that to which only Zarathustra has a right, Zarathustra the godless . . . 52 The mostly short later books, Der Fall Wagner, Götzen-Dämmerung, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Dionysos-Dithyramben he viewed as minor works, confirming 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 philosophy, 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.

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If I get to Sils Maria in the summer, I mean to set about revising my metaphysical and epistemological views. I must now proceed step by step through a series of disciplines, for I have decided to spend the next five years on an elaboration of my ‘philosophy’, the entrance hall of which I have built with my Zarathustra.56 A month later, he repeats the intention to work on a ‘Hauptwerk’, then referred to as ‘Haupt-Bau’, that is ‘main building’. 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 During 1885, Nietzsche continued to plan and prepare for producing a ‘Hauptwerk’. From the autumn of 1886 – after having finished Jenseits von Gut und Böse – Nietzsche began to refer to the projected major work explicitly as his magnum opus, his ‘Hauptwerk’, and he now has a better grasp of what it ought to contain after having drafted titles and contents in his notebooks for several years. He began to call it ‘Der Wille zur Macht’ in August or September 1885 which it would continue to be called for the next three years, and which he felt certain enough about to have published on the back cover of Jenseits von Gut und Böse as a work in preparation, and to his sister he writes:60 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

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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: Ah, everything in my life is so uncertain and shaky, and always this horrible ill health of mine! On the other hand, there is the hundredweight of this need pressing upon me – to create a coherent structure of thought during the next few years – and for this I need five or six preconditions, all of which seem to be missing now or to be unattainable.62 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 1883–1887/88 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 Götzen-Dämmerung where he writes: A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separated and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed – he no longer denies . . . But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name Dionysos.65

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In the section following one after this one, which was originally going to be the last section and sentence of the book, he writes: I have given mankind the profoundest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I shall shortly give it the most independent.66 Meaning the planned Umwerthung aller Werthe, especially its fourth book, entitled Dionysos. Nietzsche thereafter adds a chapter to Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘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 references 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 Böse and Zur Genealogie 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 Crucified . . .’ 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

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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.

V As we have seen in this chapter, Z illustrates that Nietzsche worked out of himself, that he sublimated and used his own experiences. And this is also how he claimed one should work: The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extinguished 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 It is this that makes Nietzsche into an existential thinker, although he questions or denies such, for this tradition, important concepts as free will and responsibility. The fact that Nietzsche used his own experiences creatively – much more than most thinkers and writers – should thus not surprise us. He always emphasizes, as it seems correctly, how close his life and experiences are related to his thinking and vice versa. 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

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For Nietzsche, character and personality is more fundamental and important than ‘pure philosophy’ or any particular intellectual position.73 It follows from this that he also emphasizes the development of character and personality. He, for example, often argues, in many similes, that man is ‘a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor’74 and that ‘one thing is needful. – To “give style” to one’s character – ’.75 In a section, which reminds one of Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche claims that one should employ one’s genius to oneself, not to one’s works.76 Closely associated to this is Nietzsche’s claim that: ‘a virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defence and necessity’.77 For Nietzsche, development of character is fundamental – 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 Nietzsche claims that to understand Z, it is necessary to know all of his books, in their chronological order, and he especially emphasizes the importance of the more autobiographical prefaces: they ‘give true enlightenment about me, and the very best preparation for [understanding] my bold son Zarathustra’.79 ‘Later on, when he has written his autobiography, EH, he says the same about it.80 Clearly, at least Nietzsche himself saw knowledge of his life and his experiences (or having experienced similar things oneself – but that he held to be unlikely) as a precondition for understanding Z. Knowing Nietzsche’s intention to go beyond Z to a philosophy of Dionysos, one would look forward to studies of the fragments and hints of this to give us a better view of what this next step could have looked like. What we should see when reading Z is less the prophet and more the Bildungsroman, the exemplum, the description of how one can live a worthwhile (philosophical) life. Nietzsche also explicitly says that Z is an examplum [Vorbild].81 He also states, in concord with existential thinking, that everyone can get something out of the book: ‘All human beings, who have any kind of a heroic impulse to move towards their own goal, will find great strength in my Zarathustra.’82 What we should see when reading Z is how one can give the ordinary aspects of life a wider and philosophical importance, how one can become what one is. For Nietzsche, the book represented sublimation and self-overcoming, set in a concentrated philosophical context, but expressed in the language of metaphors.

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A primarily literary analysis of Z thus misses the point,83 and philosophical analyses and discussions risk running into quagmire. For philosophical purposes, his later texts such as Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, and Götzen-Dämmerung are more suitable and accessible. What characterizes Z, what separates it from his other works – and is the reason he praises it so highly – is its existential content – both personally for Nietzsche and also in a more general manner, more or less available to all readers.

Chapter 3

Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s Typology Yunus Tuncel

In this chapter, I present a reading of Zarathustra as a type within the context of Nietzsche’s typology which permeates through his works from the first to the last; I claim that there is a line of thought in Nietzsche’s philosophy, despite the many turning points in it, which pertains to types and which I call typology.1 This typology culminates in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is considered a work of typology, for the purpose of this presentation, without disregarding the other ways in which it has been interpreted. Moreover, typology as a philosophical area of research has not received sufficient attention in Nietzsche interpretations although there are many commentaries on the Overman and Zarathustra. Before presenting Zarathustra as a type, I will briefly discuss the questions of type and typology in Nietzsche, bring up other types from his works, and suggest possible ways of reading his typology.

I 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 interwoven in Nietzsche’s thought. One difficulty with the interpretation of Nietzsche’s 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

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dealt with individually and together to discover yet another layer in Nietzsche’s thought.3 But here we will focus on typology. It is the latter sense of typology, that is, typology as a method, which separates Nietzsche’s typology from other typologies such as psychological typology or character typifications as can be found in the writings of the French moralists or in the nineteenth-century novel. Moreover, philosophical typology dwells in a philosophy which pursues philosophical questions; hence, the types that surface there do so within the context of the most persistent project of the philosopher. For instance, the Overman appears within the context of Nietzsche’s philosophy of transvaluation of highest values and his critique of morality.

II A type is not a person, or better said, there is no one-to-one association between a type and a person. Many types can reside in an individual in different intensities although some types or one type may be predominant among all the others. The relationship between a type and an individual can be described as of appropriation. In what ways, in what typological configuration, does one appropriate a type? And what type is being appropriated? These are some of the questions to be pondered. In Nietzsche’s works, there is a thread of thought regarding type – which is das Typus in the German text – from The Birth of Tragedy (sec. 15) to Ecce Homo (‘Why I am a Destiny’, sec. 4). The word comes from the Greek ‘tupos’ which means, on the one hand, form in the sense of archetype, model, or origin and, on the other, copy, mark, or stamp – it is in this latter sense that Democritus uses the word in its verb form ‘tupousthai’ in his theory of sight. ‘Tupos’ is another Greek word for ‘form’ which is thought in its ‘opposite’ as ‘atupos’ and which does not have the ontological status given to the concept of ‘idea’ by Plato. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, it takes on new meanings and is mostly used for typification of human character. There are instances when Nietzsche uses the word ‘type’ to mean archetype (Ur-typus, which appears rarely in his writings). This is the case, for instance, when he discusses the pre-platonic thinkers, calling them pure types4 in the sense of archetypes (this is the word the translator uses) and calling the post-Socratic thinkers mixed types.5 What lies in this thought is puzzling. Does it mean that only one type was strong in each of the preSocratics, whereas the post-Socratics embodied various types in equal measure (e.g., the logician, the ethicist, and the physicist all together)? This would be a poor reading if we did not also add that the archetype that was

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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. Nietzsche’s 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 reformerlegislator 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. Type and value Under what conditions of valuation does a type exist? What makes a type possible from the standpoint of interpretation and value-schemes? In short, how is a type created? For instance, the spirit of revenge typifies revengefulness, a ‘natural’, primordial feeling. How does this type become a highest, collective type, that is, tied to the highest values? What aspects of human existence does it tap into and dwell in? Nietzsche’s typology floats within the larger context of his philosophy of values. The question ‘what is a type’ is, therefore, bound with the question ‘what is value’. Since these questions apply to both the individual and the collective, we can pose further questions: What types are valued by the individual? What types gain collective worth? Or with what types are the highest values of a culture created? Nietzsche’s struggle with and interest in such figures as Socrates, Jesus, and Luther is not accidental; this interest is focused on the types which they embodied and with which they shaped their epochs. Nietzsche is interested in revealing the typological make up of the value-creator. Type and power In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,6 life teaches Zarathustra that power is affect, commanding and obeying, hierarchy and growth. Life itself is overcoming, a perpetual flow, and procreative, but this is one secret, coming into being and its overcoming: life creates and opposes what it creates. All are subordinate to life and its cycles. This secret, the unity of life and death, individuation and its dissolution, is hidden in the single thought of the eternal recurrence of the same. According to Nietzsche, everything is transient, even the highest values, but this fact of transience is no objection to life and its

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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 There are, at least, two overlapping paths which can be traversed in Nietzsche’s typology: to inquire into types which typify forces of culture, that is, ‘cultural typology’, and to investigate types which typify character traits and tendencies, that is, ‘character typology’. The former deals with such types as the artistic type or the priestly type and the latter with such types as the spirit of gravity or the spirit of revenge. A third path of inquiry, ‘historical typology’, which is equally applicable to the other two typologies, will also be discussed here within the context of Nietzsche’s notion of history. 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 problems 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 Philosopher’s 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 Nietzsche’s works. Cultural types are what embody the forces of culture in their epochal contexts. There are in Nietzsche’s typology, at least, the following types: artistic, philosophical, cosmological-religious, scientific, linguistic, psychological, 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.

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The type of the theoretical man, which Nietzsche associates with Socrates, symbolizes the scientific spirit of that epoch and its overestimation of knowledge and rationality. With this type, Nietzsche exposes the fundamental traits in this mode of existence: . . . it is enough to recognize in him [in Socrates] a type of existence unheard of before him: the type of the theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our next task to try to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical man finds an infinite delight in whatever exists, and this satisfaction protects him against the practical ethics of pessimism with its Lynceus eyes that shine only in the dark. Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.7 In contrast to the artist who looks forward to the process of uncovering while, at the same time, respecting the covering, the theoretical man remains with what he has uncovered and has a claim to uncover everything and hence to possess truth (to possess the goddess in her nudity). In the same section, Nietzsche, borrowing from Lessing, makes a distinction between possession of truth and ‘search after truth’. What characterizes this type is ‘the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but also even of correcting it’.8 Nietzsche calls this faith in thought (abstract thinking is implied here) and knowledge ‘theoretical optimism’. In short, overestimation of and blind faith in knowledge are what typify the type of the theoretical man. Nietzsche’s reflections on religion and its types – such as the type of the saint or the sage – go as far back as to the aphorisms of HH. Thereafter he dissects what can be called the religious type into its various traits and observes their typifications: the ascetic type, the priestly type, and the like. In this typological dissection, he reveals what is problematic and deeply buried in each of these types, in what ways these types persist in his epoch, and also the common ground which binds these types somehow together. By explaining the type of the saint in terms of religious neurosis, in an aphorism in BGE, Nietzsche wonders how such a type becomes appealing, even to philosophers: ‘ . . . no other type has yet been surrounded by such a lavish growth of nonsense and superstition, no other type

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seems to have interested men, even philosophers, more’. And, associating Schopenhauer’s philosophy with this type, he asks further: ‘How is the denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and began.’9 In this text, Nietzsche does not so much dive into the makeup of this type as to ask why it appeals to ‘all types and ages’. One of the hints he gives regarding the appeal of the saint is ‘the air of the miraculous that goes with it – namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul that are judged morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a “bad man” was suddenly transformed into a “saint”, a good man’.10 A deeper analysis of this type is presented in the third essay of The Genealogy where Nietzsche focuses on the makeup of the ascetic ideal and its type. The denial of the body, sensuality and sexuality, repression of instincts, internalization of the animal man, and making these acts of denial values are what characterize the type of the ascetic priest; its typological co-phenomenon is the type of the tamed man which Nietzsche sees prevailing in the nineteenthcentury European culture. The artistic type of decadence, often exemplified by Wagner, appears in Nietzsche’s late works. What interests him the most about Wagner in this period, long after the end of their friendship, are the problematic traits of the modern age and its artistic experiences as embodied in this type of artist. To Nietzsche, ‘Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.’11 But what are the problematic traits in this type? The list is long, but the following appear frequently: neurosis in art, asceticism (compromise to the ascetic ideal), flattery of nihilism and morality, acting (for drawing crowds and pleasing one’s ego), romanticism, and pessimism. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche enumerates the common traits of the decadent artist as follows: . . . the decline of the power to organize; the misuse of traditional means without the capacity to furnish any justification, any for-the-sake-of; the counterfeiting in the imitation of big forms for which nobody today is strong, proud, self-assured, healthy enough; excessive liveliness in the smallest parts; excitement at any price; cunning as the expression of impoverished life; more and more nerves in place of flesh . . . 12 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

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sensuality (the millennia-old opposition between the angel and the beast); one-sidedness when it comes to one’s own activity and seeking philosophical 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 detriment 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 collective 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 Nietzsche’s works in an attempt to understand how he approaches the problem. One of the first distinct character types that appears in Nietzsche’s 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: The word ‘philistine’, as is well known, belongs to the student vocabulary, and signifies, in its wider, popular sense, the antithesis of a son of the

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muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture. The cultural philistine, however – the study of whom [in the original: the study of whose type], and the hearing of whose confessions when he makes them, has now become a disagreeable duty – distinguishes himself from the general idea of the species ‘philistine’ through a superstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and man of culture; an incomprehensible delusion which reveals that he does not even know what a philistine, and the antithesis of a philistine, is: so we shall not be surprised to find that usually he solemnly denies he is a philistine.15 Cultural philistinism is a form of vanity, a not knowing oneself. One thinks that one is great whereas one is decadent. Nietzsche feels the urgency to understand this type and to bring it to the surface and elaborate on it within the context of modern culture, which has become encyclopedic, a culture of accumulation of knowledge and information about many things but with no creativity commensurate to it, a culture of finders and not seekers. People live off the glory of the greatness of the past, instead of striving for greatness. The cultural philistine is doubly problematic, according to Nietzsche. It is problematic in itself as explained above and is problematic because this type exerts power in culture, that is, it has become a collectively accepted type. Therefore, he asks two related questions: ‘How is it possible that a type such as the cultural philistine could have come into existence and, once extant, could acquire the authority of supreme arbiter over all the problems of German culture. . . .’16 These are the two important questions a typologist would ask in general: how is a type possible and what value and power does that type has in culture? The free spirit, on the other hand, designates a type who can explore, experiment, destroy, and recreate without the hindrances of institutional attachments, ideological bonds, or unconditional faith in custom and tradition. This freedom, though unhindered, is associated with an underlying cosmology which is already implied in the word ‘spirit’. Its experience culminates in both greatness and liberation: 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

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To experience the great liberation, it is necessary to push freedom and spirituality to their height. This is one of the teachings of Nietzsche’s aesthetic cosmology: freedom and justice are bound with one another, creativity and modesty enrich one another, joy and suffering circularly complement each other. Here this teaching is typified in the type of the free spirit. The closest type to the free spirit in Nietzsche’s typology is the wanderer who has his shadow, the background of his existence, in a parallel way that the free spirit has his spirit. Unique in Nietzsche’s character typology are the types he brings to daylight that had hitherto remained unknown or unconsciously active; the way he does this excavation; and the questions he poses pertinent to a typological investigation. I have heuristically separated two typologies in Nietzsche’s thought that are closely affiliated. I have not, however, tried to establish a link between the two although this link is ‘inevitable’, since the cultural type and the character type collapse into one in the notion of the ‘Gesamtmensch’, the total human being, and lose their boundaries. In other words, there is a way in which a force of culture is coupled with a trait of character within the worldview of an individual.

Historical typology: retrospective and prospective types It is necessary to introduce the notion of history into typology, because types are neither eternal nor universal but rather appear in historicalepochal contexts. In other words, every epoch brings forth certain types, and a hierarchy thereof, which have value and meaning for it. Moreover, it lives and is shaped by these types which are the embodiment of its highest values. In the preceding, various types were presented together without an explicit reference to their epochal contexts. To understand epochal shifts in terms of types, one needs to know the ‘retrospective’ and ‘prospective’ types of that epoch, that is, the types that are receding and the types that are proceeding. One may further inquire into the makeup and hierarchy of these types to have a glimpse into the inner constitution of the epoch. Below, Nietzsche’s typology is illustrated with a sketch. Such a simplification, no doubt, may raise questions, but my intention is to show how these different types are placed vis-à-vis the signpost ‘God is dead.’ Not all types are listed, and the ones listed here are only from Z. Moreover, the separation of types into two categories

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does not stem from a subjectivistic or a dualistic approach. Types from the two lists can coexist in certain contexts, yielding hybrid types, which, in fact, are numerous in the age of nihilism. There are, for instance, trends which cultivate the body but not the wisdom of Zarathustra nor the searching of the wanderer nor any free spirituality. Here the higher man must also be mentioned, a transitional type who has questioned the old world-order to some extent and taken small steps toward the new epoch, but who can easily relapse into the old habits (TSZ, Part IV, ‘The Ass Festival’). Types of MGE

GOD IS DEAD

Higher man Last man The saint The sage who teaches virtue The virtuous The good and the just The rabble Despiser of the body Priest The famous wise man Scholar The retired (the old man/the old pope) The spirit of gravity and the spirit of revenge

Types of BGE18 Zarathustra Overman Noble soul Free spirit Wanderer Warrior Friend Enemy Convalescent Higher man

The question of hierarchy is important, because the retrospective types, though receding, are always there and will be there. Even the weak and the herd will return eternally, one of the hardest teachings of Zarathustra. Now if we apply Nietzsche’s notion of the historical, as laid out in the second untimely meditation19 to typology, this question will be somewhat elucidated. The three modes of history, as applied to typology, pertain to (a) preservation of all types (the antiquarian history); (b) creation of great (or highest) types (monumental history); and (c) destruction of problematic types (critical history). If we now read Z as a typological work, all the types there belong to the antiquarian mode, the prospective types to the monumental mode, and the retrospective types to the critical mode. The idea of the eternal return is already prefigured in this notion of the historical: all types return, however in different constellations and in different degrees of empowerment.

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IV Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the work of typology par excellence among Nietzsche’s works. Although Zarathustra is the protagonist of the drama, there are many other types whom he encounters in his journey. It is necessary to study all these types in themselves and in relation to one another to understand Zarathustra’s world, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to do so. In what follows, I will briefly present the makeup of the type of Zarathustra within the context of Nietzsche’s typological concerns. Zarathustra himself is a type: ‘ . . . It was on these two walks that the whole of Zarathustra I occurred to me, and especially Zarathustra himself as a type [again Typus in the original]: rather, he overtook me.’20 Then he goes on to explain, with a lengthy quotation from GS (Book V, 382), how this type can be understood. Here Nietzsche gives away the physiological presupposition of the type of Zarathustra, which he calls ‘the great health’. In this aphorism, written after Zarathustra, Nietzsche sums up the typological makeup of Zarathustra: new ideals; new goals; the expanse of the soul and the wide spectrum of experience (his journey); continual self-creation (his going under); desire to explore the undiscovered and to confront ‘ . . . a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine’21 (this expression recapitulates Zarathustra’s aesthetic cosmology); discontent with ‘present-day man’ (his nausea over man); playfulness out of overflowing power and abundance (his gift-giving virtue); and ‘the ideal of a human, superhuman [übermenschlich] well-being and benevolence’22 (the Overman, the new meaning of the world, taught by Zarathustra). The aphorism ends with the signs of the new epoch: ‘the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins’,23 what, in Zarathustra, are symbolized by the high noon. Zarathustra is a type who is impregnated with an insight, cultivates this insight in solitude and with a pathos of distance, and who, therefore, lives the chaos and the conflict between the old and the new, and is in the process of creation of new values. As Heidegger points out in this context of valuecreation, Zarathustra is also a speaker, an advocate (Fürsprecher), who ‘ . . . advocates and is the spokesman. But “für” also means “for the benefit, or in behalf, of” and “in justification of”. An advocate is ultimately the man who interprets and explains that of and for which he speaks.’24 This type must traverse the path of overcoming the morality of good and evil, both within himself and as an example. In addition, there are traits that Nietzsche

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borrows from the historical figure Zarathustra; namely, honesty, truthfulness, and the fact that he is a founder of religion. Most of these we learn from the Prologue and what he writes about the work and Zarathustra in EH. What is important to note is not only what all these types are and what they stand for but also what kind of hierarchical power relations they are in. How does Zarathustra as the highest type, ‘the supreme type of all beings’,25 relate to the other types? How does he speak to them, for instance? Does Zarathustra speak from an empowered position of wisdom and ‘enlightenment’? If he ‘cares’ for others, how does he care? Needless to say, Zarathustra has different voices and speaks differently with different types (compare, e.g., the way Zarathustra addresses his disciples, on the one hand, and the dwarf or the despisers of the body, on the other). His way of addressing reflects the distance of concentric circles around him. The different voices, the distance that he creates, and the many ways of relating to different types, imbued with a variety of human emotions, imply the hierarchical relationship that he is in with his world. Gadamer observes, referring to Zarathustra: ‘He speaks to someone, and that means he speaks differently to different listeners . . . We must flesh out the auditor and always ask ourselves, Why one would speak in just such a manner to this particular audience?’26 Furthermore, certain types are not given voice, but we can infer their position in the constellation of types from their silence. One such type is the Overman. Before elaborating further on the question of hierarchy of types in Nietzsche, it is necessary to pause and ask the question as to what it is that makes Zarathustra the highest type. Simply stated, it is the height of his selfknowledge (his Apollinian wisdom), which is attained in his solitude, with his self-mastery and insightfulness, and the depth of his ecstasy (his Dionysian wisdom). Now the latter may not be as apparent as the former, but it is as important as the former and is hinted at with Zarathustra’s dance, song, and music – referring to Zarathustra, Nietzsche himself says ‘my concept of the “Dionysian” here became a supreme deed . . .’27 To the extent that Zarathustra ‘knows himself’, he carries that much ‘of the cosmos’ within himself. That is to say, to the extent that he cultivates himself as an ‘enlightened’ solitary individual, he can, though indirectly, hold all together in their conflict and chiasma.28 He is like a sun which sheds light on all, distant but yet near, since without it there is no life (unlike the pure type of the ascetic saint, Zarathustra carries, within him, all the problematic types, but he has overcome them or placed them at the bottom of the hierarchy of his types; this is one of the meanings of his ‘going under’).

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Now back to the question of hierarchy. Regarding the rank and file of types, Nietzsche says: ‘. . . he does not conceal the fact that his [Zarathustra’s] type of man, a relatively superhuman [more overmanly] type, is superhuman [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 Nietzsche’s typology from diverse perspectives and also its relation to other aspects of his thought.30 The concepts of higher or highest pertain to Nietzsche’s notion of strife and the idea of one’s perpetual re-creation of one’s 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, Nietzsche’s 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 . . . In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures: here we really do find a higher type [Typus], which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of Overman. Such fortunate accidents of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole families, tribes, or peoples may occasionally represent such a bull’s-eye.31 Nietzsche’s concern and hope for the future of humanity, which finds its expression here as the breeding of higher types (the issue of breeding can also be read in The Will to Power, Book IV: Discipline and Breeding), was misinterpreted (or poorly interpreted), around the turn of the twentieth century, as a form of social Darwinism that propounds the survival of, and, mastery by, the strongest and the fittest human beings in their social settings. This is, in fact, the ideology of the bourgeois world-order, not an aspect of

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Nietzsche’s worldview. Indeed, there is a hierarchy of types based on power relations in Nietzsche’s philosophy which places, on top of the hierarchy, those higher types such as Zarathustra and the Overman and great values such as ecstasy, self-knowledge, and self-mastery (not to mention, a balance between all these values); all of these types and values are to be regarded not as fixed conventions, virtues or concepts, but as metaphors, open to be appropriated creatively, constantly recreated, and imbued into the living reality of life. Moreover, what does it mean that Zarathustra as a type is the teacher of the Overman which is yet another type? How do the two types differ? Each type typifies something unique to itself. The Overman is the type that embodies the new meaning of this world, the new great values that are everbecoming, that are ever newly appropriated by oncoming generations, whereas man as a type of the old world-order for which God is the highest value is a bridge to the Overman. The Overman also symbolizes one’s journey for seeking oneself in which there are other stops on the way such as man, the last man, and the higher man. The use of the word ‘Mensch’ for all of these types is no coincidence; there is a circularity involved or a process implied in the unity of these types. However, what kind of type is Zarathustra in relation to the Overman? He is a teacher, but this word can be taken lightly, since everyone today is a teacher. It is better to say that he is a teacher of teachers. But even this may not be sufficient. He is the one who has seen the light and now sheds his light on the world. If the Overman is the torch, Zarathustra is the passage of the torch. What does teaching mean? It is not simply the passing of knowledge for practical skills the way most people experience education in our age. Teaching stands for re-creation of culture in new generations. Teaching, culture, and rebirth of culture hence stand in close contact with one another. Zarathustra’s teaching is no teaching or is a different kind of teaching. He lays bare what is greatest and what is smallest in human existence with parables and dreams from his life. And he expects his disciples to re-create their own paths on the way to seek themselves while learning, only by example, from Zarathustra’s journey.

V So far Zarathustra has been interpreted from the perspective of ‘character typology’; that is, this type was observed in terms of character traits which it

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 valuecreator 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 historical 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.

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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 contemporary culture based on its specific needs.

Chapter 4

The Three Metamorphoses and Philosophy Peter Yates

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 In his somewhat crude appraisal in The History of Western Philosophy (1946), Bertrand Russell characterizes Nietzsche as a ‘merely literary philosopher’ who has made no ‘technical contribution’ to the discipline. The distinction which Russell sets up between ‘technical’ philosophy and ‘literary’ philosophy has had many incarnations, from Plato’s ‘ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’, through Aristotle’s misgivings about Heraclitus, to Wittgenstein’s early, paradoxical relegation of the ‘propositions’ of ethics and aesthetics to the category of ‘nonsense’.2 In this chapter, I suggest that Nietzsche was alert to this distinction, which he himself sought to clarify in the context of his polemics against a dead, technical philosophy. This is thrown into sharp relief by both the substantive content and the form of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and deliberately so. Zarathustra invites contestation as to its status as a philosophical work, thereby raising the further question, ‘What is philosophy anyway?’ however, one might be disposed to judge the issue. Zarathustra not only presses the latter question but also implies an answer. If Z is philosophy, then philosophy should be concerned with evaluation, rather than puzzle-solving, with cultural legislation rather than attempting vainly to find true propositions about knowledge, existence, and the rules of enquiry, with opening up a vista rather than seeking a closure, with a poetic method rather than a propositional one. Crucially, it is a problem that needs to be addressed in terms of what it is to be a philosopher. All of this, I suggest, finds highly condensed expression in ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’. Particularly, the parable shows the transition that a

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philosopher might undergo as she recognizes the limits of ‘technical philosophy’ (here called propositionalist philosophy), and moves to a more creative, playful mode of enquiry (ludic philosophy), which is capable of evaluating possible modes of life and legislating accordingly. Further, the transition mirrors Nietzsche’s hopes for the development of Western philosophical culture and his own intervention in it.

Nietzsche’s philosophy: an overview Clearly then, ‘The Three Metamorphoses’ needs to be understood in the context of Nietzsche’s overall philosophical project. What the latter is, is of course open to interpretation, but by his own reckoning, Nietzsche is a philosopher who has set himself the great task3 of performing a revaluation of values, both existing values and ‘value’ itself. His aim, and this for him is the truly philosophical task, is to legislate so as to create the conditions for a cultural revolution which will in time replace the allegedly life-negating, Christian-Platonic, other-worldly values of Western culture with alternative ones which will allow at least some people to affirm life fully. The great task, Nietzsche tells us, has to be undertaken in a particular way: ‘I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than that of play: this is, as a sign of greatness, an essential precondition.’4 We should bear this pregnant statement in mind when we come to consider the meaning of ‘the child’, the final outcome of the three metamorphoses. Despite this emphasis on play, Nietzsche believes that none of this can happen without struggle which is why his entire oeuvre from the earliest to the latest works is suffused with martial metaphors. The ‘culture-war’ involves, among other things, evaluating all kinds of cultural forms, including philosophy, both canonical and contemporary. Indeed, philosophy receives especially close attention, and this is because Nietzsche regards it as the growing-point of culture and its most gifted exponents as successful legislators.5 Evaluation, of course, has to take place against some kind of standard and for Nietzsche, given his ‘great task’, the evaluative standard is necessarily a binary pair whose elements are life-affirmation and life-negation. This means that philosophies, which for Nietzsche can only pretend to be dispassionate on the matter, are sounded out for their implicit or explicit attitude to life. Do they denigrate life or celebrate it? To what extent are they life-negating and life-affirming? What exactly this means, however, can only be stated succinctly at great risk of oversimplification: life-negation and life-affirmation are constantly being developed as a dual evaluative standard throughout the Nietzschean oeuvre, and often in conjunction with other complex and shifting

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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 embodiment.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 Christianity. 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 necessary part of life to the extent that one’s 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 overcome. 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 criticising them according to their own lights, by carrying the application of their procedures to extreme lengths, and by casting suspicion on them by questioning their presuppositions and origins. This is Nietzsche’s 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

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standard as a means of wrestling with the perennial philosophical question: ‘How should we live?’ He suggests that enquiry into the origins of cultural phenomena (genealogy) will lead to liberating self-knowledge. Indeed, many of his destructive methods also have a creative application. But crucially, he alerts us to the essential openness of the situation that obtains once the destructive project is complete.10 Hence, he bequeaths us no fixed doctrines in the sense of purportedly true propositions or sets of purportedly true propositions about the world, or the nature of enquiry, or the nature of truth (the notions of the will to power and the eternal return notwithstanding). Instead, he offers methods appropriate to the ‘great task’ in hand and for the time when the great task is completed. Looked at like this, the Nietzschean oeuvre is an enquiry into enquiry itself. This is because the questions of how we are to live and be give rise to the further question of how we are to enquire into them: what mode of enquiry is appropriate to these questions of modes of life and being? This very questioning generates a taxonomy of modes of enquiry with which Nietzsche presents us. The ‘great task’ is one of engaging in the culture-war which is ultimately over what modes of enquiry will be culturally dominant in the future and which is against the allegedly malign mode of enquiry, inherited from the tradition, that Nietzsche took to be dominant in his own time. This latter mode of enquiry, I suggest, equates with Russell’s ‘technical philosophy’. It actually condenses into itself many varied philosophies. All, however, can be regarded as belonging to a propositionalist mode of enquiry, since their project is the establishment of true propositions about one, some, or all of the following: being/existence, self/subject, truth/knowledge, and enquiry itself and the rules that might govern it.11 Against it, Nietzsche places ludic, open modes of enquiry which do not primarily issue in propositions but in shifting perspectives, descriptions, evaluations, and pictures of existence/being, self, truth/knowledge, and enquiry. With all this in mind, let us turn to ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’.

Recovering innocence in ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’ ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’ is one of Zarathustra’s speeches delivered to an audience whom he addresses as ‘my brothers’. According to Zarathustra’s account, ‘the spirit that would be transformed’ must in fact undergo three transformations. First it becomes a camel, second a lion, and finally a child. Nietzsche has already told us through the words of a saint who has seen Zarathustra descending from his mountain hermitage that ‘Zarathustra has become a child.’12 On this basis, I think it reasonable to take it that Zarathustra is recounting his own experience of transformation,

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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 Nietzsche’s alter-ego, we can then see in ‘The Three Metamorphoses’ a highly condensed account of Nietzsche’s 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 spirit’s 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, knowledge/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, transgression/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 disinterestedness 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 propositionalist philosophy is to succeed in its task of establishing true propositions,

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the propositions on which it itself depends ought, in conscience, to be true. But an infinite regress opens up at this point since propositional statements are justified by other propositional statements and there is nothing in this which indicates at what point, or even if at all, this process of justification should stop.15 This is clearly unsatisfactory for the project of being able to establish true propositions since there appears to be no ultimate justification for the procedure by which they are to be discovered and/or the presuppositions which underpin it. Yet propositionalist philosophy must have secure foundations to be true to its own ambitions and self-appointed duties. This leads to a search for statements which can act as the starting point for chains of argument which justify all other possible statements without themselves needing any justification. There are various ideas as to what the foundational statements might be, and why they might be foundational, and why they litter the tradition. But none of them can entirely satisfy the propositionalist conscience and the propositionalist philosopher is drawn deeper into a labyrinth of difficult questions: these, together with the tradition’s many responses to them, are the initial ‘burdens’ of the ‘spirit which would be transformed’. The onerous choice between an infinite regress and an arbitrary foundational statement arises out of propositionalist philosophy itself and clearly is self-undermining. This is the nihilism which is implicit within propositionalist philosophy: it entails ‘That the highest values devaluate themselves.’16 The spirit, then, becomes a camel. The camel is a beast of burden and needs great strength to carry his burdens. Let us now return to the text and see if the burdens that the camel bears do indeed relate to the difficulties generated by the propositionalist conscience. Nietzsche does not tell us immediately what the burdens are but instead asks us a number of rhetorical questions before telling us that these questions do indeed indicate the camel-spirit’s burdens. The first burden is ‘. . . humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness’ and ‘Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom.’17 This refers to the initial madness of questioning the ‘self-evident’ and the ‘taken-for-granted’ demanded by the reverence of the camel-spirit. The reverence requires that one’s faith be tested thoroughly, even though in the process our ordinary, usually reliable reason, our ‘wisdom’ is challenged. Looked at like this, it seems to be identical with the propositionalist conscience which tests both our common sense use of the proposition and what the propositionalist philosophers have made of it. The second burden is ‘. . . parting from our cause when it triumphs’ and ‘. . . climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter’.18 This again suggests

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the hardship of being led by the propositionalist conscience against propositionalist philosophy itself. For the propositionalist conscience demands that propositionalism itself be tested even when it seems to be inviolable (when ‘it triumphs’), and when that seeming inviolability is held dear. With biblical resonances, the devil of remorseless questioning is invoked and the solidity of propositionalism’s grounding questioned. The third burden is ‘ . . . feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul’.19 This implies that there is little ‘knowledge’ that is really impervious to the questioning demanded by the propositionalist conscience but much quasi-knowledge on which we can feed to the point of satiation and slumber, if only we are prepared to adopt convention and renounce radical questioning. The camelspirit embraces this asceticism for the sake of ‘truth’ and in this respect is like the modern free spirit encountered in Genealogy of Morals, III. His reverence is reverence for truth and his conscience demands that truth be sought, whatever the cost in terms of living without the comforts of ‘certainty’. The fourth burden is ‘. . . being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want’.20 Here the austerity of hovering in a limbo of uncertainty, while the seemingly unquestionable is questioned, is fully embraced. As a result, all palliatives are refused, including finding those companions who might comfortingly hear and agree with what one says. The propositionalist conscience dominates the philosopher’s psyche at this point. The fifth burden is ‘ . . . stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads’.21 The asceticism of being driven by the propositionalist conscience causes the camel-spirit to encounter much that is ‘filthy’, that is distasteful and certainly disillusioning. However, he goes where the enquiry leads, for this is what conscience demands of him, and looks at the grotesqueries of extreme dispassion (‘cold frogs’) and fanaticism (‘hot toads’), both of which spring from the will to truth, unflinchingly in the eye. The last burden is ‘ . . . loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us’.22 This very cryptic utterance possibly refers to the hostility that the camel-project is likely to arouse from those for whom propositionalism must not risk possible compromise; and it offers a strategy to deal with this hostility. In a parody of the Christian message, Nietzsche counsels those who have embarked on the camel phase of the three metamorphoses to waste no energy on returning their detractors’ hostility but to repay it with love. If there is indeed a recasting of aspects of the Christian message here, the ‘ghost that would frighten us’ possibly

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refers to the Holy Ghost.23 So what does it mean to offer it a hand? Is a handshake offered which is meant to seal a truce? If so, and it seems likely, then Nietzsche is again counselling that engaging too vehemently in a fight on this terrain will simply distract the camel-spirit from its immediate task. Better to accept Christianity and other species of nihilism as being the given from which one must begin one’s journey of transformation. To sum up the camel phase of the three metamorphoses: here we see Nietzsche taking on the hardships that arise when the propositionalist conscience is given full rein. This is an engagement with the Western philosophical and theological tradition, an immersion in ‘the waters of truth’, which is undertaken with a profound resolve to encounter it with clear eyes, and not to be swayed by the need for metaphysical comfort or the wish that things were other than they are. At this point, we cannot say that he yet wishes to overcome the tradition. He only wishes to maintain his seeming independence of thought whatever the cost, a stance which remains parasitic on the tradition, arising as it does from a rigorous application of its conscience. The camel-spirit then ‘speeds into the desert’, the natural home of its ascetic saintliness.24 In the desert, however, the camel metamorphoses into the lion ‘who would conquer his freedom and master his desert’.25 Though the camel has borne the tradition as a burden, and uncovered and then endured its internal tensions, it is incapable of behaving destructively towards it and the propositionalist conscience, which after all is definitive of its being. For this, the lion phase of the three metamorphoses is needed. The lion’s self-mastery is only gained by casting off the tutelage of his ‘last master’ and ‘his last god’.26 In other words, there is no self-mastery without casting off external authority and its inner voice, without overcoming the tradition that has brought one this far. The venerable voices of tradition must now be treated with active suspicion. The nihilism implicit within propositionalism is intensified. The spirit’s final combat is then with ‘the great dragon’ called ‘Thou shalt’.27 Instead of ‘thou shalt’, the lion wants ‘I will’.28 Instead of venerable rules, instead of the compulsion implicit in ‘values, thousands of years old’ (which are inscribed on the dragon’s scales), the lion strives against these for freedom, the ability to will independently.29 The lion wants an active will to power rather than the reactive will to power of the camel. The lion must purge himself therefore of the propositionalist conscience which fetters his will. He cannot create new values yet, but he can claim the freedom necessary for this task: ‘The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” even to duty – for that, my brothers, the lion is needed.’30 Thus, the lion can

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a selfpropelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who has been lost to the world now conquers his own world.32 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 beginning’, 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 one’s 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 one’s 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 life’s 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-

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tation, cannot be really original. The child, by contrast, is free of life-negation because she is new, fresh, and innocent and thus the past has yet no power to induce the fearful wish to escape life. So far, then, we can equate creativity with innocence and innocence with the absence of life-negation. However, the child-spirit of the Metamorphoses is not a past-less being. She has been a camel and a lion. She is revisiting innocence and this is clearly a different state of affairs from a newborn innocence. So how can innocence be regained? How can it coexist with a past? Here I want to suggest that it is only possible to revisit this innocence if one is life-affirmative (over and above the mere absence of life-negation), because only if there is affirmation does one’s past become powerless, and the recollection of life’s power to inflict suffering cease to shape one’s thought and render one incapable of creative originality. Nietzsche actually underscores this point when he calls the child ‘a selfpropelled wheel’.33 The self-propelled wheel can only refer to the eternal return. Thus by associating the child with the supreme test of life-affirmation, Nietzsche is implying that the ludic is the life-affirmative mode of enquiry.

Conclusion Let us summarize ‘On The Three Metamorphoses’. In the first phase, the camel, the spirit finds that in conscience there is something to overcome but is unable to overcome it. She remains captured by the propositionalist tradition, perhaps weighed down by it, but begins to become aware of its self-destructive potential, its implicit nihilism. In the second phase, the lion, the desire to overcome his tutelage grows and to this end will is developed but this will cannot yet create because it has to complete a prior task of destruction, turning the propositionalist conscience on itself in the process. In the final phase, the child, the spirit is able to take advantage of the lion’s destructive clearing activity and to create and legislate. She is able to do so because she fully affirms life. Nietzsche’s formulation for future philosophical activity, despite its highly nuanced character, remains only a pregnant suggestion at how we might proceed rather than a strictly delineated programme. And indeed, given the essential openness of the situation, it must so remain. But this much can be said: it is to be the imaginative, creative, life-affirmative play of a child. As for the philosopher of the future: she will have discovered that the coming to fruition of the nihilism that has haunted the Western tradition for more than two millennia, and which she has recapitulated vividly within her own soul, is after all no cause for despair. On the contrary, it is a liberation into the creative abundance and cognitive acuity of play.

Chapter 5

Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

Nietzsche’s overt references to and estimations of science in the body of his published and unpublished works constitute a system of reflecting and interlocking echoes, a playing back and forth of confronting and opposing implications that seem to argue his essential position on the matter to a point of nullified stasis. In the views of many commentators, Nietzsche’s position on pure science is fundamentally inconsistent, sufficiently at odds with itself that they find it fair to say he has no position at all. On the one hand, Nietzsche periodically attacks science as the mechanistic interpretation of the world, as postulating substance – the hard materiality that consists in entities that are discrete and that persist without intrinsic change through time, that persist unless acted upon from without – as the foundation of the world, as the essence of the real. On the other hand, Nietzsche, in the famous passage from The Will to Power, heralds the principle of eternal recurrence of the same as ‘the most scientific of all possible hypotheses’,1 as if the commendation were without implicit qualification. It is the position of this chapter that Nietzsche committed himself to the development of a coherent theory of ontology, one which finds much of its inspiration in the mid-nineteenth century ideas of natural science and in Naturphilosophie. In the ongoing development of heat theory and particularly the emerging proposition of heat as a form of energy, Nietzsche observed a shift in the orientation of natural science from an essentially mechanistic vision of the universe to a conception that espoused a radical Becoming over the primacy of Being that was inherent in the atomism of mechanistic science. That transition to a new model was found in the debates over tenable propositions for the science of thermodynamics and energetics, as well as various conceptions in Naturphilosophie that contribute to the idea, as labelled by one theorist, of a Perpetuum Mobile2. Further, the

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very transition Nietzsche found in science away from a mechanistic atomism to an energeticist model of Becoming provides the operational paradigm for the full argument of eternal recurrence, an argument that Nietzsche never completely committed to paper but that may be reconstructed from the total range of statements he did make and which arrives at a proposition of neither recurrence nor eternity, one that finally eliminates the ontology of normative time. On the basis of numerous entries in the Nachlaß, it can be said that Nietzsche as an ontologist makes a clear commitment to the primacy of Becoming over Being. His view of the generally and historically assumed primacy of Being is that it is a falsification of the reality of Becoming, a ‘primordial belief’, in his own words, that the world is One and ‘at rest’, and that it is a falsification for the purpose of survival – a form of pragmatic thinking that we as a species must commit but that does not correspond in literal terms to the reality of the world.3 It follows that any science or philosophy oriented on the ‘truth’ of Being must be a continuation of the falsification. Yet, he found that, in much of contemporary scientific theorizing regarding heat as a form of energy, reality reveals itself as a dynamical process, leaving the philosophical and scientific approaches to the world in terms of Being – of permanence, of numerically and temporally identical things, such as the atoms of Newtonian physics – a useful fiction. For Nietzsche, the conception of the world in terms of Becoming is the hypothesis from which philosophy must start if it is to be compatible with the paradigmatic shift in science from an atomistic-mechanistic perspective to a dynamistic-processual one.4 Heat theory eventually settled out into the science of thermodynamics, and the first two laws of thermodynamics constituted, for a thinker like Nietzsche and certainly not for him alone, a potential logical, ontological contradiction. The first law asserted the conservation of energy – that the total amount of energy can never be altered, that energy can never be created or destroyed. The second law, the law of entropy, if viewed as applicable to the universe as a whole, implied the final anti-energeticist triumph of Being in demanding a completion of history in the teleology of the heat death of the universe – a fate of ultimate and permanent stasis and the end to all change, all Becoming. Nietzsche’s necessary recourse and solution was to accept the first law of the conservation of energy and deny the applicability of the second law of entropy to the universe as a whole by adopting an a-teleological position. The universe must have no end, in his view, for to reach an end is to achieve the finality of Being. He saw a universe that ‘plays its game in infinitum’,5

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a posture that overtly denies the ending in unstructuredness, in nothingness, in the thermodynamic heat death of everything. It is with his rejection of the second law and his upholding of the first law of thermodynamics that Nietzsche aligns himself with the science of dynamism-energetics of the mid-nineteenth century and with a range of views of Naturphilosophie that can be grouped under the rubric of Perpetuum Mobile and that take the universe as without any rest either at a beginning or an end. For Nietzsche, ‘the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force’6 with no possibility of a final dissipation. The finite and a-teleological aspect of the world as energy manifests itself as a cyclicality in which the disorganized or degraded energy formations become the material for reprocessing or recycling, making the universe what he saw as a ‘monster of energy’7 that sustains itself as a Perpetuum Mobile that ‘lives on itself: its excrements are its food’.8 The element of cyclicality contributes the foundation for Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, for eternal recurrence was what Nietzsche would make of the Perpetuum Mobile as he altered the concept to suit and support his own distinctive ontological philosophy. The contributions of the Perpetuum Mobile to Nietzsche’s ontology are derived from a number of scientists and philosophers. The key figure in science whom, as Alwin Mittasch has pointed out,9 Nietzsche read extensively and who directly asserted the indestructibility of energy was Robert Mayer, one of the principal contributors to the development of the theory of heat as a form of energy.10 Mayer, in an essay from 1862, speaks of ‘the discovery of the law of the indestructibility of force’.11 In an essay from 1870, Mayer uses Hermann von Helmholtz’s phrase, ‘the law of the conservation of force’.12 And in 1845, Mayer gives a clear account of the essence of the conservation of energy: ‘In all physical and chemical processes the given force remains a constant quantity.’13 A variety of writers developed the idea of energy as flowing in cyclical or circular patterns, a concept that serves as a foundation for the core assertion of Nietzsche’s initial conception of eternal recurrence, as presented in the passage included in WP. The scientist Georg Wilhelm Muncke viewed the first law of thermodynamics in terms of circular processing and reprocessing. Muncke uses the phrase perpetuum mobile physicum in the context of the world as a ‘circular course of things . . . which ever endures and uninterruptedly renews itself. . . .’14 In a similar vein, Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner refers to ‘curvilinear motions that proceeding from a point, return to it, and thus endlessly renew themselves . . .’15 Jakob Friedrich Fries writes of

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the natural disposition toward ‘a certain circular course [Kreislauf] of the same recurring phenomena.’16 Central to Nietzsche’s ontological worldview is the principle of a motive force that unceasingly generates and regenerates energy formations, maintaining a perpetual dynamism. Beginning with his Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and extending all the way to his late notes, Nietzsche sees an ‘inner will’17 – which he claims is what is missing from mechanistic science – in terms of a Heraclitean strife of opposites that brings about the creation-destruction of the universe ad infinitum. It is this motive force as oppositional strife to which Nietzsche gives the name ‘will to power’, defining it as ‘pathos’,18 that is, a suffering from the contradiction or Ineinander19 (entanglement) of opposite forces, which ‘relieves’ itself via an autogenerative overflow and re-flow, an eternal world creationdestruction. Here again, Nietzsche found support in the science of energetics as well in the Naturphilosophie that embraced the new scientific paradigms. The scientist Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth speaks of polarities that are never in complete equilibrium as ‘a continuing source of all motion . . .’ This source ‘most likely . . . explains the continuation of the motion of all the stars, the sun and our earth. . . . ’ Autenrieth identifies this source as the ‘vital force’, calling its ‘perpetual internal change a not further explicable basis [Grund] that sustains such continual disturbance between the essentially interrelated antitheses and does not allow them to come to equilibrium’. He refers to this ‘far from equilibrium’ situation by the term Indifferenzpunkt out of which comes creation via destruction/de-differentiation.20 Ultimately, it is the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling that had the most extensive influence over Nietzsche’s thought, and particularly his will to power as pathos. Like Nietzsche, Schelling posits the autogenerative source of the world in terms of the ‘dynamic indifference’ or ‘dynamic unity’ of opposing yet interlaced originary forces [Urkräfte], such as attractive and repulsive forces. For Schelling, as for Nietzsche, there is no force in nature that is not counteracted by an opposing force; the two constitute a paired polarity and are in a continuous conflict. Again, as with Nietzsche, this continuous conflict is ontologically more basic than the manifest universe, with the latter reduced to a generation based on the strife of the Urkräfte.21 Schelling asserts the primacy of the polarities by conjoining the ‘dynamic unity’ of opposing Urkräfte that he calls ‘the common soul of nature’22 and the principle of life with a repeated ‘rekindling’ that continually sustains the conflict of opposites.23 Schelling refers to this principle as a system of ‘mutual determination of receptivity and

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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 Nietzsche’s thinking – and, as will be seen, particularly to eternal recurrence – comes from Friedrich Zöllner, a physicist whom Nietzsche read carefully and remarked upon. Zöllner was one of the first physicists to employ Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry to space, rendering space finite but unbounded. Zöllner 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 Zöllner’s 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 Muncke’s 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 constituent 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 recurrence, evident when one follows through the logic of the argument and finds the concept transformed from an engine of endless energy to something that breaks the very fatalism of time – that breaks an intrinsically cyclical Becoming away from normative, linear time.

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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 logically and inevitably from our observations of the universe as science reveals it to us, or did in Nietzsche’s 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 proposition 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

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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, Nietzsche’s 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 recurrences 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 procedures of Aristotelian logic are consistently among the guiding principles of Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 argumentation 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

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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. Nietzsche’s 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 Nachlaß, 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 recurrence 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 Zarathustra’s initial realization of endlessly repeating, numerically infinite world histories – the transformation 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 breath’31 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

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future and realizes the conception of eternal recurrence as an endless repetition of world cycles, and then confronts the nauseating vision of the shepherd with the snake in his mouth, the serpent whose head the shepherd bites off, after which he rises up laughing. Later, in ‘The Convalescent’, Zarathustra returns to the concept of the eternal recurrence, as well as the vision of the serpent – which he now claims had crawled into his throat. He returns, as well, to the nausea, which he attributes to the thought that ‘The small man recurs eternally’.34 But his ‘disgust’ is referred to in the past tense, and when his animals detail eternal recurrence as an infinity of world cycles, he accuses them of being cruel and making a ‘hurdy-gurdy song’35 of it. Something in the concept has changed for Zarathustra. Later still, in ‘The Other Dancing Song’, life charges Zarathustra with wanting to leave her soon. He whispers something in her ear, to which she responds, ‘Nobody knows that’.36 Nothing more is revealed of what he whispered, and if the thought he shares with life were one that had already been enunciated in the text, there would be no reason for the narrator to omit it. Clearly, something further has occurred to Zarathustra. It is equally clear that Zarathustra’s disgust has left him by the close of the book, when he leaves his cave ‘glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains’.37 The reason for that change of import is the heart of the significance of Z, but it is a reason that the character never openly reveals. We are left to infer the secret that Zarathustra whispers. We must reconstruct the argument that Nietzsche never deposited into a finished text, discover the submerged chine of unexpressed intent, working through the logic of what he did write to interpret, and break through the rational contradiction that many commentators have observed. To do so, one must proceed by recognized procedure. When confronting this contradiction, we have to seek what inevitably must exist: a hidden, unexamined, and faulty assumption, the assumption that is unwittingly accepted and that lies in opposition to the bulk of the premises of the argument. The unexamined assumption in the argument for eternal recurrence as it is presented in WP – or more precisely, as that argument is generally read – is that time runs infinitely in a straight line. This is a proposition that Nietzsche never specifically asserts. It is merely the normative conception of time, and it is always perilous to assume – when one has not been told explicitly one way or the other – that Nietzsche is adopting the normative conception of anything. To be fair, in the argument Nietzsche does specifically claim that time is infinite, but this is a claim that is made in notes unpublished and unrevised at the time of his death and that is overtly

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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 displacement, 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

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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 constitutes 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 Nietzsche’s own argument, no recurrence ever occurs, not even theoretically, 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 observer’s 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 time’41 – 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 positive curvature. Nietzsche’s use of Riemannian geometry – the same geometry that applies to space in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity – is not simple conjecture 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

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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 Zöllner. The positive curvature of time is an evident mark of Zöllner’s 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 logically 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 something 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 Nietzsche’s 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 experiential 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 world’s time is thus, in Nietzsche’s 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, transpire. 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.

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This is a necessary implication of Nietzsche’s argument, and, with regard to human life, an implication that he does, at one point, specifically announce. In the Nachlaß, he wrote: Between the last moment of consciousness and the first appearance of new life lies ‘no time’ – it passes by like a stroke of lightning, even if living creatures measure it in terms of billions of years or could not measure it at all. Timelessness and succession are compatible as soon as the intellect is gone.43 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 perspectival 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

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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: Nothing can prevent me from reckoning backward from this moment and saying ‘I shall never reach the end’; just as I can reckon forward from the same moment into the infinite. Only if I made the mistake – I shall guard against it – of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of a finite progressus up to this present, only if I suppose that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a matter of indifference, would I take the head – this moment – for the tail.45 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 Nietzsche’s observation in the Nachlaß concerning the importance 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 Einstein’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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

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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 interaction 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 Zarathustra’s 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 recurrence 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 Zarathustra’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s simultaneity of destruction and creation, of his internal contradiction in all things – of his criticism of substance, which

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makes the Moment, and eternal recurrence, the culmination of Nietzsche’s ontology. Yet, from the human perspective, time will continue to pass, history will appear a perceptible fact, and the logic of our situation will continue to suggest a monumental recurrence of the cosmological chronology. But that is the human perspective. It is an Apollinian vision, for the initial, Nihilistic version of eternal recurrence was always a matter of the Apollinian viewpoint – it clearly adopts the principium individuationis and acknowledges the slipping gradient of temporal extension. But, when one thinks through the vision to acquire the riddle it harbours, one begins to come upon a ‘tragic insight’, a Dionysian vision, a seemingly illogical but inescapable inference – an inference that ultimately proves to be thoroughly consistent with an advanced mathematical logic – hidden within. The Dionysian insight shines through the Apollinian image and the Apollinian argument – what Nietzsche promised at the start of his career. Becoming that is divorced from normative temporality – Becoming that culminates and passes away simultaneously with its commencement – Becoming that is the entirety of its own time span regardless of the brevity of its extent. The Moment as the final implication and the inevitable outcome of eternal recurrence resolves for Nietzsche into another rendering of his attack on substance, of his recognition of the illusoriness of selfsameness. Eternal recurrence delivers him again to his core point, but with a difference. Nietzsche’s direct attack on substance – his claim that any unit is also what it is not – is arrived at by a priori argument: He argues by fiat, propounds the truth of what he approves, and states the impossibility of what he dislikes. However, his argument for eternal recurrence resulting in the Moment that both is and is not, that arises as it passes away, is deduced – it is rooted in scientific observation and scientific principles and is achieved through a rigorous deduction that reaches an inevitable implication. It lays its foundation outside of Nietzsche’s intentions and beyond the craning and stretch of his preferences. It argues a reason for its acceptance. Extending its roots into scientific principles of his time and devising itself into a conception consistent with his ontology, eternal recurrence as well provides Nietzsche with the fulfilment of the promise of the Perpetuum Mobile – it dispels the nightmare of universal entropy and, thereby, achieves an eradication of the primacy of Being. It grants an ontology of energy that does not degrade and, in so doing, incubates an incandescent Dionysian vision that burns in opposition to the apparent, Apollinian, mechanistic, atomistic reality of substance.

Chapter 6

The Gateway-Augenblick Paul S. Loeb

In the crucial vision-riddle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra begins his courageous attack upon his mortal enemy by drawing his attention to a twofaced gateway standing precisely where they have just stopped. This gateway, he points out, is inscribed above with the name Augenblick, and is the meeting place for two long ways or lanes on either side – lanes which extend an eternity and which no one has yet travelled all the way. Although the gateway-perspective shows the lanes contradicting and abutting each other, Zarathustra wonders about the perspective of someone travelling further and always further along either one of the lanes. This speculation leads him to challenge his opponent to answer whether he believes that the lanes eternally contradict each other. Zarathustra’s implication is that they would not, but that his opponent does not know this because he is not strong enough to bear its consequences. As most students of this vision-riddle have noted, Nietzsche’s poetic image of the gateway-Augenblick offers a spatial visualization of the concept of time. Thus, the gateway itself may be read as a symbol for the present moment that seems to pass in the blink of an eye, while the eternal lanes that meet at this gateway may be read as symbols for the past and the future that no one has yet travelled all the way.1 Zarathustra’s initial description thus shows how the perspective of the present moment displays past and future as two eternal straight lanes extending indefinitely in both directions.2 But Zarathustra’s question implies that he knows what his opponent cannot bear to know – namely, that this short-sighted perspective prevents us from seeing that the seemingly distinct lanes of past and future eventually curve around and join together to form a single circular lane that is tremendously extended yet still finite (though unbounded).

The gateway to Hades What students of Zarathustra’s vision-riddle have not yet noticed, however, is that Nietzsche’s explicit allusions back to Gay Science (340–342) instruct

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us further to interpret the symbol of the gateway-Augenblick as the presently experienced moment of death. The most important of these allusions is the term Augenblick itself. In recounting his vision of the most solitary, Zarathustra emphasizes the eternal recurrence even of the gatewayAugenblick in which he is whispering of eternal things while a slow spider crawls by in the moonlight. Similarly, during the most solitary solitude described in GS (341), the demon emphasizes the eternal recurrence even of the spider-and-moonlight Augenblick in which he is whispering of eternal recurrence.3 But the latter reference is linked to GS (340), ‘The Dying Socrates’, which depicts Socrates’ last Augenblick of life – the same Augenblick in which something loosens Socrates’ tongue so that he says his blasphemous ‘last word’: ‘Oh Crito, life is an illness!’4 Nietzsche’s implication, I have argued5, is that this something was Socrates’ daimonion, prophesying to him at the moment of his death that he will have to eternally relive the very life he has just finished.6 So we are led to conclude as well that the gateway-Augenblick in Zarathustra’s vision-riddle should be more precisely interpreted as a symbol for the last moment of life in which there is revealed a vision of life’s eternal recurrence.7 This interpretation is supported by the traditional poetic claim that the transition from life to death takes place in an instant – as when, at the conclusion of the book, Zarathustra’s animals imagine him saying to himself as he dies: ‘Now I die and fade, and in an instant (Nu) I am a nothing.’8 In addition, Nietzsche’s poetic image of a ‘gateway’ (Thorweg) alludes to the ancient Greek image of the gate to the underworld of Hades. This allusion is anticipated, in GS 342, and at the very start of Zarathustra, by Nietzsche’s image of Zarathustra beginning his descent (Untergang) into the underworld (Unterwelt).9 It is anticipated as well by Nietzsche’s suggestion that Zarathustra’s greatest event will take place at the gate to the underworld (das Thor der Unterwelt).10 And, in the context of the vision-riddle itself, which foresees this greatest event, this allusion is set up by Nietzsche’s description of Zarathustra’s midnight-departure from the Blessed Isles (Elysium), and in Zarathustra’s gateway-invocation of a Heracles- or Odysseus-like courage that slays even death itself. Finally, in the concluding chapters of Part III, where Zarathustra’s prevision is fulfilled, Zarathustra’s overripe soul is described as longing for the golden death-bark (TodesNachen) that will come across the dark waters and deliver him to the vintager who waits with the vine-knife – an allusion to the ancient image of Charon ferrying passengers across the rivers of the underworld.11 Also supporting this interpretation of the gateway-Augenblick symbol is Nietzsche’s use in the vision-riddle of the poetic death-imagery he had

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already introduced in the GS aphorisms: intense solitude, silence, stillness, secrecy, whispering, a slow creeping spider, and moonlight. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche intensifies this atmosphere by introducing the vision-riddle with further death-imagery of gloominess, corpse-coloured twilight, and wicked dreams. In the penultimate Part IV chapter entitled, ‘The Sleepwalker’s Song’, which alludes back to the vision-riddle, Nietzsche recalls this same death-imagery, along with that of falling dew, chill, howling wind, cobwebs, worms, and graves. Here Zarathustra speaks explicitly of being dead and of ‘the drunken happiness of dying at midnight’ (trunkenem MitternachtsSterbeglücke). Nietzsche intensifies this atmosphere as well by drawing connections between Zarathustra’s gateway-vision and his previous deathcentred visions. These visions include Zarathustra’s dream-riddle of his midnight-entombment on the most solitary mountain of death12, and the dream-vision in which he is terrorized by the voice of his future stillest hour.13 Finally, in his vision-riddle Zarathustra sees himself climbing a mountain path that ends at the gateway-Augenblick, and as doing so while carrying upon his back the heavy weight of his archenemy. Together with the convalescent Zarathustra’s recollection of his own experience of being crucified14, these images allude to the Gospel’s depiction of Christ carrying his own heavy cross up to the top of Mount Golgotha where he is to be put to death. Besides making sense of all the surrounding poetic imagery and mythical allusions, interpreting the gateway-Augenblick as the threshold of death helps to explain why Zarathustra and his opponent see a gateway at just the place where they halt. Indeed, Zarathustra brings himself and the dwarf to a halt immediately after he has invoked courage as that which slays even death with the triumphant shout: ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!’ More importantly, this interpretation helps to explain why the perspective of the two-faced gateway-Augenblick shows the lane behind and the lane ahead contradicting and abutting each other. Although some commentators have argued that this means time appears to run in opposite directions away from the present moment, this reading does not actually explain Zarathustra’s description of a converging contradiction.15 And since Zarathustra’s earlier speech on time explicitly states that time does not run backwards,16 he cannot mean that time converges on the present moment from opposite directions.17 If, however, we follow Nietzsche’s pointed allusions back to the concluding GS aphorisms, Zarathustra’s suggestion of contradicting lanes directs us to Socrates’ claim in the Phaedo that life and death are contradictory opposites.18 This is a claim that Nietzsche explicitly disputes in GS 109, an

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aphorism also alluding to eternal recurrence. Since Nietzsche stages a dialectical confrontation between Zarathustra and his archenemy regarding this apparent contradiction, we may conclude further that Nietzsche intends to undermine Plato’s employment of this claim in Socrates’ dialectical proofs that he will eventually be released from the cycle of rebirth.19 This conclusion is supported by Plato’s own pervasive allusions to the ancient myth of Hades, and by Plato’s own poetic image of the moment of death as a gateway that initiates a labyrinthine cyclical journey through the underworld of Hades and back to life.20

The dwarf’s interpretation Let us turn now to some of the details of this dialectical confrontation. When Zarathustra implies that his opponent cannot know his most abysmal thought because he could not bear its heavy weight, Nietzsche points us back to his implicit claim in GS 340–341 that Socrates did not know and would not have been able to bear the heavy weight of the thought of his life’s eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s claim, I have argued,21 is supported by Socrates’ denigration of life throughout the Phaedo, by his fear of imprisonment in a wheel of reincarnation, by his hope-inspired good cheer in the face of death22, and by his preference for a definitive death (91b). Also, Nietzsche’s description of Zarathustra’s archenemy as ‘the spirit of heaviness’ (der Geist der Schwere)23 alludes to Socrates’ conception of the earth and life as the realm of the heavy and burdensome into which the soul is dragged down by its encumbering corporeal condition.24 At the same time, Zarathustra’s description of his archenemy as a ‘dwarf’ (Zwerg) points us forward to the convalescent Zarathustra’s identification of his most abysmal thought as the eternal recurrence even of the smallest.25 Although Zarathustra is perfectly able to bear the weight of thinking his own life’s eternal recurrence, he is intolerably burdened by the heavy weight of thinking the dwarf’s eternal recurrence. Nevertheless, he knows that the dwarf himself, the Socratic type, would be crushed by the heavy weight of his own life’s eternal recurrence, and so he courageously awakens this thought to hand his archenemy a complete and final defeat. 26 First, however, Zarathustra gives the Socratic figure an opportunity to guess his most abysmal thought, thereby revealing that he does not in fact know it. And in response to Zarathustra’s question whether the lanes eternally contradict each other, his archrival murmurs contemptuously: ‘All that is straight lies. All truth is bent, time itself is a circle.’ This response,

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and Zarathustra’s angry reaction to it, has puzzled many commentators because it would seem to agree with Zarathustra’s own implied interpretation of a single circular lane. In his retrospective Ecce Homo, Nietzsche summarizes Zarathustra’s teaching as the doctrine of ‘the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course (Kreislauf) of all things’.27 And indeed, Zarathustra calls himself ‘the advocate (Fürsprecher) of the circle’,28 and in the published book’s conclusion proclaims his lust for the wedding ‘ring of rings’, the ‘ring’ of eternal recurrence.29 In addition, Zarathustra’s animals, speaking for the first time, say that, for those who think as they do, the ‘wheel’ (Rad) of being rolls eternally, the ‘ring’ of being remains eternally true to itself, and the path of eternity is ‘bent’ (krumm).30 However, if we keep in mind Nietzsche’s background allusion to Plato’s Phaedo, and thus his specific concern with the question whether life and death eternally contradict each other, we can see that the dwarf’s response is the kind of response Phaedo’s Socrates would have given. For the latter says that we are trapped in an endless cycle of rebirth: he argues that ‘there is a perpetual reciprocity in coming to be, between one set of things and another, revolving in a circle, as it were’, and he rejects the notion that coming-to-be is ‘a linear process from one thing into its opposite only, without any bending back in the other direction or reversal’.31 Still, Socrates thinks that his purifying practice of philosophy has ensured his release from this cycle. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s depiction of the dwarf’s response to Zarathustra’s challenging question, and next of Zarathustra’s cross-examination of this response, may be read as his poetic attempt to elicit, and then refute, the Platonic reasons for thinking escape is possible from life’s eternal recurrence. This reading of the dwarf’s response is strongly supported by Nietzsche’s direct allusion back to Zarathustra’s first speech on time.32 For in this speech, Zarathustra says, in words that precisely anticipate the dwarf’s response: ‘God is a thought that makes all that is straight bent and all that stands turn. How? Should time be gone, and all that is transitory be only lie?’33 Zarathustra’s point here, in the context of the rest of his speech, is that God is conceived as existing outside of time and space and therefore as permanent and unmoving.34 By comparison, then, our ordinary sensory experiences of impermanence and motion, indeed of time and space itself, are all illusions and lies.35 Thus, when the dwarf accepts Zarathustra’s implication that time itself is a circle, we are supposed to notice that he does so contemptuously (verächtlich). This is because the dwarf, like Phaedo’s Socrates, believes that there is a ‘truly straight’ realm of timeless absolute reality by comparison with which the lanes’ apparent straightness is actually bent and time itself is a circle.36 And this means that the dwarf, like Phaedo’s

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life-denying Socrates, and like the suffering figures diagnosed in ‘The Hinterworldly’, believes that he will eventually be able to escape from the illusory circle of time and into the realm of timeless absolute reality.37 On this reading of the dwarf’s response, we can see why Zarathustra angrily warns him, the spirit of heaviness (der Geist der Schwere), not to make things too light (leicht) for himself. What Zarathustra means by this is that his opponent has seemingly accepted the implications of the gateway-vision, while all along contemptuously dismissing the entire vision as a mere illusion. Although the dwarf mouths the words, ‘time itself is a circle’, he does not actually believe that these words describe true reality. In this way, the dwarf shows that he does not in fact know Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought, and that he has instead interpreted Zarathustra’s vision-riddle so that he does not have to bear the heavy weight of thinking his eternal return to the earth and his body.38 Thus, Zarathustra’s next task is to refute the dwarf’s interpretation by using his own Socratic reasoning against him. Although subtle, this is an absolutely essential point that is missed by most scholars who write about the exchange between Zarathustra and his dwarfarchenemy.39 It is true that Zarathustra angrily rejects the dwarf’s response. But the allusions built into the dwarf’s response, and the dwarf’s contemptuous attitude, show that Zarathustra does not reject the dwarf’s response because the dwarf believes that time is a circle, but rather because he does not truly believe time is a circle. And this means, then, that Zarathustra himself does believe that time is a circle, and that the rest of his proof aims to prove precisely this. Let us turn to the rest of this proof now, a proof that must begin by attacking the dwarf’s assumption of a God’s-eye vantage point, above the gateway and the lanes, from which he can contemptuously dismiss time itself.

Zarathustra’s cross-examination As most commentators since Heidegger have noted, Zarathustra begins his refutation of the dwarf’s response by commanding his archenemy to return to the temporal perspective of the gateway-Augenblick.40 However, according to these commentators, Zarathustra has already identified the dwarf’s extratemporal perspective, or rather absence of any particular perspective, with the dwarf’s claim that time is a circle. For this reason, they go on to argue next that the dwarf’s return back to the gateway-perspective is meant to show him that time is not a circle and that the present moment really is the site of an eternal contradiction between the lanes of past and future.

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On this commonly accepted reading, Zarathustra forces the dwarf to see that he is not entitled to assume any God’s-eye position from which the whole of time can be viewed and regarded as a circle. Instead, the dwarf is forced to live authentically and humanly within the radically temporal confines of the present moment wherein past and future always collide. Zarathustra’s teaching of eternal recurrence is thus interpreted as an existential doctrine about the importance and difficulty of living fully within the agonistic present moment. The evidence I have cited above, however, shows that Zarathustra identifies the Socratic dwarf’s attempted God’s-eye point of view, or rather supposed absence of any particular point of view, with the dwarf’s determination to avoid acknowledging the reality of circular time. Accordingly, the reason Zarathustra commands the dwarf to return to the perspective of the gatewayAugenblick is so that he will assume a perspectival standpoint which will force him to acknowledge that time is a circle.41 According to Nietzsche, that is, a perspectival approach to time is needed to see that time is really circular. Certainly, the short perspective of the present moment does not show this. Instead, as Zarathustra’s further questions imply, this limited perspective shows two separate lanes of past and future as straight, linear, and extending eternally onward in opposite directions. But this is precisely why Zarathustra first commands the dwarf to abandon the short perspective of the present moment, and to imagine instead the much longer and thus superior perspective of someone following either lane ever further and further.42 And this is also why, after dismissing the dwarf’s reply, he again commands the dwarf to abandon the limited perspective of the present moment, and to imagine instead the much longer perspective of someone travelling all the way down the lane in back of the gateway. The result, he implies, is that the dwarf will be forced to see that he would have to return to his starting point from the lane ahead because the two lanes are actually one single lane that curves in the distance to form a vast but finite (though unbounded) closed circle. Here we may invoke an analogy commonly used today, but known also to Nietzsche, that derives from Bernhard Riemann’s pioneering 1854 idea of a non-Euclidean geometry that maps on to the earth’s surface.43 Our local perspective at any point on a great circle of the earth’s spherical surface – say the equator – shows us only a relatively small, straight, and linear segment of that great circle.44 So if we look out from this perspective to the East and West, we will see two separate straight lanes that seem to extend forever in these seemingly opposite directions. But if we travel further and ever further in either direction around the equator we are forced to see – in a completely immanent fashion that does not depend on any God’s-eye detachment –

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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 God’s-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 God’s-eye, transcendent, and extratemporal position could possibly show the whole of time.46 But this is precisely the dwarf’s 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 God’s-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 time’s circularity.47 And the key to doing this is to notice, once we abandon the God’s-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 perspectives 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 perspective, 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 Zarathustra’s dialectical contest with his Socratic archenemy concludes by proving to him what Nietzsche attributed to the daimonion of the dying

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Socrates in GS 340–341: 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, Zarathustra’s 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 Nietzsche’s depiction of Zarathustra’s dialectical victory. Alternatively, some have argued that Nietzsche’s contempt for dialectical reasoning leads him deliberately to present grounds for this victory that are weak but nevertheless sufficient to defeat Zarathustra’s dwarfish Socratic opponent.52 If we suppose, however, that Zarathustra’s archenemy is Plato’s Socrates, then we must assume that Nietzsche intended Zarathustra’s argument to have world-historic validity and significance. This point cannot be deflected by noting Nietzsche’s usual depreciation of Socratic reasoning. For the context of the struggle between Zarathustra and his archenemy is Zarathustra’s courageous decision to awaken the thought of eternal recurrence – 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, Zarathustra’s argument should consist in an appropriate refutation of Socrates’ dialectical grounds for this hope. On my interpretation, Zarathustra’s argument does attempt such a refutation. 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’ shortsighted 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

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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 disembodied souls of the dead exist before coming to life again. This is why Zarathustra’s 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 archenemy’s ignorance of the thought of eternal recurrence, and having undermined as well his archenemy’s 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 Nietzsche’s reply to the first question has its source, I believe, in Plato’s 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 Apollo’s swans:58 they are prophetic birds with foreknowledge of the blessings of Hades, and therefore sing and rejoice more greatly on that day than ever before. Now I hold that I myself am a fellow-servant of the swans, consecrated to the same god, that I possess prophetic power from my master no less than theirs, and that I am departing this life with as good cheer as they do.59 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,

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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 (60d–61b).61 In GS 340–341, however, Nietzsche had already challenged this aspect of Plato’s 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 Zarathustra’s vision-riddle, and to the point where he has just defeated his archenemy with his concluding dialectical questions. 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 backgroundthoughts. 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 Zarathustra’s concluding dialectical questions toward the shift in his vision, Nietzsche suggests that the confirming answer to these questions, and thus the true source of Zarathustra’s knowledge of eternal recurrence, can be found in a proper interpretation of this shift in vision. The key to this interpretation lies in Nietzsche’s suggestion that Zarathustra has just crossed the gatewayAugenblick. Thus, having just indicated that he and his opponent were whispering together inside the gateway (im Thorwege), Zarathustra asks the

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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 Nietzsche’s precise phrasing here lets us know that Zarathustra’s last question was asked just as he was stepping from inside the gateway and onto the lane extending out ahead of the gateway. This gateway is inscribed Augenblick and Zarathustra’s step across it thus causes a ‘sudden’ (plötzlich) 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 highlight Zarathustra’s step across the gateway. Indeed, as we have already seen, interpreters usually follow Heidegger’s 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 gatewayAugenblick is a symbol for the presently experienced moment of death, then Nietzsche’s emphasis may be read as a poetic device for suggesting Zarathustra’s dying prophetic vision. This interpretation is supported by Nietzsche’s allusion to the ancient Greek image of the Cerberus-hound guarding the gateway to Hades, together with his related allusion to Homer’s tale of a courageous Odysseus who must descend into Hades to find out how to return home.64 It is supported as well by Zarathustra’s 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 dog’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 hypothetical 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

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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 Zarathustra’s dying consciousness 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 yourself! 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 accommodate themselves to one another as soon as the intellect is gone.66 According to this argument, then, because Zarathustra’s consciousness is absent in the immense stretches of time during which he does not exist, he has no means of perceiving any of this passing time. But the knot of causes in which Zarathustra is entangled guarantees that his life must return in exactly the same succession and sequence. As far as he is concerned, therefore, his dying consciousness is immediately succeeded by his returned awakening consciousness and no time at all passes in the course of this transition. Although an immense period of time precedes and follows Zarathustra’s lifetime, his consciousness is a closed circle of its own in which the endpoint must return back to the starting point from which it set out. Although others will perceive a complete end to his awareness, Zarathustra himself can never experience such an end or even a break in his awareness. Because there is no absolute or universal time – that is, no time that exists independently of the perspective or framework from which it is measured – both of these perspectives are correct, and there is no fact to the matter that favours either one. This argument helps to explain why Zarathustra describes his shift in vision as ‘sudden’, and indeed why he initially observes that the gateway is named Augenblick. It also helps to explain Zarathustra’s observation, immediately after crossing the gateway-Augenblick, that he finds his thoughts running back to the time when he was a child, in the most distant childhood (in fernster Kindheit). Nietzsche’s implication here is that Zarathustra experiences a

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sudden shift from the sights and sounds of his dying consciousness to the sights and sounds of his awakening consciousness in his very early childhood.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 awakening. Indeed, if we count the number of separate paragraphs in Zarathustra’s 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 demon’s announcement in GS 341, as well as to Zarathustra’s whispered questions at the gateway, we are in a position then to sum up Nietzsche’s grounds for declaring Zarathustra’s prophetic victory over Plato’s Socrates. It would appear at first that Socrates has an advantage in claiming foreknowledge 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 advantage 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 Nietzsche’s belief in his soul’s 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 Plato’s 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 life’s eternal recurrence.

Mnemonic victory I turn finally to the second part of my question concerning Zarathustra’s knowledge of the truth of eternal recurrence – namely, how does Zarathustra come to have a prevision of himself acquiring this knowledge? Since I have

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argued that Zarathustra foresees himself acquiring a deathbed foreknowledge of his life’s eternal recurrence, this is to ask how Zarathustra is able to foresee his own moment of death. If Zarathustra’s prevision shows that knowledge of eternal recurrence is learned at the moment of death, how is Zarathustra able to learn this knowledge while still alive? Questions like these also face Plato’s Socrates when he concludes early in the Phaedo: ‘[I]t’s then, apparently, that the thing we desire and whose lovers we claim to be, wisdom, will be ours – when we have died, as the argument indicates, though not while we live.’69 In reply, Socrates goes on to propose his theory that learning is recollection (anamnesis). According to this theory, what we are reminded of concerning absolute reality we must have learned at some former time when our souls existed somewhere apart from our bodies and outside the cycle of eternal rebirth.70 Hence, Socrates argues, by living as close to death as possible, he is able to recollect the wisdom about the afterlife that his soul had gained while he was dead but had forgotten upon being reborn and reincarnated. Since this wisdom concerns the very same afterlife to which he will return after he dies, Socrates may thus claim to be able to recollect foreknowledge of Hades that will be confirmed at his moment of death. He is then able to teach this wisdom to others by eliciting in them similar recollections. From Nietzsche’s standpoint, of course, this theory is best understood as part of Socrates’ overarching attempt to find grounds for his hope that he will be released from the cycle of eternal rebirth. It is worth noting, however, that Nietzsche does not directly challenge Socrates’ mnemonic grounds in his GS aphorisms, and does not imagine Socrates to be confronted with any contradictory revelation concerning his prenatal existence. Instead, Nietzsche imagines Socrates’ daimon announcing to him only that everything in his life will have to come again to him in the same sequence and succession – ‘and even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this Augenblick and I myself’.71 In Zarathustra, however, Nietzsche aims also to depict Socrates’ mnemonic defeat. For now he supplements the daimonic announcement above with Zarathustra’s whispered interrogation of his archenemy’s recollection: ‘And this slow spider, crawling in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have already been?’ Immediately after, and as if in reply to this very question, Zarathustra attempts to recall if he had ever before heard the howling dog he is now hearing. His thoughts run back, and he realizes that he does recall hearing this – when he was a child, in his most distant childhood. After fully recalling the details of this experience,

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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. Nietzsche’s 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, Zarathustra’s consciousness is a closed circle in which the endpoint must return to the starting point from which it set out. Therefore, this childhood memory must also be of his future and Zarathustra’s recollection of this childhood memory may also be regarded as a ‘prevision’ (Vorhersehen) of his death and recurrence.72 Following Plato’s lead, then, Nietzsche theorizes that Zarathustra’s 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 Plato’s lead in supposing that Zarathustra’s knowledge of the afterlife has its ultimate source in his recollected experience of death. This supposition is most vividly expressed by the ‘Once More’ roundelay [Rundgesang] in which Zarathustra’s 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 Zarathustra’s eternally recurring death. Nietzsche thus leads us to understand that Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought, the thought that arises out of his infinitely deep subconscious well, is his deathbed revelation of the world’s infinite depth – a revelation that had so far been kept concealed from his daylight conscious rational thought. Although others do not of course possess Zarathustra’s 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, –

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– as secretly, as fearfully, as cordially, as that midnight-bell says it to me . . . 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 Zarathustra’s 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 Zarathustra’s archenemy to postulate a place where his disembodied soul can exist outside the cycle of eternal rebirth. This difference helps to explain Nietzsche’s 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 transported 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 Zarathustra’s 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

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reawakening into our first moment of awareness. From this it follows, however, that each of us has already died and recurred innumerable times, and that this buried knowledge of our life’s eternal recurrence may be recollected in our dreams or called up from our subconscious depths in the course of arduous philosophical struggles. Nietzsche’s doctrine of recurrence thus has several parallels with Plato’s doctrine of reincarnation in the Phaedo.79 Like Plato, Nietzsche argues for personal immortality, thinks that we may recollect our souls’ knowledge of our past lives, and emphasizes the significance of dreams and courageous philosophical encounters with the fact of our deaths. But unlike Plato, Nietzsche rejects the idea of a disembodied soul, thinks that all our past lives are identical, and believes that we are unable to dream or recollect anything outside of our corporeal experience. Nietzsche is thus led to agree with Plato that the moment of death is a singular transitional moment in which we are able to obtain a kind of certainty about death and the afterlife. This is why he invents his own seductive counter-myth of a dying Zarathustra, and this is why he designs the dramatic setting of a gatewayAugenblick in which he re-enacts the death of Socrates and stages a world-historic agon between the dying Socrates and the dying Zarathustra.

Chapter 7

Thus Spoke Zarathustra : The Hammer and the Greatest Weight Alan Wenham

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 West’s inability to actually see itself. For, if Nietzsche’s 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 crucified, 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 naïve expression of the genetic masochism inherent within the fundamental structures of Western culture as such.

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This is the stage upon which Nietzsche’s 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 Zarathustra’s ‘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 actually stands, in a certain way, against the Übermensch; 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 Zarathustra’s 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 Nietzsche’s considerations 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 Nietzsche’s 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 one’s 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 Nietzsche’s thought are always somewhat of an amusement – rather, we find here only a further

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expression of the problem that engenders what is sometimes simplistically regarded as Nietzsche’s most affirmative work. This is not to suggest, however, that Z is not a positive work – far from it, as we have already indicated, it is a key part of Nietzsche’s crystallizing attempts to overcome the paralysis induced by the myopia of a debilitating slave culture and address what it is that we are truly capable of – what is truly possible for us. However, at the same time, the work does have its own shadow, an understanding of which, I will try to show, is absolutely essential for moving towards a strong understanding of this work. This chapter will not, therefore, be in the spirit of Nietzschean thinking itself, as I am only attempting to underline a problem, and perhaps to indicate how this crisis can be dealt with in terms of the eternal recurrence. Articulating the meaning of master/slave morality first presents itself, it often seems, as an exhaustively privative task. Perhaps, we could start, for example, by simply saying that, if it is true that Animism, anthropologically speaking – as a form of natural law and, sometimes seemingly bizarre and capricious, legislation – seems archaic and strange to us today, for Nietzsche, the death of God has highlighted further and as yet unseen anachronisms that remain for us in the West. Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology finds its initial place exactly here, and a key part of what this involves, we could argue, is the claim that the essential ‘worldview’ of the West has been overcome, by something akin, in terms of ‘mentality’, to that of the lower orders of a caste system, such as the Hindu caste mentality we find ‘in’ India with the Untouchables, the Dalits, Chandalas, and the like. From this perspective, we could say, with Nietzsche, that the supposedly self-evident nature of pessimism, the ‘evils of the world’ – in short, Schopenhauer, this horrific world of suffering and pain, the whole cruel nightmare that sits quietly beneath all cosmetic Western optimism, originates from here. At least here we can see that what often seems like Nietzsche’s maniacal and hubristic optimism is, for him, only a trick of the light: the shadowy and pessimistic nexus of Western culture makes it appear so because our ‘world-view’ is so deeply entrenched in a dark and reactive slave negativity. Yet, we have not done nearly enough here until we begin to realize that this ‘trick of the light’, ontologically speaking, goes all the way down – this is what makes Nietzsche a philosophical thinker. The West is not just in the grip of a self-destructive ‘mentality’ or ‘psychology’ that promotes impotency and weakness. Rather, Nietzsche moralizes ontology because morality, understood in a specific sense, is for him something we might call ‘transcendental’, if by that we mean that it is only from ‘within’ a horizon of a

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‘structure of values’ that anything can be conceived of, or spoken about, have any meaning, or even be experienced. We will not use this term here for reasons that will become clear later, yet, we can still say that for Nietzsche it is the values of fundamental morality that imbibe and delineate a fundamental exegesis; they are formative of a particular culture at its very root. This means its language, codes and practices, its historical narratives and institutions – basically the very structures of intelligibility that underpin Western culture as such – are engendered by a condition of value. When Nietzsche speaks of, and indeed calls for, a revaluation of all values, it must be made sense of primarily on this level. The weight of slave morality for Nietzsche falls right here in so far as it is a lived pessimism, an existential subjugation, we might say. For we live out our lives within the horizon of own cultural exegesis, these ‘structures’ always form the ‘fabric’ of the ‘question’ and the ‘answer’; questions about Nature, for example, always receive their results within such a horizon. It is their ‘format’ or ‘medium’, we might say (though of course these terms are problematic), in terms of the ‘before’ and the ‘after’. Yet, separating out culture, our cultural ‘seeming’, how things seem from ‘within’ a particular cultural exegesis, from how they ‘really are’, is always a vestibule to dualism – one that Nietzsche explicitly rejects. Of course, we cannot simply escape the horizon of what we have been calling here ‘culture’, there is no true ‘Nature’ underlying and uniting heterogeneous cultures, no universal framework uniting and supporting the ‘flesh’ of different cultural perspectives that can be called a ‘real world’ for Nietzsche – the opposition of ‘Nature and Nurture’ is a false, and indeed, thoroughly metaphysical opposition. We can begin to see, in this light, that Nietzsche’s thought here, and specifically the typology of master and slave morality, can be seen as prototypical and formatively penultimate in some senses, though not of course unequivocally, to certain structuralistic conceptions of ‘human subjectivity’. We could say, for example, that the dynamic of master and slave morality has hitherto engendered all historical masters and slaves – in so far as these have been self-conscious ‘subjects’, that is, in so far as they have, to a limited extent, understood themselves as persons, politically subjugated or not.3 And, of course this also means that there is no ‘true humanity’ to find ‘beyond’ or ‘underneath’ fundamental values. Overcoming slave morality does not, for Nietzsche, mean escaping the constricts of an alienating culture and allowing humanity to somehow flower or bloom in its repressed essence: there is no essence. Yet, in view of all this, perhaps one of the most prescient and immediate questions here, though of course there are many, concerns the very possi-

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bility of such a counter-intuitive and circular sounding ‘knowledge’ concerning fundamental moralities, as Nietzsche understood them. For, immediately we ask: how is it possible to make such determinations concerning fundamental moralities, and their dynamic (i.e., master/slave), except from out of themselves? Such claims are always on the surface ‘autoapodictic’, in the same way as questions about language always meet an inner limit, in so far as they are one with what they question (that they are driven by what they question, in a sense). For, if we reify ‘values’ as fundamental determinants, in the manner Nietzsche appears to do, the question always arises as to how it is possible at all to make such determinations without falling into a profoundly circular form of reasoning – in terms of something being pinned down and conceived, spoken about basically, from out of its own ground? To put it another way, how can such horizons be brought into the foreground at all, while remaining, at the same time, horizons? The key to this question lies in conceiving it as an expression of a fundamental problem that has always haunted Western philosophy as such: quite simply, ‘where to begin?’ For if we simply dismiss the very possibility of Nietzsche’s determinations concerning fundamental values as psychologistic and circular, and the dynamic therein between master and slave morality, we should always do so in light of the realization that the negativity of this circle, so dismissed, casts its shadow far beyond Nietzsche’s thinking. Hegel, for example, already sees this when he takes as his own disjunct the possibility of epistemology. For Hegel, to conceive of knowledge as an ‘instrument’, or ‘medium’, is always to dislodge what one is saying. For, in effect, that which conditions, the transcendental subject, for example, must itself be unconditionally known and, of course, we have already discounted this beforehand. Indeed, for all their immediate differences, what both Nietzsche and Hegel share, and know, as ‘modern philosophers’, is that there is no presuppositionless starting point. Seeking to radicalize then, perhaps recklessly, this starting point, or anti-starting point, one might venture to say that all philosophy hitherto has always been forced to account for something which it must necessarily operate within. There are, of course, on a certain level, basic presuppositions, first principles, axiomatic structures and the like, which in a sense cannot be proved or doubted without necessarily presupposing and employing them. Moreover, this statement itself is a further quagmire in so far as the very possibility of giving them any character at all, that is, to call them a priori concepts for example, seems questionable. Yet from this perspective now, it seems that, in a way, philosophy is no better than Myth! For both give an account of things in a manner that must instrumentally

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presuppose, to some degree, what they seek to explain. With creation myths, for example, if the beginning of the universe is accounted for in anthropomorphic 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 etymological 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 fundamental concepts are understood in a way that actually presupposes them. For, if we say that a concept such as ‘unity’ may be understood in metaphorical 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 remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves – so how should we one day find ourselves?4 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

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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 Nietzsche’s time, and still in our own, science already makes such movements. 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 mankind’s 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 movement 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, Nietzsche’s typology of master/slave morality is not a scientific reduction, for the scientist always implicitly posits a stable and an immutable reality – already established and settled, unquestioned and, of course,

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thoroughly metaphysical – which grounds his or her claims concerning human development. Nietzsche, on the contrary, does not posit a metaphysic, but rather, deals directly with a symptomatology of metaphysics itself, as a creative act. For science, the framework that grounds an explanation of how we think of the world is simply universally ‘how it is’. Any culture that would arise whose thinking, and thus its experience, differed from the framework would be merely a world of illusion, a veil of seeming drawn over ‘how it really is’. Yet, in view of the death of God, the existential fact of this ‘illusory culture’, this world of seeming now, is its weight, its concrete nature; an ‘alien experience’, of course, would still involve being5 – it would be as it is. The ‘reality’ that sits under all, what we might call for our purposes here, ‘culturally engendered experience’ would and does require, itself, a miraculous cultural correspondence, for science. Yet, for Nietzsche, this is always nothing but an expression of value and of an antecedent form of life; to privilege one way of seeing the world over another, one way in which things are over another, in lieu of the fact that both have being, is founded in preference, which is to say, in an act founded in prejudice, an act that elevates what is most useful, most valuable. Yet, suppose one persists with the following question: what is this ‘form of life’ that ‘acts’? What is this symptomatology actually of – or to be more specific, if one asks: with Nietzsche’s concept of resentment, for example, if this is something that engenders fundamental values and thus the Western exegesis, and there is nothing absolute ‘beyond’ this, then how are we to even understand resentment as a concept without relying on an implicit understanding of ‘that which resents’, that which grounds resentment, when it is a part of this very exegesis? Are we not implicitly relying on a ground to resentment, in the same way as the scientist, in the sense of how we would normally account for ‘that which resents’ (i.e., a subject, an organism, an extended body, and the fundamental concepts that go along with this)? To pose this question is to arrive precisely at what Nietzsche’s thought wants to face in view of the death of God and it can be answered here in two interrelated ways. First, as we have said, there is no starting point; resentment can only be understood, in a certain way, from out of itself, or better, from out of the structures which it, through the values of slave morality, engenders. Nietzsche’s account of fundamental values – be it in terms of resentment, or the ‘herd instinct’, and so on – in the end simply must operate ‘within’ these very values, or within a milieu, a framework, that they engender – but

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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 (resentment, 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 Nietzsche’s thinking. Rather, what is first at stake is Nietzsche’s 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 undermine 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 exclusive expression of the primary Nietzschean reduction.6 Indeed, with this ‘primary reduction’ of a ground to a prejudice in Nietzsche’s 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), something 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’. Nietzsche’s 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

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stratification, to have Ontological priorities, in other words, the foundationalist prejudice in Western philosophy, has always orientated itself towards the irreducible, that which is simple, an isolated truth upon which to build. Yet, for Nietzsche, as he writes in the second aphorism of the introduction to On the Genealogy of Morals: We have no right to any isolated acts whatsoever: to make isolated errors and to discover isolated truths are equally forbidden to us.7 This amounts to saying that nothing is meaningful in-itself, fundamentally speaking. There are no isolated truths for Nietzsche, and thus a thinking that tries to find such things will never be able to escape the ‘higher level’, or context, that must always be presupposed in order to know them, in order for them to be meaningful. At bottom, Nietzsche wants to make the West able to begin to see itself, to begin knowing itself from within itself, and this means a movement that shows, for example, the historical, naturalistic, and psychological contingencies that create that which these normally presuppose: the supposedly fixed and immutable structures that frame all contingency – and this is done not just because He is dead and because we wish to clear away all the transcendentalisms that his corpse has left behind, that still infect our thinking today, but also because we come to see that this has never been something essentially alien to philosophy. All this points to the fact that there are no absolute elements in Nietzsche’s thought; the Will to Power is an expression of an ‘irreducible pluralism’. Knowing ourselves, coming to know those fundamental values that engender our very ‘coming to know’, our very awareness of things, is legitimized by a thinking that sees the ubiquitous presence of circularity in foundational thinking, that sees that the ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’ are on the same level, in so far as neither is, ultimately speaking, reducible to the other, which means in a sense that is to say, at bottom, neither of them can be God, neither of them can be a master. To do this, to fully show this, to level these out, one must now make the kind of reductions Nietzsche wants to make – this is what it means to smash idols. The very possibility of showing the kind of prejudices that engender what is taken to be most fundamental and immovable can be brought into play, as a way to knock them down. Yet, it is very important to emphasize here that to speak of a ‘symptomology of metaphysics’, for example, to reduce a metaphysical exegesis to something which presupposes it – to go beneath ‘the ground’ through the fruit of that ground – is not something that ultimately renders ‘that which resents’, to take the example above, as something ‘not really

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true’, or ‘merely’ an interpretation. For, to come to know things from ‘within themselves’ is not, at the same time, to posit an unattainable absolute. The absolute is not even a zero here, that is, it is not an absence still charged with a meaning. In this way, when resentment, for example, sees ‘that which resents’ through and on account of itself, it is not at the cost of ‘that which resents’ in-itself – this was never there in the first place. In terms of Nietzsche’s reductions this translates into the fact, as we have already implied, that the being of ‘that which resents’ – resentfully interpreted, resentfully encountered – is concrete, it is as it is: one does not make out of it an illusion, an ‘appearance’, simply because it is no longer a master. Concrete as these things may be, they are not however exhaustive of being, or of the possibilities of being. What is absolutely vital to Nietzsche’s thinking is the fact that a perspective can change, and more importantly that a ‘trans-perspectival’ state is, to some extent at least, possible.8 Indeed, to have something that we call ‘Objective’ is predicated on this, this is its condition: one form of being, one perspective, is raised above all others. Nietzsche’s thinking seizes upon this possibility in the same way as realism does, yet, in his thought, trans-perspectival being is not warped by a privileging, in the first instance, of one perspective over others (in the sense that one is more ‘real’). A vital consequence of all this, we might say, is that, for Nietzsche, not only is there now nowhere to begin in philosophy – that ‘beneath the ground is simply more ground’ – but there is also now, strictly speaking, no way to begin, and therefore fundamental values can be explained in a number of different ways (or perhaps better, even ‘fundamental values’, as a primary reduction is itself only one way of coming to know ourselves, of which the Will to Power is another). For, in seeking to know anything for Nietzsche, as with the Sophists, we cannot say that it, this thing we want to know, has an essence that is unequivocal. A resentfully encountered entity – an entity encountered through a structure of intelligibility historically engendered by resentful slave values – though concrete, is thus not exhausted in its being by that ‘resentful perspective’. That which grounds Nietzsche’s typology of master/slave morality then, is an attempt to come to know fundamental values and that this becomes possible because of what we might call a radical levelling impetus in Nietzsche’s thinking. The ground that has been raised up and taken as a master is now usurped by its fruit: the ‘beehives of knowledge’ and the ‘honey’ they contain are set on the same level. This allows not only for fundamental values to be shown in their ‘grounding’ role as regards the basic foundations of Western intelligibility but it also allows for multiple

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approaches to be adopted, none of which is raised above others. This anti-foundationalism amounts, at bottom, to Nietzsche’s radicalization of Nihilism in a purposeful way. For one cannot simply stand outside a horizon to oppose it – rather in a similar manner to Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage perhaps, one must take hold of what is at hand, the pre-established ‘materials’ and ‘tools’ available and subvert these for one’s own purposes. This amounts to one of the most positive aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking, in so far as it always essentially tries to look into the heart of what is most terrible, most vertiginous – the levelling out of all forms of knowledge in the face of the death of God – and to find ways of affirming these, to seize upon, in effect, a certain ‘freedom’, the opening up of a profound possibilities we now face. All this does not mean however that Nietzsche’s thinking operates on a completely flat surface. Rather, with these reductions, with this radical levelling, a rank and order is still preserved in Nietzsche’s thinking, not in the manner of positing a new fundamental ground or ‘reality’, but rather through embracing an aim and purpose: by philosophising with a Hammer; and this means, to be able to appropriate the diversity of perspectives and interpretations. This is what makes Nietzsche’s thinking still actually possible – what allows him to go on to actually privilege something like resentment (though not absolutely). For, by reducing the absolute ground to such things, it loses its power over us: we show how by its very own validity its status is thereby usurped. For, to make something available to knowledge as tangible and contingent is to begin to give control over that thing, to dominate it; and at bottom, all this amounts to the fact that today we can no longer say that the human being simply encounters meaningful entities on the ground of a fixed set of values set by God. Rather, values now presuppose evaluations, and these are mortal creations. The decision to ‘go higher’, and to do this in a number of different ways, to seek out many different ways of thinking about the formative existential factors of human life, in order that they may be overcome, is done so through the realization that such knowledge is not essentially beyond us, it does not deal with things that are essentially out of view, or out of our own grasp. The true freedom and creative power of the human being comes when he realizes that he is an existential being, that in relating to himself, in becoming self-conscious, he finds in himself an existential power, in so far as he can get hold of, in the most concrete of ways, his own conditions, and change himself. This seems palpable, for example, when one becomes conscious of the formative nature of language. To some extent human beings can and do change language, yet it is language in which they necessarily always must explicitly think, and which exerts a

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fundamentally determinative limit on them – ‘speaks them’, as the structuralists have said. The same is true of culture generally, for while at the same time it is culture, and the values that engender it, that provide the antecedent structures that make ‘subjectivity’ possible, that provide it with the framework without which it could not be what it is, in terms of its being, its ways to be, it is also the case that cultural change can be the work of human beings. This can never be done on an absolute basis, of course, but only from out of itself, but this is no different, at bottom, from the ordinary way that we often retrospectively come to ourselves, never from any possible absolute perspective, yet nevertheless from here we are always forced to, and do, look forward and to act to change ourselves. Perhaps now we have begun to get into view the grounding and unifying element of Nietzsche’s thinking. The various perspectives he employs are guided and unified by the Hammer; his thought is essentially grounded in a purpose, in a drama, the desire to ‘look forward and act’, to seek out new axial ways of thinking, hidden points of control, points of existential change. And it is precisely here that, not only can we begin to see how deep the shadow of the greatest weight really strikes at Nietzsche’s own thought but also the irony of the way in which Nietzsche proposes to deal with it. For the most dramatic expression of his thinking – Z – calls into question this very kind of thinking as such, which to say, it is here that the essential instrumentality which guides and unifies Nietzsche’s thinking faces its most radical crisis. Moreover, such an irony is entirely in line with what we have been saying. For Nietzsche cannot step outside his own engagement to assess such a question, he can get no immaculate perception of the matter, thus the most abysmal thought is essentially a dramatic thought, the most dramatic thought. Dramatic, because of what it points to in terms of a lived life – Nietzsche’s own life perhaps; one thinks of the scenes in Z that mirror the young Nietzsche’s encounter with his ailing father, for example9 – but also dramatic in a further sense, in terms of a fear of putting down the Hammer, and of what the Hammer has come to mean. For, what is always key in Nietzsche’s thinking, more so than other thinkers, is always what is not said. We might say that Nietzsche’s thinking articulates an extreme selfawareness through what is, and what must always remain, unspoken. Nietzsche can never say: ‘look, the way I am speaking to you now is simply the most honest way I can, formal language is, above all, a lie, it thinks it can speak without prejudice, it thinks it is “disinterested”, “objective” . . .’ He can never say this because this would be to employ an implicit formality, it would be dishonest and hypocritical to add such a caveat, to try to ground his style in some formal disclaimer. And, we can see this same silence oper-

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ating through out Z in terms of what is at stake with Zarathustra’s ‘most abysmal thought’, his ‘greatest weight’. For what is most important with the eternal recurrence image, and the crisis that precipitates it, is that at the same time as posing an existential threat to the Übermensch, the ‘most abysmal thought’, as we have said, poses an existential threat to Nietzsche’s thinking as such: it is the Hammer itself that faces its greatest weight, which is to say that this crisis poses a formal challenge to his thinking. For how can Nietzsche now justify that which underpinned the radically heterogeneous character of his thinking, that allowed it to begin and allowed it to seize various ways to begin, if this at the same time actually implies a dissolution of this drama which would underpin it? This dissolution, as I have already tried to indicate above, is intimately bound up with the figure of Zarathustra in Nietzsche book. Zarathustra’s crisis is that he has come to realize that that which legitimizes and makes possible the creation of the Übermensch, which is to say the death of God, the death of all transcendental authority, is predicated on something which threatens to contaminate this very creative act itself. For the radical contingency and extreme anti-teleology of history, which legitimates the self-creation of meaning, of the Übermensch (as the ‘meaning of the earth’), at the same time harbours a hidden consequence that throws into question the very idea that there can be a destination, an ‘end point’ – that man can actually be made meaningful as a bridge. In our terms we could say that this essentially involves the realization that Zarathustra’s teaching of the Übermensch is complicit in what we could call a slave hermeneutic of time, in so far as Zarathustra’s teaching still operates within a specific structure that still posits a redemptive historical movement, a redeeming ‘final goal’ that will justify mankind – thus there is a threat that the Übermensch itself as a creative act is itself a meaningless gesture. It is notable in this regard that ‘The Prophet’, the book wherein Zarathustra has the terrible dream that precipitates his crisis, is followed immediately by ‘On Redemption’. It is not difficult to read this section as an expression of Zarathustra’s new awareness of this slave hermeneutic of time and how it infects his own doctrine. Yet, that Zarathustra does not relate this specifically to the Übermensch in this section is down to the fact that the weight of what is uncovered goes beyond any particular doctrines or teachings one might have. For time as such is not immune, in Nietzsche’s thinking, to what we have been saying above. To posit one way in which time is, when we are feeling disengaged, theoretical, or reflective, for example, as its ‘objective reality’, is to give preference to one way in which it is over others. Moreover, we cannot even say that what is privileged here,

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‘objective time’ in the example above, which is to say the dominant occidental view of time, is actually the most common ‘experience’ of time, in terms of everyday Western life as it is lived. Indeed, at the bottom, we can have no disinterested ‘experience’ of time, for Nietzsche, or better, time is not a disinterested horizon; and thus what is at stake here is, for him, human beings operating ‘within’ a culture increasingly engendered by dominant slave values, come to a specific ‘experience’ of time, which is increasingly vengeful and self-destructive. On the surface ‘On Redemption’ can look like a psychologistic reduction of time, one that would ultimately presuppose time to offer an explanation of an essential vengeful ‘slave psychology’ that is formative of a certain ‘subjective’ experience of it. Yet, as we have been trying to show throughout this chapter, Nietzsche’s reduction of time is an attempt to know thyself, an attempt to inaugurate the becoming self-conscious of a particular hermeneutic of time, through itself, so as not to sublime that hermeneutic as an ultimate ground. The slave hermeneutic of time has no author, no ultimate presupposed ground that sits underneath it; ‘that which resents’, as an ‘in-itself’, does not ‘produce’ this slave hermeneutic, but rather, it, itself, only appears ‘within it’. Yet, since the possibilities of being remain open, which is to say, things retain the possibility of being different, a thinker like Nietzsche can operate within the hope of overcoming it. Nevertheless, in this overcoming, it is too easy to fall back into the same current it opposes: Zarathustra comes to see that his own doctrine is just one further consequence of this slave hermeneutic of time. For, the Übermensch is still an expression of a slave hermeneutic that engenders an essentially moral experience of time, one that still wants to make mankind a bridge, something instrumental, something to be justified by something else. It makes time an essentially moral phenomenon, and this is driven by a slave resentment of the past, the ‘it was’, which, because it cannot strike against this master, is sublimated against the ‘now’. It is made blameworthy and is thus now in need of redemption. In this way, the Übermensch, no matter how radically different it is as an ‘ideal’, still retains a masochistic potential: it is still used to strike at the present, to take vengeance on it. Moreover, for all its difference as an ‘ideal’, the Übermensch is still also at risk now of becoming merely one more variant of an essentially nihilistic desire to give a fixed and final ‘super-meaning’ to Western life, in much the same way as Christian eschatology does. The weight of the eternal recurrence image finds its place here. For, in its negative form, which is to say as an abysmal thought, it actually radicalizes the slave hermeneutic of time in so far as it compresses and expresses its

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ultimate nihilistic consequence.10 For now this moment is infinite, it cannot be used to justify anything – ‘the small man recurs eternally’, he is not to be done away with, to be justified by some ‘future time’, there can be no ultimate and qualifying panacea. As for the ‘spirit of Gravity’, this now means life is utterly meaningless suffering, and that life can only be justified if it has an instrumentality. It is the wisdom of Silenus that is now king. Zarathustra’s challenge here, is thus to find a way to affirm the eternal recurrence of each moment in a manner that does not look outside itself, in a way that does not resent the past, the ‘it was’, does not sublimate its desire for vengeance against the ‘now’, making it blameworthy, devaluing it in favour of another time which will redeem it. Yet, perhaps now we can finally indicate what we have been driving at all along, what is important in all this is that the resonance and scope of this problem is not confined to merely an idiosyncrasy that resides in Nietzsche’s thought alone, in so far as it speaks of ‘free spirits’ or an Übermensch. Rather, for him, the articulation of ‘the most abysmal thought’ and the eternal recurrence is the becoming self-conscious of a fundamental prejudice within the tradition of Western thought itself: For, why do we wish to know ourselves? Why do we do philosophy? Why do we think at all? Is there not an implicit aim, an implicit purpose? Has Western thought not really been, in the end, quietly founded on its own secret drama? (If, perhaps, at times an exceedingly dull one.) Not only the Übermensch but also normative thinking as such, as the West knows it, as well as its motivating and grounding place in relation to all knowledge seeking, is thrown into question by what is confronted with the greatest weight. The essential drama of Nietzsche’s thinking, which is grounded in the desire for a new epoch, in so far as it wishes to justify mankind, is still complicit in a slave hermeneutic of time: the Hammer is complicit in a slave desire for vengeance against time and in a desire to inflict cruelty on itself. This is what is most terrifying, and indeed, Nietzsche’s thinking is the first of the tradition to become radically self-conscious, to such a level that it challenges itself existentially, it faces up to the ultimate nihilism, the ultimate self-destruction. The realization that, ultimately, the more one tries to emancipate oneself from a tradition, one finds, at a certain level, that the driving and orientating motives that fuel such attempts begin to become questionable, begin to become implicated in what they seek to overcome. We might thus say that, with the death of God, what is at stake is not only the fact that there is nowhere to begin in philosophy, not only is there also no way to begin, but now the very unifying reason to begin, in Nietzsche’s thinking, comes into question.11 A key aspect of the eternal

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recurrence in this regard is its status as a powerful expression of this realization, an image that forces us to see exactly what is at stake in the denial of any transcendental being – something Nietzsche spent his whole intellectual life trying to uncover and show to us.

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: 1. That there is no where to begin; 2. That there is no way to begin; and 3. That there is no reason to begin. Nietzsche’s thinking overcomes the first two crises through its instrumentality, 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, Zarathustra’s ‘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 one’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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

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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 Übermensch 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 resonance: the Hammer and its greatest weight.

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 elucidation. This will most readily safeguard, I believe, the uniqueness of Zarathustra’s message on freedom. In part, this uniqueness lies in its distinctive delivery within the elevated and somewhat exaggerated tone of Zarathustrian rhetoric. In addition, the message is also subject to a distinctive 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, Zarathustra’s 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 The mention of a yoke naturally implies a burden one is made to carry – willingly or unwillingly – so that the lifting of it does amount to

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a kind of freedom, generally called liberation. And liberation – being free or freed from burdens – is indeed a sound answer to the question free from what? Yet note how the thought of lifting a burden could actually compromise one’s very worth and usefulness unsettles the value of liberation and makes it somewhat ambiguous. This ambiguity is re-enforced by Zarathustra’s dismissive attitude to the very question free from what? It is as nothing to him, of no interest! What is, however, of interest to Zarathustra are the answers given with bright, that is, I take it, with enthusiastic eyes to the question free for what? In the following sections I will try to demonstrate that only those who have successfully answered the first, the free from what? question, that is those already liberated, are eligible candidates to proceed to a position where the free for what? question can be asked of them. Liberation on its own, then, is inferior because preliminary kind of freedom, merely preparatory to freedom properly so called which must have a satisfactory answer to the free for what? question. According to numerous hints dispersed throughout Z, freedom properly so called is a high and rare achievement, aiming far beyond and above what mere liberation could ever offer. This freedom requires great courage, goal-orientated creativity, as well as a distinctive affirmation of oneself, of one’s being just as one is, together with an affirmation of the kind of life that is both peculiarly and necessarily one’s own. Hence, persons free in this sense will exhibit in their very lives their answer to the question free for what?

[2] If liberation is merely a preparation for freedom proper, two questions must now be asked: (a) how does one liberate oneself? and/or (b) can one be liberated by someone else? As is well known, liberation from, say, political oppression is not one of Nietzsche’s pre-occupations; his perennial concern is with a different kind of oppression altogether, namely, the oppression of untested and unquestioned values – imbibed with culture and religion – and the burdensome constraints and hindrances these can put on us. Yet once our eyes are opened to the potentially pernicious influence of these values – something Zarathustra is passionate about – one of the ways we can liberate ourselves from these values is through contempt (Verachtung). Already early in his mission, Zarathustra calls for the hour of great contempt. One should, he urges, have contempt for one’s happiness, one’s reason, virtue, justice, and one’s Mitleid,2 because, so he claims, these tend to lead

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to many negative results, including a degrading and pitiful kind of comfort (erbärmliches Behagen). Without doubt, the kind of freedom one wins when contemptuously denying oppressive values is correctly called liberation and celebrated as such, unless, of course, one is too anxious about the risks and challenges inseparable from liberation or unable to resist the many temptations for ease and comfort. Unsurprisingly, Zarathustra has a name for those who are no longer able to feel contempt: he calls them the most contemptible, the last men.3 Yet, contempt is not the only way to liberation, there is also conquest, the conquest of a lion! Remember the lion as the second of the three metamorphoses tracing the development necessary for freedom and growth. Following upon the camel – the paradigm of the obediently meek and un-liberated animal of burden – the lion, by contrast, is ready to do battle and conquer freedom by fighting the dragon glittering with the values of thousand years. Fighting, the lion replaces the dragon’s stern and fixed you ought with the roar of his victorious I will.4 However, can one be liberated by someone else, via salvation perhaps? Zarathustra does not think very highly of saviours and doubts their claims to liberate. This is not surprising considering that the kinds of liberation so far discussed are based on Zarathustra’s demands for personal effort, for active, determined engagement with on one’s own values within one’s own context. Or, as Nietzsche puts it in the fourth of the Untimely Meditations,5 freedom will not drop miraculously into one’s lap, it has to be one’s own achievement. It follows that, as salvation implies precisely an intervention from outside by way of a gracious gift, it cannot, therefore, provide a credible alternative to liberation via conquest and contempt. Indeed, it could even be counter-productive. Zarathustra declares: 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 one’s 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

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with one’s 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 one’s inner and often wayward and disruptive drives, usually precariously chained up in one’s cellar. When the prison-doors of values and mores are thrown open, then the wild dogs of one’s drives too, sensing the general loosening of constraints, clamour for freedom. They too are eager to escape the restrictive 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

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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 vigilance, 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 one’s drives, this is not the case here. Zarathustra claims that one does not win the battle with one’s 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 one’s 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 one’s 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

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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 nature’s 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 latter’s 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 one’s 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 description, in a deeply unstable position, one very injurious to one’s sense of identity. With most of the values previously adhered-to now questioned or undermined, and with one’s 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 one’s ease and security is a constitutive part of Zarathustra’s much-repeated exhortation that man is something to be overcome. No doubt, overcoming oneself is a fearful challenge, reaching deep into one’s sense of identity, making it problematic as to who one is or wants to be. Stronger even than in liberation, overcoming oneself is a requirement 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 archetypal 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 Goethe’s famous

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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 Zarathustra’s 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 If, as Zarathustra indicates, liberation for creation is indeed in some way similar to being reduced to ashes, and if the longing to be thus reduced can only be understood by the wise, then this could help us to make more sense of Zarathustra’s remark in the quotation of [1] above, that some will loose their very worth and usefulness when liberated from a yoke – perhaps this is so because some may just burn, simply burn, and turn into useless because barren ashes since nothing follows upon their burning? So only some, maybe only the wise, can profit from liberation. Why? The reduction to ashes, the liberation from all one’s previous values and drives, the overcoming of oneself, is utterly pointless, and may even be dangerous, unless taken as a springboard for a new beginning. There are, indeed, numerous references in Z to the connection between destruction and creation, such as, for instance: Change of values – that is change of creators. Whosoever is a creator, must always destroy.15 And whosoever has to be a creator in good and evil, in truth, he must be a destroyer first and crush values.16 This confirms our conclusion: destruction is a necessary precondition for any new creation, a necessary purification for any rebirth. In short: Without ashes, no Phoenix! Let us turn now to the free for what? question.

[5] Ashes are first mentioned right at the start of Zarathustra’s mission: the very first person he meets on his descent is an old hermit who instantly recognizes 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

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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 selfrolling 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 lion’s 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 satisfactory 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 one’s 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

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movement, a holy yes-saying. With these playful, innocent, and self-creating endowments, the child is now able to will his own will; indeed, having lost a world, the child now wins for itself his own world. So here, we have, in outline, the conditions necessary for the new kind of freedom, freedom proper. These conditions do indeed build upon, but then, nonetheless, leave behind those required for mere liberation, just as the child follows upon the conquests of the lion. We have now reached a position where we can confidently state that the hiatus between the two freedoms of free from what? and free for what? is characterized by the fact that liberation with its near loss of identity, its reduction to ashes, and, as in the last quote, its loss of a world, is utterly futile unless the destruction is made fertile again by the capacity and will to create something new. Without the freedom of this creative will, the ashes of destruction remain just that – ashes: plain waste, the sterile evidence of a lost world. As we have seen, Zarathustra believes that a new world with its new values will not come about through the gentle workings of slow, gradual, or evolutionary change, but only through the combined activity of two, usually conflicting, forces: violence and gentleness. We have (1) the destructive break with the past – the task of liberation, necessary to render the ground virginal again, innocent again, and thus receptive for (2) the creative play of the child – the activity of freedom. Note that the often-disconcerting partnership of violence and gentleness is found throughout Z. Consider here, for example, Zarathustra’s frequent cry for war and destruction next to his deep yearning to pour out the riches of his love; his frequent threats to come down with fire, lightning, and tearing winds to prepare for this love; the tenderness and trembling anticipation to ‘go under’ next to the near madness of his rapture when believing the moment ripe for his great giving. Zarathustra, then, has no aversion to whipping, screaming, fighting, burning so long as it helps the acceptance of this love. Said differently: for Zarathustra the lion has to roar so that the child can play.

[6] It is in the nature of the topic of freedom that it is extremely difficult to be specific as to content and practice. However, from what has been ascertained so far, it is clear that the kind of demands Zarathustra asks of freedom are not fulfilled by reference to the lifting of a yoke, whether this is liberation from obsolete and oppressive values or the fact that one has imposed

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order on one’s instincts and drives. As we have seen, these are preconditions for freedom only. And, while Zarathustra is dismissive about the fact that someone has escaped a yoke, he is eager to know about one’s 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 Übermensch, and after admitting to himself that he has looked for the wrong person in the wrong place, Zarathustra makes the following resolution: An insight came to me: Zarathustra should not speak to people but to companions. Zarathustra should not become the shepherd and dog of a herd. A creator seeks companions, not corpses, nor herds and believers. Fellow creators seeks the creator, those who inscribe new values on new tablets.19 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 congregation. 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;

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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 teacher’s. 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 person’s ruling idea and the cluster of attributes 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 child’s 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 metamorphoses. 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 one’s price for much struggle; on the contrary, it is embedded

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into the narrative of one’s 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 mountain during their pilgrimage to Zarathustra’s 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 creators: 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 mountain’s 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

Nietzsche – On the Regenerative Character of Dispositions Arno Böehler

On the life of the muse In an aphorism that begins with the title ‘The Convalescent’, Zarathustra replied to his animals: 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 Zarathustra knows, what his headstrong soul needs. In long experience with himself, he has learned that it is the muses that can free him from his concerns. Everywhere his soul had been touched by the muses, it had begun to stir again. The emotional malaise that had lamed him was all of a sudden gone and the strings of his disposition began to make music once again. The great disgust with life that had overcome him and morosely taught him: ‘All is the same, nothing is worth while, knowledge chokes.’2 During such hours of the muses, all this had miraculously flown away. From these experiences, Zarathustra believed to understand what his soul needed to heal. He did not want to merely drag himself onwards as he had done until now, simply to survive. He was weary of his own weariness, he longed for a new, a different life: new wineskins for a new wine. Today, at the dawn of his convalescence, Zarathustra was finally prepared to bring the ill-temperedness of his soul to a sudden ending, and to rid himself of the monster of nihilism that had inadvertently3 overcome him. ‘It is I or you!’,4 he cried out against his own gravity. Zarathustra had thus made the first step towards his own recovery; today he agreed to his own demise.

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The muses as cheerful sources to sur-vive a life 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 (Über-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 ecstatically 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 emotionally 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 medially 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

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is transmitted in a passionate manner from one body to another and therefore becomes a true presence (Greek: ousía) of joy.

On new songs and new lyres Hence it is not surprising that even Zarathustra’s animals support and strengthen him in his effort to recover through an appeal to the muses. Perhaps because of their animal-like acquaintance with life they understand the healing power of sweet songs. Perhaps also because after their year-long acquaintance with him they are aware of his susceptibility for the muses. Sing and overflow, O Zarathustra; cure your soul with new songs that you may bear your great destiny, which has never yet been any man’s 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 Zarathustra’s recovery obviously was not just about repairing the functionality 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 implicitness in the process of his recovery. This unreflective way of speaking, thinking, and feeling will no longer be sufficient for Zarathustra. The feelings which are still created by a mechanical recourse onto the existing chambers of his disposition have to be reconsidered anew, they have to be

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checked for the temper of their constitution,10 sensitively reviewed and – if necessary – synthetically expanded, emotionally transformed, supplemented, completed, and therefore constitutively reworked. For this reason, a regenerative act is not just a recursive act in which one can simply refer, retentionally, to already existing chambers of ones disposition, to use them for the umpteenth time. For, if this happened, then this would just be a mechanical performance of feeling, nothing more than the production of a cliché of emotion, by which we habitually react to sensory impulses with this or that affective pattern. The contemporaneousness of the current situation would then not be taken into consideration; it would not be felt and experienced. For Zarathustra’s complete recovery, in which the strings of his soul are brought back to life and song, he does not just need new songs but also a new lyre, providing his soul with new chambers, sensitive organs, and exquisite sensors, which will allow him to feel in new and different ways. On the other hand in the process of his convalescence, he will have to get his soul out of the habit of reaching to readily available capabilities of thinking, feeling, behaving, and interpreting, to prevent the current act of emotional processes from rashly becoming a repetition of purely habitual behaviour. Not just this or that organ, to which Zarathustra currently has recourse, but the way he ‘uses’ his entire sensitive sensorium therefore is at stake during the course of Zarathustra’s convalescence. If he wants to do justice to his fate and present a polyphonic expression of his teachings on the eternal recurrence of the same, then he needs a new and sensitive lyre first which will allow him to transmit the nuances and the abyss of his teachings to those who have an ear for such unheard of truths. At the same time, the unheard aspects11 of his teachings must be protected so that they will not be silenced by the barrel organ of restless spirits, who would rashly interpret his teachings, and therefore, transform them into an old stereotypical story and melody. ‘[S]truggling on the one hand against Habitus, on the other against Mnemosyne; . . . refusing the overly simple cycles, the one followed by a habitual present (customary cycle) as much as the one described by a pure past (memorial or immemorial cycle).’12 Interrupting the habitual habitus of his soul, so that the execution of emotional acts, during their execution, is examined, perhaps ennobled and renewed, that is the recipe which not only Gilles Deleuze but also Zarathustra recommended to regenerate their emotional existence. During the new instrumentation of his soul, Zarathustra was thus not only concerned with the composition of new songs and the creation of a new lyre, but also

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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.

On well known melodies and new songs Therefore it comes as no surprise that Zarathustra’s animals too speak of his teaching in a tone of voice which gives it the ring of a well known melody: There will be a great year of becoming, they say. They describe an ogre of a great year, which, just like a sand clock, always has to be turned upside down again, so that it may run down and run out again and all the years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest. In this year, Fate catches up with every creature and after a long cosmic minute it will be re-awoken to life and the external circumstances will be repeated, so that it has to live the same life again that it has already led many times, and will live again in the future. This is how Zarathustra’s animals spoke to him on that morning and pretended to have spoken of him and his most abysmal thoughts. ‘O you buffoons and barrel organs!’ Zarathustra replied and smiled again. 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, Zarathustra’s teachings appear to be hard to digest. This is the sore spot, which marks the deciding

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difference between the animalistic and the human interpretation of his teachings. For while animals have a right to interpret the eternal return of the same as a cosmic event in which their own life is fatefully entangled and fatally embedded, for human destinies it is proper to interpret the same event as the chance of a concrete challenge each human being has to face, give its own signature to, and hence practically has to accomplish as long as it is alive. Zarathustra’s phrase ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’, is, at least for humans, therefore never just a fatal truth, but rather a type of guiding principle (Leitsatz), which humans should not simply believe and treat like a given fact, but should cope with as something that has to be practically reciprocated, considered bad or good, cursed or agreed upon, wanted or refused. Only after a person has already chosen to make Zarathustra’s concept of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ the maxim (Leitsatz) of his or her own life, then such a person is forced to internalize it as the governing principle guiding his or her soul. The sensitive application of the teaching of the eternal recurrence of the same to the individual existence, as an act of maximization and intensification of one’s liveliness, is, as an act of the recreation of the pre-existing dispositions of a living creature, apparently not just an act with a pure descriptive character. Rather it is a performative-synthetic act in which the contemporary dispositions of a soul are not just cited, but expanded, supplemented, re-created, and creatively regenerated during the performance of such an act. Also the dispositions that Zarathustra has recourse to during the internalization of the concept of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ – whether it is his ability to feel, to think, to behave, or to desire – all these abilities cannot be merely used, cited, and applied in their existing form, rather, during the process of the internalization of his teaching, they must be exceeded, reworked, and if necessary synthetically expanded and constitutionally reconstituted. In a speech, which is given the title ‘On Redemption’, Zarathustra can say about the act of redemption: ‘To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all “it was” into a “thus I willed it” – that alone should I call redemption.’14

On redemption To repeat that what has been transmitted to us as a life – what we ourselves hence did not bring forth and yet are forced to be – to repeat this in such a way that we come to the point to affirm it: ‘thus I will it; thus shall I will it’15 – that alone would mean redemption for Zarathustra. Since the

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burdensome character of the past, which is thereby repeated, would completely disappear and melt away in such a moment of amor fati. Once we do understand that Zarathustra, from the very beginning of his own recovery, started to cut and refine the genealogically transferred historical burden of his life in such a way that his ‘first nature’ became ennobled, purified, and made into a jewel by his life, then it is clear, that Zarathustra’s notion of amor fati has nothing to do with a passive form of love. Since the reception of the life that has been transmitted to him, Zarathustra’s fulfilment of his own amor fati, represents a synthetic act a priori, which Zarathustra has to perform and execute himself existentially in the course of his own genealogical becoming and act of a lifelong regeneration. Thus every living act, structurally, represents a synthetic act a priori, because the execution of a lively behaviour necessarily brings with it a moment of instability in the structures cited in such an act: the possibility of an event, which leads to the restructuring of those structures which were involved in the act at its beginning.16 Every act of recovery of a living being is the attempt to give oneself a posteriori a past which one would like to have descended from, in contrast to the past from which one really stems. It is an act of transformation from a first nature into a second one. The genealogy of a living being, in which it is affected17 with the life that it was genealogically given by others by birth, hence is neither an act of a simple representation of the past nor a sheer birth ex nihilo, but rather it is an act of a certain differential repetition of a past, in which that, what was, in the act of its repetition elicits differences, through which something is created which until now has never been there. In reference to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Agamben rightly reminded us that the lively interaction with the transferred heritage of a certain history is not just about remembering the past, to prevent it from being forgotten. Rather the potentiality of an act of remembrance lies in an act of remembering, which, during the process of recollection, is a posthumous returning of a future to a past and thereby given unfulfilled possibility back to a past, with which it is linked during the act of remembering and therefore belatedly ‘re-membered’.18 As Agamden writes, ‘A creative, artistic mode of re-membering, restores possibility to a past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.’19 A history in the service of life – a topos to which Nietzsche early on confessed20 – will therefore not only be satisfied with having dealt with the

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transmission of a historical heritage only in historical-critical perspective. Rather it will be about a plastic interaction with history, in which our transmissions are treated primarily as the material of synthetic-performative processes. It will not just be about stating that, which was, in performing its historical replay over and over again, but about the performative interaction with that, which has been transmitted to us as ‘a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident’21 to deal with it in multiple fragmentary ways.22 A life, as an act of regeneration of those handed down forms of life, means therefore more than simply being generated, more than simply to be alive. It means to make our lives a form of ueberleben, a form to survive. To begin with, we normally do not come into contact with our lives in an exuberant way, but rather live our lives as if we were not alive at all. As the medium of our ancestors, we simply mime their past over and over again. We live, as those who taught us how to live.23 We live as barrel organs and buffoons.24 Even there, where we should let go of the same old fables.

On the temporality of dithering 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 works’27 – 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 fablesongs, 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

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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

Zarathustra’s 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 challenging 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.

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The abyss speaks ‘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 convalescence. ‘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

In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future and of New Origins Uschi Nussbaumer-Benz

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 wellsprings 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. Huntington’s 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 accomplishments these world cultures in fact have attained – it is precisely the

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foundations of these cultures/religions that lie at the core of the conflicts mentioned above and are indeed part of the problem. I wish to present with this chapter a stringent chain of circumstantial evidence leading towards the following finding: Nietzsche had rediscovered in an ancient text a specific cultural concept in which the three most influential monotheistic religions/cultures as well as the Buddhist culture/ religion (and not only these four) are rooted, albeit in a more or less deformed manner. On this newly found basis, Nietzsche thought it was possible to attempt a general transvaluation of values, away from the so-called ‘ascetic ideal’ of the West and East, towards and in favour of ‘the other’, the different ideal – and thus to build a new culture. This source of Nietzsche’s, supposedly a rich wellspring of the future and for new origins, is a pre-Buddhist, even a pre-Vedic narrative. It is a narrative that has proven in the course of previous world history an enormous archetypal efficacy, that is, power – however, in its more or less deformed version. The original ancient narrative had been taken up and advanced by a crucial Buddhist text, the Ceylonese Dighanikaya, written in the language Pali (not Sanskrit) – whereas its Aryan version has left many deep, bloody traces of violence in world history, according to its specific conceptions of spreading peace and justice all over the world by force, through ‘holy wars’, often implicating messianic/redemptive ideas. Nietzsche, on the other hand, had come across the ancient narrative via his friend Ernst Windisch, a renowned Orientalist – so that we may well assume that it is in fact Nietzsche who calls: ‘Look here: a wellspring for many who are thirsty, One heart for many who are yearning, One will for many (who are) tools’, ‘Is there a people gathering around [Nietzsche]? ‘A people, that is: many/ much attempting ones’?2 Since this ancient textual source was only in the progress of publication at that time, however, we do not have the most pleasant opportunity to recur upon remarks written by Nietzsche on the margins of his source. Instead, we have to rely on several kinds of texts (as well as on a photograph) and to point out parallels and signs. Of course, plenty of them have to be presented, and they must be striking: to form a stringent chain of circumstantial evidence. Eventually, the validity of a theory or of a new perspective results from its explanatory capacity and strength.

I 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

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Lucerne, Switzerland, in May 1882, shortly before he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche carefully arranged the scene in every detail. He did so in a playful mood (‘in übermütiger Stimmung’), as Lou Salomé or, to put it correctly, Lou von Salomé3 recorded in her diary.4 Nietzsche had to urge his reluctant friend Paul Rée a bit, a philosopher of Jewish origins who later in his life became a physician, to cooperate and to pose in the foreground, on the right-hand side of the ‘double harness’ of a cart, while Nietzsche placed himself slightly in the background, on the left-hand side (on the right in the photo). At the left of the picture, within the cart, their common friend Lou Salomé (who not long before had rejected proposals of marriage from both of them) poses; with a trace of a smile she is swinging a miniature whip decorated with a lilac bloom. The right wheel of the wagon in the foreground, beneath Salomé, nearly produces the impression of a fourth person in the picture. A panorama of the Alps with the ‘Jungfrau’ forms the background of the photo, which was to attain a regrettable notoriety to date. (The photo already scandalized Nietzsche’s family when Salomé later on showed it to them in Bayreuth, in Nietzsche’s absence.) Nietzsche at that time still believed having found in Lou Salomé a spirit who would be able to live up to his standards; someone of high intelligence and education, an autonomous thinker, and a strong-willed personality who, despite her young age of 21, knew to conduct herself in society in both a versatile and unconventional manner. Nietzsche, characterizing her as perspicacious as an eagle and courageous as a lion,5 hoped she would adopt his philosophy, including his deepest thought, and carry on his work. However, Nietzsche’s expectations as well as his friendship with Salomé (and with Rée) found their bitter end as early as autumn of the same year 1882: as a result of the confrontation with petit-bourgeois virtue, the notorious ‘Naumburger Tugend’, not least personified in Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. Nietzsche complains about this catastrophe in a letter, writing that someone like him who has no one with whom he can share the secret of his life aim, that such a person loses incredibly much if he loses the hope of having met a like-minded individual looking for a similar solution.6 Obviously, Nietzsche had not told Lou Salomé everything about his philosophy yet. But the question now is: what does Nietzsche mean by ‘life aim’ and ‘solution’? In northern Italy, on a mountain called Monte Sacro close to Orta, probably a week before the photo was taken, Nietzsche had made up his mind to make his friend Lou Salomé the first person to become familiar with the whole of his philosophy.7 The short excursion he made with her to the Monte Sacro, with its panorama of the Alps, must have been an experience

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of almost mystic quality for Nietzsche, and at least to some extent for Salomé, too.8 What she noted down in her diary about three weeks later, however, looks like her summary, her own version, of Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s ‘solution’? Let me suggest here that the photo presents Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 apodictic 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 At the beginning of December 1882, after a visit of Heinrich von Stein – a follower of Richard Wagner and former tutor in Wagner’s residence – in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, Nietzsche wrote to von Stein, still with a glimpse of hope to find an ally: I wish to relieve the world of some of its heartbreaking and cruel character. 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

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Among Nietzsche’s notes of Winter 1882/83 figures a similar passage: ‘it is a disease of the brain and the nerves to be cruel . . . I wish to relieve the world of its heartbreaking character’.12 What seems to suggest itself: In December 1882, Nietzsche has not yet revealed to anybody, neither (completely) to Lou Salomé nor to Heinrich von Stein, his ‘pregnancy’: the pregnancy of the ‘female elephant’ Nietzsche.13 It came to its end in spring 1883, after 18 months respectively one and a half years, and his ‘son’ Zarathustra, Part I, first saw the light of day: ‘This book, with a voice over several millenniums’. But here, so Nietzsche declares, no prophet is speaking, not one of those gruesome hermaphrodites: illness and will to power, called founders of religions. For in the present case it is, according to the one (‘it’) talking to Nietzsche/ Zarathustra without voice, the stillest words that bring the storm; since thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.14 ‘Doves’ feet’ . . . are supposed to bring peace, aren’t they? Is there a connection with the paragraph in The Dawn mentioned above? Nietzsche had shared with Richard Wagner an interest in Buddhism, at first via Schopenhauer. Wagner had even started to compose a music drama on Buddha, entitled The Victorious, which he never completed. Moreover Wagner and Nietzsche took note of contemporary standard books on Buddhism, namely Carl Friedrich Köppen’s work, still inspired by Schopenhauer: Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung (Berlin 1857–59); Eugène Burnouf’s (Sanskrit professor in Paris): Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien (1844); and – shortly before Wagner’s death – the third great contemporary work on Buddhism, Hermann Oldenberg’s Buddha: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Gemeinde, published in 1881. Oldenberg was the first to offer a serious, well-founded presentation of Buddhism based on the oldest textual sources written in Pali and with a critical historical approach; strangely enough, in his book, Oldenberg expressly warns against viewing early Buddhism through the lenses of Schopenhauer. Among Nietzsche’s notes of Summer/Winter 1882 we find, standing all by itself, the word ‘Metteyya’, which is in fact the Pali version of the Sanskrit ‘Maitreya’. Metteyya, the next Buddha, has been prophesied by Gautama the Buddha for the far future, as Nietzsche could have learnt at least from Oldenberg’s book. (In Heinrich Kern’s two-volume work: Der Buddhismus und seine Geschichte in Indien. Eine Darstellung der Lehren und Geschichte der buddhistischen Kirche[!], in the authorized translation of Hermann Jacobi, Schulze, Leipzig 1882 and 1884, on the other hand, the name is to be found (second volume) in its Sanskrit version, which has become far better known in the Western world.) – The Pali version of the name might well serve

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as a hallmark for Nietzsche’s intention and he may have noted it down deliberately in the form of a ‘solitary block’. Sensitized in this point, one not only recognizes in Z several typical Buddhist expressions (such as Nachen, grosses Nichts, respectively boat, great nothingness etc.), but one even finds important signs/evidence that Nietzsche implicitly even refers to Zen-Buddhism; he does so in a critical way. (I wish to highlight here that the German expression ‘Stockmeister’ in the chapter ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’/Of old and new tablets has been translated inadequately to date, probably because the Zen-Buddhist context has not yet been detected by English and American translators. ‘Stick masters’ would be the simplest and best translation of ‘Stockmeister’.) Nietzsche presumably had come to know Zen-Buddhism through Reinhart von Seydlitz, as an exchange of letters suggests; von Seydlitz also belonged to the Wagner circle.15 So it is not at all amazing that Nietzsche also had acquired some knowledge about the sacred texts of early Buddhism written down in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), starting about 80 years before our era, in the language Pali: As early as in 1870, Nietzsche had taken interest in Ernst Windisch’s study tour to England, where his former university colleague, an Orientalist, in the service of the ‘East Indian Office’ catalogized ‘Sanskrit manuscripts’ in the course of one year, as Nietzsche notes in several letters. In autumn 1871 already, he writes, he will meet Windisch in Leipzig. In the Journal of the Pali Text Society of the year 1882, Windisch is in fact mentioned as the editor of one of the canonical Pali(!) text collections, the Iti-vuttaka. According to the Journal Oldenberg, as well as Kern, was put in charge of the edition of further texts by the Pali Text Society founded by Rhys Davids in 1881. Rhys Davids himself translated the Dighanikaya. The Pali Text Society confirmed upon my request that in the year of Windisch’s first study tour to England in 1870, all these manuscripts had in fact already arrived from Birma in England. In one of the crucial passages of the Dighanikaya,16 the symbol of the wheel leaps into view – just like the wheel in the photo arranged by Nietzsche in the Lucerne studio. In this passage, a young woman of noble birth, the hetaera Ambapali, in a playful mood – like Nietzsche when arranging the scene in the photo studio and precisely as described in Lou Salomé’s record – drives her wagon up against the wagons, ‘wheel against wheel’, of a group of young men called Licchiavi, who are also of noble rank.17 Thus challenging them after having earlier than they succeeded in inviting Gautama the Buddha for a meal, the hetaera Ambapali must be regarded as being their definitely non-ascetic antagonist within the

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framework of the ancient narrative, in a new kind of agonistic game – a game that will presumably conquer the world. (It might be of interest here that four colours are attributed to Ambapali’s antagonists in the contest jauntily initiated by her: the Licchiavi, through their appearance, clothing, and jewellery, are grouped into dark, yellow, red, and white – aren’t we still quite familiar with this simplified classification of the peoples in our world?) The question now is how we should conceive those non-ascetic heroes, the heroes of that ‘new religion’, as Salomé erroneously put it, or in Nietzsche’s own words: of ‘the other’, the different or differing ideal he professes to be still looking for in his second book after Zarathustra, in The Genealogy of Morals ; of the counterpart to the self-contained system of the ‘ascetic ideal’, this unified whole of will, aim, and interpretation; of the other, the different single goal.18 However, Nietzsche had stated already before the composition of Zarathustra, namely in The Gay Science : ‘a different ideal runs on ahead of us . . .’. In the first instance this is a strange formulation, in its original German version, too.19 If we consult the Dighanikaya20 we come across a great wise individual (mahapurusha, in Pali also Cakkavatti, in Sanskrit: Cakravarti) to whom both the spiritual and the worldly, that is political, paths stand open, because of his acquired perfection – which might be considered as resulting from a successful self-overcoming, a constructive integration into the individual life of those collective, transhuman, or metaphysical forces dealt with in religions and mystic or spiritual creeds. Thus, in rolling out of himself just like the wheel that has appeared in the sky as a result and a sign or symbol of his acquired perfection, this individual – who obviously served Nietzsche as the model for his conception of true individuals that Zarathustra propagates in Z I 21 – together with his more than thousand ‘heroic sons’, conquers the world, unlike his counterparts in the Sanskrit tradition, without violence and only by instituting justice, stability, and general welfare in the countries: ‘He . . . conquering not by the scourge, not by the sword, but by righteousness, he doth preside over this earth to its ocean-bounds.’22 In the Dighanikaya, the symbol of the wheel is taken up again in the account of the young woman called Ambapali, as we have already seen. The Licchiavi, still representatives of the Eastern version of the ‘ascetic ideal’, acknowledge Ambapali’s victory, saying that she has in fact outstripped them and, with some ambivalence (or shall we call it ‘ressentiment’/resentment?), that she has indeed made fools of them – whereas Nietzsche and Rée in the photograph with Salomé appear as partners in a mutual empowerment; a mutual empowerment within the framework of the ‘other’, the

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non-ascetic ideal with the notions of righteousness, justice, and general welfare at its core. Furthermore, this scene in the Dighanikaya represents an agonistic concept of a ‘different’ type of aristocracy which consists of true individuals, that is of individual wheels rolling out of themselves, as personified by Ambapali. Accordingly, the aristocracy fostered by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra consists of a nobility which is the adversary of all that is despotic. Lou Salomé would have been a perfect Ambapali: of aristocratic origins, representing the ‘different ideal’ (and thus implicitly also dissociating herself from the violence of the name ‘von Salomé’, derived from repression, namely from the services of her father as a colonel of the Russian army during the Polish insurrection of 1830/31). It is noteworthy though that, despite the disappointment, anger, pain, and sorrow that Nietzsche tried to write off his chest in many drafts after their break-up, he struggled through to the following words in a letter to Salomé of 23 November 1882: ‘I beg your pardon! Dearest Lou, be what you have to be23 – a wheel rolling out of itself’. The scene with Ambapali in the ancient narrative moreover constitutes a counterpart to any regime of a great leader organised in a basically strict and unchangeable hierarchic manner, of an Übermensch, overman, or superman, who according to the Aryan tradition proceeds to pacify the world with the help of his more than thousand heroic sons, by repression and force of arms.24 Mahayana Buddhists of the famous Kyoto school as well as prominent Zen-Buddhists including Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, who was and still is very much honoured in the Western world, fostered fascism in Japan and associated themselves with the Axis powers in World War II, declaring it a ‘holy war’.25 This expression, as we all know, has a long tradition in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish history, too. Even R. Otto Franke in his German translation of the Dighanikaya used the formulation that the great wise individual (the Cakkavatti) and victorious conqueror owes his world rulership to his heroic sons who have crushed the enemies (p. 89) – instead of simply calling them (as Rhys Davids does): ‘crushers of enemies’ presumably in the sense of: originating from the warrior caste (like the Gautama Buddha himself). And, surprisingly, Franke already stated in his translation of the Dighanikaya, which was first published in 1913, that mahapurisa, which should be best translated as ‘Übermensch’,26 resembled the concept of the Jewish Messiah. Keeping in mind that Franke, in a footnote, speaks of a striking likeness of the Buddhist conception of a Buddha and the Jewish one of a

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Messiah, I tried to find an explanation (other than Carl Gustav Jung’s ‘synchronicity’). It took me a long time, however, just to find an unbiased and convincing treatise on the subject of the Messianic idea/ideal and its origin, namely Joseph Klausner’s 1956 treatise The Messianic Idea in Israel.27 Having read this remarkable book, the amazing likeness, even in details, struck me, too. In his book on The Messianic Idea in Israel, Klausner points out that even a thoroughly ethical personality like Philo of Alexandria could not imagine a purely spiritual Messiah; he cites Philo and the oracle prophesying a man coming forth, leading his host to war, subduing great and populous nations. Let me also mention here that among the documents found in Qumran, Israel, near the Dead Sea, there is an ancient Hebrew war roll mentioning a ‘Messiah who is killing.’28 However, Klausner expresses the opinion that ‘the idea of a twofold Messiah inevitably arose from the conception of the twofold character of the essentially single Messiah’ (p. 495). With this conclusion, Klausner allows me to state, for the time being, that the Jewish ideal, the original Jewish idea of the Messiah, is identical with the pre-Aryan myth as recalled by the Pali Buddhist Dighanikaya, at least with regard to its contents. I will come back to this subject later. On top of that, I discovered in Udo Schaefer’s book Glaubenswelt Islam. Eine Einführung (second edition, 2002) a footnote referring to his, Schaefer’s, comments on obvious parallels of the Mahdi idea to the Jewish Messianic idea, published in his book Heilsgeschichte und Paradigmenwechsel (Prag 11992, Hofheim 22002, pp. 65, 70).29 The concept of holy world rulership, or emperorship, related to the concept of ‘holy war’ deriving from the Aryan version and tradition30 was very much alive in Nietzsche’s time, and it is so to date, mostly below the surface of our diverse cultures. It had grown deep roots for example in Alexander the Great, in Vergil, Thomas Campanella, and Dante, in the Hohenstaufer Frederick I (Barbarossa), Frederick II (called both Messiah emperor and Antichrist), William II, Hitler and Nazism.31 Part of the rightwing extremism not only was but still is also strongly influenced by the vision of the Buddhist program as expressed in the Shambala-Myth of the Kalachakra-Tantra dealing with the continuous Buddhocratic conquest of Europe and of our whole planet through the Chakravartin, the prophesied world ruler (so were, for example, the Japanese Shoko Asahara and his endtime sect AUM). The present Dalai Lama felt it necessary to dissociate himself in public (the first time as early as 1975) from the cult of Dorje Shugden of the Gelugpa tradition (the ‘Yellow Caps’) to which he himself

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belongs. Dorje Shugden, a guardian spirit or transcendent being, is intolerant and fosters evil, forceful, criminal means to achieve the Buddhist aims; the Dalai Lama even compares this with Nazism in Germany. The cult seems, however, to be supported by the Chinese regime; Gangchen Rinpoche, a prominent adherent of this cult who lived in Italy, was received with great honours in China in 1998. There is even some evidence to suggest that at least one of the protagonists in the dramatic and brutal conflict in former Yugoslavia draws upon such messianic traditions. The everlasting claim to the so-called ‘Serb Jerusalem’ for example was underlined by Milosevic, who seems to have identified himself with the so-called Messiah ben Joseph, the forerunner who has to kill, has to wage wars – ‘birth pangs of the Messiah’! – before the definite Messiah, the Prince of Peace, may appear: by having the bones of Lazar solemnly brought back to Kosovo, into a monastery, on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the defeat of the Serbs under Prince Lazar on the Amsel battlefield (‘Amselfeld’) against the intruding troops of the Islamic Ottoman empire. Samuel Huntington certainly is right when he writes that a local or ethnic war is usually redefined as being a war of religion (since religions have proved to be the most powerful and stable justification for the fight against ‘godless’, ‘wicked’ powers), a war of civilizations, and thus tends to entail severe consequences for a large part of humanity. But Huntington ignores its hidden archetypal origin. He has not, like Nietzsche, ‘gained wisdom concerning ancient origins’, and therefore, is scarcely able to ‘eventually look for’ and discover ‘wellsprings of the future’ and ‘new origins’. The ancient myth or great narrative, which deployed such an enormous archetypal power pre-eminently in its Aryan version, remains crucial to the three prevailing monotheistic cultures also insofar as it endows Nietzsche’s saying that God is dead, at least the old God who was to guarantee the existence of truth as such, with a new and concrete meaning. In the course of his radical, unconditional, and uncompromising quest for truth, scientific truth, Nietzsche’s discovery thus necessarily entails a post-postmodern permanent oscillation between truth and narrative in his works. By 1993, Derrida for example, like Levinas before him, had begun to associate himself with the word ‘messianic’ (with references to Walter Benjamin, and also to Karl Marx), with a ‘messianicity’ that would, however, fit the hand of deconstruction – a transcendence like a prophetic aspiration, a Jewish or perhaps ‘Jewgreek’ messianic passion (a word that sounds a bit Nietzschean) – or a sighing or longing for something unrepresentable (l’avenir à venir).32 For Derrida, too, the notion of ‘justice’ is vital to the

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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 nonAryan 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. Anyway, he ridiculed the ambition of revolutionaries to introduce new calendars; whereas he eventually, in a letter of 26 November 1888, mysteriously whispers to Paul Deussen that he, Nietzsche, has ‘the power to change time’ (KSB 8, pp. 491 f. – my italicized accentuation). Obviously we have not digressed with these considerations from the question as to ‘the sign’ posed by Nietzsche in The Dawn, Book I, nr 96 entitled ‘In hoc signo vinces’ – ‘When finally all manners and customs on which the

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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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Collège, 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. Bataille’s intention was to oppose fascism – but Julius Evola, too, the fascist theoretician of spirituality, claimed

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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 teachings 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 Zarathustra’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s texts totally

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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 civilizations, 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 flaws’41) 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 individual’s own internal competitive forces become manifest, and a more profound consciousness and greater sensitivity 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Stein’s 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

Justice and Gift-Giving in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Vanessa Lemm

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 Adder’s 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 intimate 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 practices 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

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strictly economic ideas of distributive justice, which, in the words of Derrida, transform the gift into an ‘exchangist, even contractual circulation’ (Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, p. 138). The latter are based on economic transactions which do not reflect a desire not to keep, but rather a desire to make an additional profit. The intimate relationship between gift-giving and justice indicates, in my view, that the gift-giving virtue belongs to a conception of morality that is political. Here, the political should be understood with reference to a conception of justice that gives priority to one’s relationship to the other. It rejects utilitarian conceptions of justice because they reduce the other to a permutation of the self. Justice as gift-giving provides an alternative to those forms of sociability that are based on utilitarian principles, in particular, on the idea that the good is useful and that it is held in common with others.4 What distinguishes Nietzsche’s anti-utilitarian conception of justice from other critiques of utilitarianism is that it is not concerned with supplying a contractual basis for justice, one in which the self and the other stand in a reciprocal relationship and the terms of mutual offerings of the self vis-a-vis other. Rather, for Nietzsche, justice must be structured by gift-giving, where the relationship between the self and the other is not symmetrical and reciprocal. In such an asymmetrical relationship, what the self gives to the other and the other to the self is an acknowledgement of the distance and difference between them. Gift-giving promotes justice precisely because it acknowledges (receives) the other’s irreducible singularity. It is in this sense that it has a liberating effect on both the self and the other. There is another sense in which the virtue of gift-giving is political, namely, insofar as it revives the Greek conception of political friendship, philia politiké, understood as a bond between equals who stimulate each other to develop their virtue. Like gift-giving, Greek political friendship preserves the other’s freedom through distance while simultaneously challenging the realization of the other’s freedom through struggle and competition (agon). Interestingly, in Z, this agonistic relationship to the other takes the form of a friendship with the animals. Zarathustra, it is said, attains virtue in competition with the animals (Z: 22 ‘On Old and New Tablets’). The virtue of courage, for example, is an animal virtue that Zarathustra ‘robs’ from the animals: 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

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serpents’ wisdom – that, it seems to me, is today called – Zarathustra! (Z ‘On Science’) The intimate connection between an agonistic friendship with the animals and the attainment of virtue in general, raises the question of whether the attainment of justice as gift-giving does not also depend on a friendship with the animals; whether the gift-giving virtue is not also an animal virtue, that is, a virtue that Zarathustra has robbed from the animals. It might be significant in this context to note that throughout Z, Nietzsche not only refers to Zarathustra’s gifts as honey but also tells us that Zarathustra receives this honey from his animal friends who have gathered it for him so that he can offer and spend it.5 If the virtue of gift-giving turns out to be an animal virtue, then one could argue that justice as gift-giving provides an alternative to forms of social and political life that are derived from (moral) practices of domination and the exploitation of animality (GM II, 1–3). In my hypothesis, the lack of justice and generosity that Nietzsche detects in the Christian practices of charity and alms giving result from denying animality a productive role in the constitution of sociability. In particular, these practices ignore the value and significance of what Nietzsche refers to as the forgetfulness of the animal. Throughout his work, Nietzsche argues that the forgetfulness of the animal is revelatory of the strength and fullness of life. It is a force indispensable not only to actions of any kind (HL 1) but also to acceding to the privilege of making promises (GM II, 1–3). In contrast, he associates the inability to forget like an animal with weakness, passivity and a general poverty of life that manifests itself, in particular, as the incapacity to overcome resentment and revenge (Z ‘On the Pitying’).6 The problem of revenge is of such great importance to Nietzsche because justice as gift-giving is possible only when the cycle of revenge has been broken, when feelings of resentment have been overcome. However, in Z, the forgetfulness of the animal does play a crucial role in the breaking of the cycle of revenge, and thus, in enhancing the creation of forms of memory that have a truly redemptive and reconciliatory power; but, the forgetfulness of the animal is, moreover, at the heart of the virtue of gift-giving insofar as it exemplifies a desire not to keep (Z: 4 ‘Prologue’). Upon the basis of these two important roles played by the forgetfulness of the animal in Nietzsche’s analysis of gift-giving, I contend that the latter should be understood as an animal rather than a human virtue. In this context, I would also like to point out some of the affinities I see between Nietzsche and Derrida concerning gift and giving.7 I am

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particularly interested in the relationship both Nietzsche and Derrida see between gift-giving, on the one hand, and a movement of temporalization that involves both memory and forgetfulness, on the other. Derrida holds that there can be no gift without forgetfulness, that forgetting is in the condition of the gift and the gift in the condition of forgetting (Derrida, Given Time, p. 16 ff.). Derrida argues that a gift without ambivalence, a gift that would not be a poisonous present but a good, must happen in such a way that the forgetting forgets itself. At the same time, however, this forgetfulness, without being something present, presentable, determinable, sensible, or meaningful is not nothing either. The question is how it is possible to want to forget, to want not to keep. I suggest that an analysis of the virtue of gift-giving in Z might offer an answer to this question. In Z, Nietzsche uses the metaphor of gold, of the metal and of the colour, to describe the virtue of gift-giving.8 Gold serves as ‘an image of the highest virtue’ because it is, like the virtue of gift-giving, ‘uncommon (ungemein) and useless (unnützlich) and gleaming (leuchtend) and gentle (mild) in its splendor’ (Z: 1 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’). In what follows, I will examine Nietzsche’s conception of justice as gift-giving using the four main characteristics that gold shares with the virtue of gift-giving as my guiding thread. I will begin with the ‘gleaming’ character of the virtue of gift-giving. I contend that the latter signifies that gift-giving constitutes a relationship to the other, a relationship that is neither an exchange between objects, because giving means giving one’s self, nor an exchange between subjects, because gift-giving is an event that exceeds the self. I argue that what arrives in the event of the gift is the attainment of freedom and justice generated through forms of social and political life that have their source in gift-giving. I will then turn to the other three characteristics of the virtue of gift-giving – its ‘uselessness,’ ‘uncommonness,’ and ‘gentleness’ – to determine what distinguishes the ideas of freedom and justice based on gift-giving from other ideas of freedom and justice.

The gift-giving virtue is like gold: ‘gleaming’ 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 (übergehen).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

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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 (Hinübergehende)’ (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 Nietzsche’s 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 being’s 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

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require a return of and to animality, in particular, to the forgetfulness of the animal, understood as a force of life indispensable to the self-overcoming of the human being. In his account, freedom and justice arise from friendship with the animals, rather than from mastery over them. When Zarathustra exclaims that he needs hands outstretched to receive his gift, this need should not be confused with the needs of those who give alms to pacify their conscience or out of a desire to raise themselves above others or receive gratefulness in return for their gift. According to Nietzsche, the latter are examples of practices of giving involving individuals who are in reality too poor to give. Zarathustra affirms that he gives no alms: ‘[f]or that I am not poor enough’ (Z: 2 ‘Prologue’). By contrast, he sees his poverty reflected in the fact that he cannot not give: ‘This is my poverty that my hands never rest from giving’ (Z ‘The Night Song’). The peculiarity of gift-giving is that it occurs through need - it is necessary and inevitable (I will return to this aspect of gift-giving below), but at the same time, this need does not point to a deficiency but arises from an over-fullness of life exemplified by the over-fullness of the sun which also ‘gleams’ like gold.13 In the Prologue, Zarathustra praises the sun and calls it an ‘over-rich star’ (Z: 1 ‘Prologue’) indicating that gift-giving occurs only through an abundance, a surplus, and an exuberance (Überfluß) of the self.14 This over-fullness is exemplified by Zarathustra himself, the ‘giver of gifts’, who compares himself to ‘a bee that has gathered too much honey’ and needs ‘hands outstretched to receive it’ (Z: 1 ‘Prologue’).15 Zarathustra has reached saturation (Überdruss); he has accumulated so many riches that these riches aspire to be distributed and given out. His suffering from saturation reflects the impatience of the one who wants to give, that is, to destroy the boundaries that are too tight to contain his riches. As such, gift-giving constitutes a movement of pluralizing and diversifying life through exceeding the limits of one’s own being.

Giving the self The idea of gift-giving as an overflowing (überfliessen) of the self signifies that justice as gift-giving can neither be understood as an exchange of objects nor as an exchange between subjects. In the words of Derrida, ‘there where there is subject and object, the gift would be excluded’ (Derrida, Given Time, p. 119) because what flows over to the other resists being reduced to the status of a subject or an object. Let me address the question of why gift-giving does not constitute an exchange of objects before I turn

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to the question of why it does not constitute an exchange between subjects. For Nietzsche, gift-giving cannot be understood as an exchange of objects because to give essentially means to give who one is rather then what one possesses. The desire to give who one is can be exemplified by Zarathustra’s disciples’ desire to become gifts: 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’) Gift-giving presupposes a readiness to give oneself, to sacrifice one’s life: ‘to live on and live no longer’ for the sake of virtue (Z: 4 ‘Prologue’; see also in comparison, TI ‘Skirmishes’ 38). Although Nietzsche repeatedly speaks of gift-giving as a sacrificing (Z: 4 ‘Prologue’; Z: 1 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’), it is important to note that he also explicitly distinguishes this idea from the Christian view that the morally good act must be an act of self-sacrifice. In ‘The Honey Sacrifice’, Zarathustra confesses that his discussion of sacrifices is mere ‘cunning’ (List): ‘Why sacrifice? I squander what is given to me, I – squander it with a thousand hands; how could I call that sacrificing?’ (Z ‘The Honey Sacrifice’). The crucial difference between squandering in the Nietzschean sense and sacrificing in the Christian sense is that while the former is constituted by egoism, the latter is constituted by selflessness. Whereas the squanderer is full of him- or herself and, therefore, rich in gifts, the one who sacrifices him- or herself is self-less and thus has nothing to give. Against the idea that ‘what makes an act good is that it is unselfish’ (Z ‘On the Virtuous’), Nietzsche upholds Zarathustra’s teaching to let ‘your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child – let that be your word concerning virtue’ (Z ‘On the Virtuous’). What is hidden behind the ‘selflessness’ exemplified by the Christian practices of charity and love for one’s neighbour is an absence of a self, an impoverished and weak self which cannot stand itself: ‘You flee to your neighbour from yourself and you want to make a virtue out of it: but I see through your “selflessness”’ (Z ‘On Love of the Neighbour’). Nietzsche detects in the so-called love for one’s neighbour an attempt to compensate for one’s own interior emptiness. By contrast, the truly virtuous act is egoistic in the sense of being full of the self rather than selfless (selbstlos). Zarathustra praises the selfishness of his disciples, their insatiable striving for ‘treasures and gems’, their forcing ‘all things to and into themselves’, as

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‘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 ‘explosion’ of the self that displaces and ultimately ends up destroying the self in view of enriching the other (see also TI ‘Skirmishes’ 44).16 Zarathustra’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 one’s ‘own invention,’ one’s ‘own most personal defence and necessity,’ ‘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 other’s 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.

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Giving beyond the self The idea of the squandering of the self is central in Nietzsche’s account of the gift. It not only explains why gift-giving does not constitute an exchange between objects but also leads us to answer the question of why it does not constitute an exchange between subjects. Nietzsche compares the overflowing of the self in the act of squandering to the natural movement of a river overflowing its banks. Both movements are ‘involuntary (unfreiwillig)’: they illustrate the idea that gift-giving is not an act which can be traced back to an intentional subject, a conscious decision, or a willful act.18 Gift-giving occurs inevitably, fatefully, involuntarily. Gift-giving is not under the control of a mastering individual, but rather occurs in and through, over and above the self. The giver of gifts gives him- or herself over to the other not because they are free to give, but because he or she is not free not to give. Throughout his work, Nietzsche describes the absence of an intention, consciousness, or reason behind individual action in terms of the forgetfulness of the animal (HL 1; GM II, 1). In the Prologue to Z, Nietzsche confirms that there also exists an intimate connection between the forgetfulness of the animal, on the one hand, and the virtue of gift-giving on the other: ‘I love the one whose soul is overfull so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under’ (Z: 4 ‘Prologue’).19 The connection between forgetfulness and gift-giving indicates that what ‘acts’, or is active, in gift-giving is the forgetfulness of the animal and, hence, that gift-giving is an animal rather than a human virtue. The question of gift-giving then becomes the question of how to recover the forgetfulness of the animal; how to re-appropriate the forgetfulness of the animal, a force the human being has lost throughout the process of its civilization and humanization, but needs to recover to accede to the virtue of gift-giving? For Nietzsche, the recovery of the forgetfulness of the animal should not be misunderstood as the voluntary act of bringing back the animal. Instead, it is conceived of in the terms of a chance encounter where the human being encounters its animality (and animal forgetfulness) as much as it is being encountered, recovered, and surprised by it. But, if the possibility of the gift depends on the return of and to the forgetfulness of the animal, then gift-giving must also be understood as a chance encounter and, hence, requires patience, readiness, and attentiveness to grasp the moment of the gift-event.20 In Z, Nietzsche names this chance encounter of the gift ‘the great hazar’ (Z ‘The Honey Sacrifice’). In ‘the Honey Sacrifice’, Zarathustra is waiting for the advent of an event, for the moment when he will go under like the sun. Zarathustra’s waiting illustrates the idea that the gift is a gift

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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 Zarathustra’s departure from his disciples at the end of book one when he separates from his disciples 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 Zarathustra’s hesitation to enter into a gift-giving relationship 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 GiftGiving 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 sacrifice. 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 oversaturated 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 everything 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’). Zarathustra’s 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. ‘Zarathustra’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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

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Shapiro convincingly argues, a transvaluation of how we evaluate.21 I will now turn to the other characteristics of gift-giving, its ‘uselessness’, ‘uncommonness’, and ‘gentleness’ to show what a transvaluation of how we evaluate might consist of, on the one hand and, on the other, provide further arguments for why attaining a human community based on gift-giving promotes an idea of freedom and justice worth struggling for.

The gift-giving virtue is like gold: ‘useless’ The virtue of gift-giving is useless (unnützlich) because it neither fulfils a particular function or purpose nor satisfies a particular interest or need.22 Those who practice the virtue of gift-giving, thus, need to be distinguished from those who practice virtue only in view of a potential profit, in view of receiving greater benefits in return. They are those who, for example, when they praise, pretend to be giving back, when in truth they want more gifts (Z: 1 ‘On Virtue That Makes Small’, see also KSA 12 9[79]). The virtue of gift-giving, by contrast, takes justice beyond economy, beyond the utilitarian calculus. Nietzsche insists, through the words of Zarathustra, that ‘there is no reward and paymaster’ for virtue, ‘[a]nd verily, I do not even teach that virtue is its own reward’ (Z ‘On the Virtuous’). The virtuous, as Nietzsche imagines them, know that ‘whatever has a price has little value’ (Z: 12 ‘On Old and New Tablets’), or, conversely, that ‘the value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 38). Those who practice the virtue of gift-giving conceive of life as a gift and of their own life as a response (-ibility) and a giving back: 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 necessarily exclude one another if, by reason, one means calculating in terms of

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costs and benefits.23 The virtue of gift-giving manifests itself as a passion, a ‘gift-giving love’ (Z: 2 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’) which, by definition, contains a grain of madness: ‘there is always some madness in love’ (Z: 5 ‘Prologue’). According to utilitarian principles, gift-giving is mad because it suspends the instinct of self-preservation: I love him whose soul squanders (verschwendet) itself, who wants no thanks and returns none (nicht zurückgiebt): for he always gives away (schenkt) and does not preserve (bewahren) himself. (Z: 4 ‘Prologue’) Gift-giving is a squandering which presupposes a fullness of life, an overflowing, wasteful, and dissipating force that gives gratuitously, free from the expectation of receiving material or spiritual compensation in the future. For Nietzsche, the madness of suspending an economy of self-conservation in favour of an economy of expenditure is of crucial importance for the possibility of entering into a relation with the other which is free, like the gift, ‘not bound in its purity, not even binding, obligatory or obliging’ (Derrida, Given Time, p. 137). Hence, the virtue of gift-giving is a madness which is not so mad for ‘there is also always some reason in madness’ (Z: 5 ‘Prologue’).24 For Nietzsche, like Derrida, the gift is a madness which defies the common measure. It is, in the words of Derrida, ‘extraordinary’, ‘unusual’, ‘strange’, ‘extravagant’, ‘absurd’, and ‘mad’ (Derrida, Given Time, p. 35), or, in the words of Nietzsche, it is like ‘gold’ ‘uncommon’ (Z: 1 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’).

The gift-giving virtue is like gold: ‘uncommon’ The gift-giving virtue is uncommon (ungemein) insofar as it reflects the individual’s singularity. The virtue of gift-giving shares this feature with virtue in general for ‘your virtue is yourself and not something foreign’ (Z ‘On the Virtuous’). Virtue is, in this sense, inherently aristocratic. It distinguishes each and every individual’s genius, the irreducible uniqueness of its gift and giving. Nietzsche rejects the idea of ‘virtue as an ideal for everyone’ for it takes ‘from virtue the charm of rareness, inimitability, exceptionality and unaverageness – its aristocratic magic’ (WP 317). For Nietzsche, the singularity of each and every individual cannot be determined and fixed in comparison to others but always remains inaccessible, at a distance or at a certain height. Accordingly, the virtue of gift-giving is placed at a height: ‘the gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue’ (Z: 1 ‘On

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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 overlooks 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, incommunicable, 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.

Gift-giving and friendship In Nietzsche, and interestingly, also in Derrida, the only kind of relationship which appreciates the virtue of gift-giving is that between singular individuals. It is important to stress that this neither signifies a retreat to the private sphere nor reduces the problem of justice to a moral or ethical one. On the contrary, any relationship that engages two singular individuals designates a philia politké, a political friendship, whose political significance is derived from the fact that it may be the only kind of relationship that generates freedom and justice.25 Opposed to the need to enter into language as a realm of common and rational measures, the friends’ preferred manner of communication is nonverbal and silent: ‘Silentium. – One should not talk about one’s friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship’ (AOM 252).26 Friendship can only be exercised ‘in a sort of counter-culture of knowing how to keep silent’ (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 52). Silence protects the irreducible singularity of the friend, it preserves the other’s essential secret: ‘it is difficult to live with people because it is difficult to be silent’ (Z ‘On the Pitying’). Language constitutes a danger not only to friendship – speech ruins, corrupts, degrades, and belittles the greatness Nietzsche attributes to

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friendship – but also to gift-giving insofar as they are silent and solitary acts: ‘Oh, the loneliness (Einsamkeit) of all givers (Schenkenden)! Oh, the taciturnity (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 relationship 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 one’s neighbour (Nächstenliebe), 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 friendship (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 one’s 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 neighbour 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 sufficient for me: I give each my own’ (Z ‘On the Adder’s Bite’). To give to each his or her own requires not only that one knows what constitutes the other’s ‘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 one’s 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

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from each other as exemplified by Zarathustra’s departure from his disciples (Z: 3 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’). The parting between friends signifies that they do not subordinate themselves to any authority, but mutually offer to each other their freedom. Among friends, the ruling principle is not that of the reciprocity of charity, but that of the absolute probity of its members without hidden thoughts and interests. Between friends, the practice of gift-giving takes on an agonistic character. It stimulates the other’s becoming and self-overcoming, challenging him or her to the becoming of greater virtue.27 Between friends, the virtue of gift-giving is before all ‘delight in war and victory’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 38), a striving for power which presupposes struggle and suffering: Not contentment (Zufriedenheit), but more power (Macht); not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (Tüchtigkeit) (virtue in the Renaissance style, virtù, virtue free of moralic acid). (A 2) Nietzsche describes the virtue of gift-giving as a ‘power’ (Macht), a ‘dominant thought (herrschender Gedanke)’ that is inseparable from a will ‘to command all things’ (Z: 1 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’; see in comparison Z ‘On Self-Overcoming’). Zarathustra sees this will to power reflected in his disciples who ‘must approach all values as a robber’; who ‘force (zwingt) all things to and into themselves,’ but only so that they can flow back out of their ‘wells (Borne)’ as ‘the gifts of their love’ (Z: 1 ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’). Nietzsche contrasts their will to power with that of the ‘small men (Menschen) of virtue’ who steal because they cannot rob: ‘And when you receive it is like stealing, you small men of virtue; but even among rogues, honor says: “One should steal only where one cannot rob”’ (Z: 3 ‘On Virtue That Makes Small’). One should not, however, confuse the striving for power reflected in gift-giving with a striving for domination and power over others. On the contrary, gift-giving is of such great importance to Nietzsche precisely because it is ‘gentle’ and mild in its splendor: it overcomes the violence and injustice associated with relations of domination towards greater freedom and justice.

The gift-giving virtue is like gold: ‘gentle’ 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 punishment, for ‘to judge is the same thing as to be unjust’ (HH 39; see also GM I,

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II; TI ‘Errors’ 7; WS 68; and AOM 33). A passage from ‘The Adder’s 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 Adder’s Bite’)28 Punishment and judgment degrade and belittle unless a punishment ‘is not also a right and an honor for the transgressor’ (Z ‘On the Adder’s Bite’), that is, something that elevates and distinguishes both the one who punishes and the one who is punished. Ultimately, however, it is best to refrain from judgment and punishment altogether because ‘it is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right – especially when one is right. Only one must be rich enough for that’ (Z ‘On the Adder’s Bite’). Nietzsche warns against those ‘in whom the impulse to punish is powerful’, and against those ‘who speak of their justice’, for they are those who ‘lack more than honey’, who have nothing to give (Z ‘On the Tarantulas’). Nietzsche sees in their quest for justice the pursuit of revenge, for ‘when they say “I am just (gerecht),” it always sounds like “I am revenged (gerächt)!” With their virtue they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies, and they exalt (erheben) themselves only to humble others (erniedrigen)’ (Z ‘On the Virtuous’; see in comparison AOM 33). In contrast, the virtue of giftgiving is gentle: it takes justice beyond revenge. In Z, Nietzsche directly connects the ability to overcome revenge with the active force of animal forgetfulness: ‘[g]reat indebtedness does not make grateful but vengeful; and if a little charity (Wohltat) is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm’ (Z ‘On the Pitying’) indicating that what is responsible for the emergence of forms of social and political organization that overcome violence and domination is the gentleness of the animal, the gentleness of gift-giving. The virtue of gift-giving is ‘gentle (mild) in its splendor’ (Z: 1 ‘On the GiftGiving Virtue’) because it is practiced with the awareness that it always risks losing the ‘shame’ (Z ‘The Night Song’) needed to preserve a ‘distancing relationship on the basis of which there is something to honor in virtue’ (WP 317). Gift-giving protects both the one who gives and the one who receives from being made small by virtue (Z: 1–3 ‘On Virtue that Makes Small’). Hence, the giver of gifts approaches the other only at a distance and with reverence (Ehrfurcht) for the others’ inaccessible distinctiveness

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and irreducible singularity. The figure of Zarathustra, the giver of gifts, exemplifies this idea when he addresses his disciples by saying: ‘I like to give as a friend to friends. Strangers, however, and the poor may themselves pluck the fruit from my tree: that will cause them less shame’ (Z ‘On the Pitying’). For there to be a gift, giving and receiving should not be perceived either by the giver or by the receiver.29 The image of the tree and the plucking of its fruits illustrates that the giver of gifts gives without causing shame, without humiliating and belittling because he or she gives without being recognized (WP 317; see also, D 464), having recovered the forgetfulness of the animal, the gentleness of gift-giving.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

Translation from Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in Zaei Banden, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, p. 659. Carnap, Rudolf (1959) ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’, Logical Positivism, ed. by A.J. Ayer, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 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. Schacht, R. (1983) Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

The Symphonic Structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Preliminary Outline 1

2

In early 2005, an undergraduate student from Norway, Brage Brakedal, asked if he could take a directed reading course with me on Z. When I suggested exploring the work’s symphonic structure with the help of Laurence Lampert’s study, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, he agreed with alacrity, and ended up with a very plausible articulation. I depart from Mr Brakedal’s picture in some details of the first and second parts/movements, and in regarding the third part as a final movement in rondo form rather than a third of four in scherzo and trio. In a discussion of Zarathustra in his Nietzsche Biographie, Curt Paul Janz asks in a section heading, ‘Is Zarathustra a “Symphony”?’ His conclusion is, ‘To a certain extent, but one must first completely forget about the formal conception of “the symphony” in favour of the musical in general.’ (Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche Biographie [Munich 1978], 2: 211, p. 220.) Michael Allen Gillespie is more sanguine, saying that ‘Nietzsche employs musical forms to coordinate the various aphorisms within a larger whole’ in his late works and ‘probably in Zarathustra’. (‘Nietzsche’s Musical Politics’, in Nietzsche’s New Seas, ed. by Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong [1988], Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 119.) I regret that Gillespie’s insightful essay, which beautifully demonstrates that Twilight of the Idols is composed in sonata form, came to my attention only after this contribution of mine was already in galley proofs. Nietzsche, letter to Franz Overbeck, 6 February 1884 (KSB 6: 475).

184 3

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5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21

22

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Letter of 15 January 1888 (KSB 8: 232); a shorter version, ‘Without Music Life Would Be an Error’, is in TI, ‘Maxims and Arrows’ § 33. Among studies of this topic, Georges Liébert’s Nietzsche and Music is especially to be recommended, despite the author’s occasional testiness with respect to the first of his two subjects. See also the section ‘The Musicality of Zarathustra’ in the Introduction to my translation of Z (Oxford, 2005). Hans Joachim Mette (1994) (ed.) Friedrich Nietzsche Jugendschriften, five vols, 1: 1–2; 1: 12–13; 1: 18; 1: 27, Munich: Beck. Letters of 27 April 1863 (KSB 1: 238) and 6 September 1863 (1: 253). See Curt Paul Janz (1976) (ed.) Der musikalische Nachlass/Friedrich Nietzsche, Basel: Barenreiter-Verlag. André Schaeffner, cited in Liébert, Nietzsche and Music, p. 1. Nietzsche, HH I: 586; The Joyful Science, 373; KSA 10: 7[62]. Letter to Köselitz, 22 June 1887 (KSB 8: 95). CW, § 1.*** Letter of 20 October 1887 (KSB 7:***). David S. Thatcher (1975) ‘Musical Settings of Nietzsche-Texts: An Annotated Bibliography’, Nietzsche-Studien, 4: 284–323; (1976) 5: 355–383. KSA 9: 11[141]. Letter of 14 August 1881 (KSB 6: 113). KSA 9: 11[195, 197]. EH, ‘Zarathustra’, § 1. Letter of 10 January 1883 (KSB 6: 316). Letter of 1 February 1883 (KSB 6: 321). In another letter to Köselitz six months later, Nietzsche writes that it should be easy to recognize ‘that the first part comprises a ring of feelings that is a presupposition for the ring of feelings that make up the second part’ (KSB 6: 442). For an intelligent articulation of the ways in which Zarathustra is a challenge to The Ring (as well as to Parsifal), see Roger Hollinrake (1982) Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pessimism, London: Allen & Unwin. Letter of 1 February 1883 (KSB 6: 324). In an earlier letter to Lou Salomé, Nietzsche uses the expression ad unguem to refer to his work on revising The Joyful Science: ‘The final decision on the text requires the most scrupulous “hearing” of every word and sentence. Sculptors refer to this last phase of the work as ad unguem’ (KSB 6: 213). Horace uses the expression ad unguem, recommending that one ‘condemn that poem which/many days and many erasures have not pruned and/revised and chastened ten times to the nail’ (Ars Poetica, pp. 292–294). Some think it refers to the phase of polishing in which the sculptor perfects the very fingernails of the statue. Letter of 2 April 1883 (KSB 6: 353); 18 January 1884 (KSB 6: 466); 6 February 1884 (KSB 6: 475); 30 March 1884 (KSB 6: 491); 25 February 1884 (KSB 6: 480). As quoted by Bernard Scharlitt (1920) ‘Gespräch mit Mahler’, Musikblätter des Anbruchs II, Verlag, p. 310. Ralph Hill cites the introductory sinfonia to Peri’s opera Eurydice of 1600, which may be the first significant instance. Ralph Hill (1949) The Symphony, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 11.

Notes 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32

33

34 35

36 37

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For the Christmas after his twelfth birthday Nietzsche received a folio of 12 fourhanded 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). Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik, pp. 41, 121, 123. Nietzsche, Z, trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford 2005). Letter of 13 July 1883 (KSB 6: 397). Hesiod and Theognis (1979) Works and Days, line 116, trans. by Dorothea Wender, New York: Penguin Books, p. 116. EH, Preface, § 4. EH, ‘Zarathustra’, § 7. The term Zurückwollen 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). EH, ‘Zarathustra’, § 7. 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. Nietzsche’s early evaluation in a letter to Köselitz 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 Bizet’s opera was relatively unknown has turned out to be highly prescient. Mark, 10: 30. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) BGE, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 246. KSA 9: 4[285] (1880). Zarathustra, Prologue § 2; Revelation 1: 8; Zarathustra, 3: 16 § 6.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche’s Autobiography 1

2 3

4 5 6

EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, p. 3. Compare also the rather different statement, KSA 11, 25[148], from early 1884, written while reading Renan’s Vie de Jèsus. EH, ‘Zarathustra’, p. 8. However, Nietzsche once, in a letter to Overbeck, 7 May 1885, states that ‘Do not believe that my son Zarathustra speaks my views. He is one of my preparations and intermissions’ (compare letter to Elisabeth, 20 May 1885), which was the expression of Nietzsche’s hope and desire to go beyond Also sprach Zarathustra, which he never fully managed to do. I discuss this below, in the penultimate section, and have done so in more detail in my article, ‘Nietzsche’s Magnum Opus’, History of European Ideas, 32 : 278–294 (2006). ‘Aus meinem Leben’, BAW 1, 1–32 and KGW I.1, 281–311. Letter to Brandes, 8 January 1888. Letter to Knortz, 21 June 1888.

186 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14

15

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17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24

25

Notes

That this relates to Nietzsche’s own development is still clearer in an early draft, KSA 14, 140 f. In this earlier draft Nietzsche writes in the form of ‘we’ instead of ‘they’, that is, the note then began: ‘We at present begin . . . our . . . [etc.]’. Letter to Burckhardt, 1 May 1883: ‘irgendwann schüttet Jeder einmal sein Herz aus’. Letter to Gast, end of August 1883. Letter to Karl Hillebrand, 24 May 1883. Letter to Gast, 17 April 1883. Letter to Overbeck, 12 February 1887. Hollingdale’s translation. I agree with Salaquarda (‘Der Sohn des ElephantenWeibes’ in Entdecken und Verraten: Zu Leben und Werk Friedrich Nietzsches, ed. by Andreas Schirmer and Rüdiger Schmidt [Weimar 1999], and also in ‘Die Grundconception des Zarathustra’ in Klassiker Auslegen: Also sprach Zarathustra, ed. by Volker Gerhardt [Berlin 2000], pp. 69–92 that a merely biographical reading of Also sprach Zarathustra is of limited value, but such a reading in combination with other kinds of readings is paramount. Furthermore, the biographical approach here also gives us insights into how Nietzsche worked. Many notes and in several letters, for example, KSA 11, 26[394], summer– autumn 1884, and 34[204], April–June 1885, KSA 12, 6[4] and in letters to Förster, 16 April 1885, to Overbeck, 7 May and middle of July 1885, to Widemann 31 July 1885 and to Fritzsch, 29 August 1886. KSA 12, 6[4] and letter to Gast, 6 April 1883. Nietzsche never explicitly refers to himself as the mother of Zarathustra, but he refers to the work and figure as a pregnancy, the time when he had the idea of eternal recurrence as its conception and so on. For example, in a letter to Brandes, 8 January 1888 about his tendency to feel pity. EH, ‘gute Bücher’, § 1. Compare also Zur Genealogie der Moral, Preface, § 8. EH, ‘Unzeitgemässe’, § 3. Ibid., ‘GT’, § 4. Ibid., ‘Klok’, p. 4. Compare also KSA 11, 25[87]. Rohde to Nietzsche, 22 December 1883. See Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck, 9 September 1882. Compare also Nietzsche’s letter to Paul Rée, 15 September 1882. Even after Nietzsche had intellectually and philosophically rejected pity around 1876, he still speaks of his own too great ability to feel it, with statements such as ‘Pity is my weakness’ and ‘Is pity not a feeling out of hell?’. (Draft of letter to unknown recipient, possibly Salome, end of November 1882 and a letter to Salome and Ree near 20 December 1882, ‘Ist nicht Mitleid ein Gefühl aus der Hölle?’) Zarathustra discusses Schopenhauer’s philosophy in sections ‘Of SelfOvercoming’ and ‘Of Immaculate Perception’ and in ‘The Prophet’ he describes his biographical response and liberation from Schopenhauer. Most commentators agree that the magician, the sorcerer [the Zauberer] in book four is modelled on Wagner. KSA 9, 11[195]. The next note, on the same theme, under the title ‘Zum Entwurf einer neuen Art zu leben’ is at the end dated with the words ‘Sils-Maria 26 August 1881’, that is only a few weeks after his discovery of the idea of eternal recurrence.

Notes 26

27

28 29 30

31

32 33

34

35

36

37 38

39 40

41 42

43

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‘Beiträge zur Quellenforschung mitgeteilt von Paolo D’Iorio’, Nietzsche-Studien, 22: 395–397 (1993). Von Hellwald, Friedrich (1876) Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart, Augsburg: Lampart & Co., p. 128. Ibid., p. 129. EH, ‘Why I am a Destiny’, p. 3. Compare Zarathustra’s 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. Hellwald’s book is strongly Darwinian, and it is also, in print, dedicated to the greatest German Darwinist, E. Haeckel. This section is also dealt with more philosophically by Peter Yates below. 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. 44–46. 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. Quoted in Gilman, Sander L. (1987) Begegnungen mit Nietzsche2. Aufl., Nachdr. Bonn. Bouvier. 819 S. Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik, p. 478. 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. See Gilman, Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, 429 f. 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. 29–51 and by R. Perkins (1997) in Nietzsche-Studien, 26, 361 ff. See KGW VI.4, p. 887 which shows that the bird originally symbolized Lou. Unfortunately, the biographical information related to Also sprach Zarathustra seems not to have been collected together at one place anywhere. See KSA 14, p. 306. See Nietzsche’s letters to Franziska and his sister, 1 April 1882, and to Overbeck, 8 April 1882, and Peter Gast’s comments about the journey, KGB III.7/1, p. 203. Compare EH, ‘Zarathustra‘, p. 1, where Nietzsche claims that this idea constitute the centrepiece of the work. This is visible, among others, in letters to Lou Salomé, 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

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46

47

48

49

50

51

52

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. For example, while reading Emerson’s 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. 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 commentary 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 Spitteler’s possible influence on Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and the discussions of this question, see Curt Paul Janz’ Nietzsche biography, II, pp. 224–228. Spitteler’s Prometheus und Epimetheus [1881] is in Nietzsche’s private library, but may have been sent to him in September 1887, see Widemann’s 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 Stauffacher’s ‘Carl Spitterler und Friedrich Nietzsche: Ein Ferngespräch’, in Nietzsche und die Schweiz (Zürich 1994), ed. by David Marc Hoffmann, pp. 133–139, and the references therein. Curt Paul Janz, in his standard biography of Nietzsche suggests as another fundamental stimulus Shelley’s ‘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 Nietzsche’s 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). Unfortunately, these and other sources to Also sprach Zarathustra seem not to have been collected together and discussed at one place anywhere. ‘Nietzsche’s Reading at the Time of Morgenröthe: An Overview and a Discussion of his Reading of J. Popper’. This paper will be published in conference proceedings about Nietzsche’s Morgenröthe during 2007 or 2008, ed. by Paolo D’Iorio. 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 Köckert, middle of February 1885 and to Fritzsch, 29 August 1886. See the letter accompanying Jenseits von Gut und Böse to Jacob Burckhardt, 22 September 1886. See letter to Fritzsch, 29 April 1887: ‘Meine Absicht dabei war, ihm [i.e., the fifth book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft] noch mehr den Charakter einer Vorbereitung ‘für Also sprach Zarathustra’ zu geben’. 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

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55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63

64

65

66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73

74 75

76

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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 Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck, 17 September 1887. See the longer discussion in my article, ‘Nietzsche’s magnum opus’, History of European Ideas 32 (2006), pp. 278–294. This is something which Nietzsche all along works on. To mention just one example, see KSA 10, 24[4]. Letter to Overbeck, 8 March 1884, and the two letters quoted in the text. Letter to Overbeck, 7 April 1884. Letter to Meysenbug, early May 1884. See, for example, Nietzsche’s letters to Overbeck, 18 August 1884 and 14 September 1884, and to Franziska, 29 January 1885. 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]. KGW VI.2, p. 257. Letter to Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster, 2 September 1886. Letter to Overbeck, 24 March 1887. Letter to Helen Zimmern, 8 December 1888: ‘Mein Leben kommt jetzt zu einem lang vorbereiteten ungeheuren Eklat: das, was ich in den nächsten zwei Jahren thue, ist der Art, unsere ganze bestehende Ordnung . . . über den Haufen zu werfen.’ 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[73–75] and 39[3 and 22]. See also KGW VI.4, pp. 972 ff. Nietzsche, F. (1988): Götzen-Dämmerung: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, ‘Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen’, § 49, KSA vol. 6, 55–161. Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Streifzüge’, p. 51. Letters to H. Taine, 8 December and to Naumann, 20 December 1888. EH, ‘Verhängniss’, 8: ‘Ich habe eben kein Wort gesagt, das ich nicht schon vor fünf Jahren durch den Mund Zarathustras gesagt hätte.’ 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’. See KSA 13, 14[89], 16[32], 19[8], 22[14] and 23[8 and 13]. GS, p. 345. KSA 9, 6[448], from the autumn 1880. I have discussed this extensively in my book Brobjer, Thomas (1995) Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character: A Study of Nietzsche’s Ethics and its Place in the History of Moral Thinking, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. EH, ‘Zarathustra’, p. 8. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 290. See also, for example, Also sprach Zarathustra, III, ‘Of Involuntary Bliss: ‘must I perfect myself ’. Morgenröthe, 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

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imagination, for the imposition of order and choice upon the influx of tasks and impressions. 77

78 79 80

81

82 83

Nietzsche, F. (1988) Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christenthum. KSA vol. 6, 165–254, § 11. KSA 11, 37[11]. Also published as Der Wille zur Macht, p. 125. Letter to Fritzsch, 29 August 1886. Letter to Deussen, 26 November 1888: ‘Darin wird zum ersten Mal Licht über meinen Zarathustra gemacht’. Letter to mother, 29 January 1885: ‘ein Vorbild abzugeben, nach der Art meines Zarathustra’. Letter to Paul Lanzky, end of April 1884. See Karl Spitteler review (which is generally positive) of all of Nietzsche’s books, from Die Geburt der Tragödie to Zur Genealogie der Moral (with the exception of Jenseits von Gut und Böse), published in the Swiss newspaper Der Bund, 1 January 1888.

Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s Typology 1

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3

4 5

6

7 8

To the extent of my research, the closest German word to typology, ‘Typenlehre’ – which literally translates as the doctrine or teaching of types and which is translated as ‘typology’ by Walter Kaufmann – appears only in one text, namely Aphorism 186 in BGE. There are, however, many other implicit or explicit hints to the study of types throughout Nietzsche’s works. Characters in literature can be said to have affinity to types since the former too represent certain traits of human existence in context. In this sense, to read Nietzsche’s typology along with the literature of his age, especially the authors whom he calls ‘the psychologist of types’ in EH, would intensify the reading. Persistence of a philosophical project, however, distinguishes philosophical typology from other typologies. To illustrate the unity of these three philosophies, let us take the example of the type of the theoretical man within the context of Nietzsche’s critique of Socratic rationality in BT. The force here is the force of rationality as it plays itself out with the other forces of culture in a specific constellation, and the symptom Nietzsche portrays here is hypertrophy, that is, the hypertrophy of the logical instinct. KSA 1, p. 810. PTAG, trans. by Marianne Cowan (1962), Washington: Regney Gateway, pp. 2, 4, 9. TSZ, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1954) in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking Penguin; P. II, ‘On Self-Overcoming’. BT, § 15, p. 94. Ibid., pp. 93–98. This section not only reveals Nietzsche’s critique of Occidental scientific experience since Socrates but also his prospective notion of science, that is, what scientific experience can be, especially when it is imbued with truthfulness and honesty. This and his notes of the same period are the beginning of Nietzsche’s philosophy of science which later would include such notions as the gay science and the will to power as knowledge. That Nietzsche undermines science,

Notes

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10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17

18

19

20

21 22 23 24

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knowledge, abstract thinking or reason is a misreading, for him the task is to seek context for them in the overall constellation of human existence. BGE, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1966), New York: Vintage, Aphorism 47, pp. 61–62. Ibid., p. 62. Preface to CW, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1967), New York: Vintage, p. 156. Ibid., Second Postscript, p. 187. GM, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1969), New York: Vintage, Third Essay, pp. 2–5. UM I: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, ed. by Daniel Breazeale and trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (1997), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, § 2 pp. 7–13. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. HH, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (1986), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Preface, § 3, p. 6. MGE stands for ‘morality of good and evil’ and BGE for ‘beyond good and evil’. There is a hierarchy of types in these lists and a hierarchy between the lists in which the types beyond good and evil are placed higher than the types of morality of good and evil. UM II: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ed. by Daniel Breazeale and trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (1997), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–3. EH, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1969), New York: Vintage, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, p. 298. Here there is a word play with the words einfallen and überfallen both of which, due to the root verb fall, imply that both the work and its main type fell on to Nietzsche (as an insight). GS, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (1974), New York: Vintage, pp. 346–347. Ibid. Ibid., p. 347. ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’ in The New Nietzsche, ed. by David B. Allison (1977), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 64. KSA 6, p. 344, Art, not Typus, is used here for type. ‘The Drama of Zarathustra’ in Nietzsche’s New Seas, ed. by Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (1988) Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 221. EH, p. 304. How this is so has to do with the fact that Zarathustra is an agonal type, a point which I have explored in my doctoral dissertation, The Principle of Agon in Nietzsche’s Thought (New School for Social Research, 2000): Nietzsche himself describes his creation in this fashion: ‘Let anyone add up the spirit and good nature of all great souls: all of them together would not be capable of producing even one of Zarathustra’s discourses. The ladder on which he ascends and descends is tremendous; he has seen further, willed further, been capable further than any other human being.’ Greatness of the soul is to have and feel a spectrum of human feelings and to place them on a scale. Opposition, contradiction, conflict; these are no objections to life for an agonal soul who can sustain them in new unities. Further on Zarathustra: ‘In every word, he

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contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended into a new unity.’ (EH, pp. 304–305) 29

30

31

32

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 übermenschlich and the übermensch of the original into English. There are two works which can be mentioned here: Jung’s lectures on Z and Laurence Lampert’s comprehensive study, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). AC (1954) trans. by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking Penguin, § 3–4, pp. 570–571. GS, Book V, p. 382.

The Three Metamorphoses and Philosophy 1

2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18

Translation by the editor from (1990) Jenseits Von Gut und Böse, Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in Zwei Banden, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, p. 63. Russell, B. (1946, 1984) A History of Western Philosophy, London: Unwin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1979) EH, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, § 10, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ibid. See, for example, Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) BGE, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, § 211. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) WP, trans. by W. Kaufmann, and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, § 576 and Z, ‘On The Three Evils’. EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, § 10. WP, §§ 22, 23, 24. WP, § 481, Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996) GM, Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, III, § 12. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974) GS, trans. by W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, § 343. The use of the term ‘proposition’ here is somewhat loose. However, explicating the distinction between ‘propositional statements’ and ‘propositions’ here, let alone considering the cogency of the very notion of ‘the proposition’, would lead too far afield. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1976) Z in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by W. Kaufmann, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ‘Prologue’, 2. Ibid., ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’. Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London & New York: Routledge, § 25. BGE, § 289. WP, § 2. Z, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’, op. cit. Ibid.

Notes 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

193

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Stanley Rosen (1995, p. 81) suggests this interpretation of ‘ghost’ in his lineby-line reading of Zarathustra. Z, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’, op. cit. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., my italics. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14 15

Friedrich Nietzsche (1968) WP, ed. by Walter Kaufmann, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, p. 55. Muncke, G.W. (1825–1845) ‘Perpetuum Mobile’, in Johann Samuel Traugott Gehlers Physikalisches Wörterbuch, ed. by W. Brandes et al., Leipzig, pp. 408–423. Nietzsche (1986) Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Preface, p. 4. Ibid., Preface, p. 5. Nietzsche, WP, p. 1066. Ibid., p. 1066. Ibid., p. 1067. Ibid., p. 1066. Alwin Mittasch (1950) ‘Friedrich Nietzsches Naturbeflissenheit’, in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1950–52, Heidelberg, p. 22. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld (1966) The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 48. Robert Julius Mayer, ‘Über das Fieber. Ein iatromechanischer Versuch’, 1862, in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, 3rd edition, ed. by Jacob J. Weyrauch (Stuttgart 1893), pp. 324–336. Mayer, ‘Über die Bedeutung der unveränderlichen Grössen’, 1870, in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, pp. 381–393. Mayer (1845) ‘Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel. Ein Beitrag zur Naturkunde’, in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, pp. 45–128. Muncke, pp. 408–423. Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner (1832–1833) Grundzüge der Physik und Chemie, 2nd edition, Nuremberg, p. 66.

194 16

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25 26

27

28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Notes

Jacob Friedrich Fries (1826) ‘Experimentalphysik’, in Lehrbuch der Naturlehre, Jena, pp. 25–126. Nietzsche, WP, § 619. Nietzsche (1956) Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. by Karl Schlechta, Munich, vol. 3, p. 778. Nietzsche, KSA 7: 7[196] (7.111). Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth (1836) Ansicht über Natur- und Seelenleben. ed. by Hermann Friedrich Autenrieth, Stuttgart and Augsburg, pp. 36–37, 295, 383–384, 391. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1797) Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, Leipzig, p. 111. Schelling (1798) Von der Weltseele; eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus, Hamburg, pp. 567–569. Ibid., p. 568. Schelling (1790) Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, Jena and Leipzig, p. 90. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, p. 381. Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner (1872) Über die Natur des Cometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. Nietzsche commented favourably on this book in several letters, as Günther Abel and Alistair Moles, among others, point out. [Abel (1984) Nietzsche: Die Dynamik des Willens zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr, Berlin] There is thus a likelihood that Nietzsche adopted in eternal recurrence the idea of Riemannian (nonEuclidean) space and time to which Zöllner alludes and which Loeb discusses in the next essay of this volume. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, Zweite Abtheilung: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, p. 61 (translation by the authors). Notable exceptions are Milic Capek (1991) in The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties (Dortrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, and (1971) Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. VII, ed. by Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, Dortrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company; Alistair Moles (1990) in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, New York: Peter Lang; and Babette E. Babich (1994) in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nietzsche, WP, § 634. Nietzsche (1968) BT, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: The Modern Library, § 15. Nietzsche (1977) Z, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Penguin Books, ‘The Stillest Hour’. Nietzsche, Z, ‘The Stillest Hour’. Ibid., ‘The Wanderer’. Ibid., Z, ‘The Convalescent’. Ibid., ‘The Convalescent’. Ibid., ‘The Other Dancing Song’. Ibid., ‘The Sign’. Ibid., ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’. Ibid., ‘The Convalescent’.

Notes 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

195

Ibid., ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’. Nietzsche, KSA 12: 1[119] (12.38) (translation by the authors). Nietzsche, WP, § 1064. Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[318] (9.564) (translation by the authors). Nietzsche, Z, ‘The Convalescent’. Nietzsche, WP, § 1066. Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[156] (9.500) (translation by the authors). Nietzsche, Z, ‘The Convalescent’. Ibid., ‘At Noon’. Ibid., ‘The Drunken Song’. Ibid., ‘The Sign’. Nietzsche, WP, § 617.

The Gateway-Augenblick 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

See Small 2001, p. 52; KSA 13: 14[188]; WP 1066; and Shapiro 2001. See Small 1998 (pp. 84 ff.) and 2001 (pp. 41–58) on Nietzsche’s use of optical and perspectival language in his description of the gateway-Augenblick and of the influence of Gustav Teichmüller (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. 233–234. Also, repeating his allusion to Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles concerning the midnight Augenblick of his death, and alluding to the whispering demon of GS p. 341, Nietzsche depicts Zarathustra’s whispering archenemy as the devil (II.10). See also Nietzsche’s D and his earlier association of the devil and the deathbed that anticipates GS p. 341 (D p. 77). While Lampert (1986, pp. 160–169) 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 Zarathustra’s archenemy with Socratic rationalism, I am arguing that Nietzsche’s allusions lead us more precisely to identify this figure with the dying Socrates. Loeb (1998) ‘The Moment of Tragic Death in Nietzsche’s Dionysian Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: An Exegesis of Aphorism 341 in GS’, International Studies in Philosophy, 30: 3, pp. 131–143. 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), Zarathustra’s stillest hour seems to speak through the 11 strikes of the clock at the midnight hour. Compare Shapiro, 2001 (pp. 21–22) for a tracing of Augenblick to Luther’s translation of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15: 51–52. See also Salaquarda, pp. 326, 331–322, who links Nietzsche’s transformative Augenblick-vision of eternal recurrence with Paul’s mystical and blinding experience on the road to Damascus (D p. 68). Zarathustra, III, 13, § 2. Ibid., Prologue, 1. Ibid., II.18.

196 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34

Notes

Ibid., III.12 § 17, III.14, III.15 § 1. Ibid., II.19. Ibid., II.22. Ibid., III.13 § 2. See Heidegger 1984, pp. 41–42; Lampert 1986, p. 164. Zarathustra, II.20. For more on the significance of this contradiction, see Heidegger (1984, p. 56), Stambaugh (1972, p. 40), and Small (1998, pp. 80–82). I contend that each fails to comprehend that the gateway-Augenblick represents a non-generic present moment, that is, the present moment of death. Plato (1993) Phaedo, trans. by David Gallop, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 71c–d, 105d. Ibid., 71c–72e, 105c–107a. Ibid., 107d–108a. Although Nietzsche’s 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 Pythagorean background of Plato’s dialogue points to their common source, see Barnes, p. 88. Loeb, 2008. Plato, Phaedo, 58e–59a, 67e–68b, 84d–85b. Zarathustra, III.2 § 1. Plato, Phaedo, 81c. Zarathustra, III.12 § 2. 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 philosopher-stone’s heavy weight as he fell back down upon himself. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1979) EH, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, III: BT 3. Nietzsche’s term, ‘Kreislauf’, alludes both to the dwarf’s mention of time as Kreis and to Zarathustra’s questions about what can run (laufen) on the lanes behind and ahead of the gateway-Augenblick. Zarathustra, III.13. Ibid., III.16. For similar ring-images, see II.5; III.12 § 2; and IV.10, IV.19 § 11. Ibid., III.13 § 2. Heidegger (1984, pp. 54–55) and others (see White, pp. 89–93) are wrong to equate the dwarf’s interpretation of the gateway-vision with the account of eternal recurrence offered by Zarathustra’s animals. See also Loeb (2005), p. 99, n. 55. Plato, Phaedo, 72a–b. Zarathustra, II.2. Gooding-Williams (2001, pp. 196–197, 215, 217) rightly notes Nietzsche’s allusion here to Luther’s translation of Ecclesiastes 7: 13. According to Zarathustra’s ‘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 35

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37 38

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42

43

44

45

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Although Small notices Nietzsche’s allusion back to Zarathustra’s first speech on time, he argues that by ‘time being gone’ (die Zeit wäre hinweg) Zarathustra means that the distinctions among past, present and future are all illusory (1998, pp. 88–91). Plato, Phaedo, 78c–79a. While strongly supported by Small’s discovery (1998, pp. 87–91; 2001, pp. 43, 52–55) that the dwarf’s interpretation very closely resembles that of Nietzsche’s former Basel colleague, Gustav Teichmüller, in Darwinismus und Philosophie, pp. 39 ff., I argue that Nietzsche rejects only Teichmüller’s further Platonist contention of some possible non-perspectival standpoint. Plato, P, 77b–81a, 109b–111b, 114b–c. Lampert (1986, pp. 164–167) is an exception, but he misses Nietzsche’s allusion to Zarathustra’s first speech on time, and hence is led to claim that Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought is merely an intensification of the dwarf’s correct interpretation. Berkowitz (pp. 196 ff.) also misses Nietzsche’s allusion and thinks that the dwarf genuinely believes that time is a circle. See, for example, Heidegger, 1972, pp. 41–43; Stambaugh, 1972, pp. 38–39; Moles 1989, p. 30; Small, 1998, pp. 86–91, 2001, pp. 21, 52–54; White, pp. 86–87, 91–92; Shapiro 2001, pp. 29–30. All these commentators infer Zarathustra’s rejection of circular time from his rejection of the dwarf’s response. In contrast, see Heidegger (1984, pp. 43–44, 56–57, 135–140, 176, 181–183); Stambaugh 1972, pp. 39–41; White 1990, pp. 86–87; Ansell-Pearson 1994, pp. 110–112; Small 1998, pp. 90–91, 96. Small (1998, p. 91) rightly emphasizes the universalist language (‘All that is straight lies, all truth is bent’) that shows the dwarf’s attempt to avoid the perspectival standpoint of the gateway-Augenblick. See also Nietzsche’s earlier unpublished note: ‘Kontur-Phantom. Zu jeder Krümmung den vollendenden Kreis ziehen’ (KSA 8 29: [13]). See Small 2001, p. 47, on Nietzsche’s praise of long perspectives as the best means of knowledge (e.g., GS p. 78). See Riemann, p. 10 on the analogy of the ‘sphere’. See also Hawking, pp. 139–146. For a more detailed treatment of the discussion of the Riemannian non-Euclidean conception of space, see Moles (1989; 1990, pp. 277–283, 291 ff.); Stack (p. 39); Moles, Abel (pp. 397–400); and Small (2001, pp. 65–67), especially on the influence of astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner’s 1872 book, Über die Natur der Komete on Nietzsche. Also see Stack (pp. 37–38) on the influence of Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry through F.A. Lange’s History of Materialism, and on Nietzsche’s unpublished notes which argue that the conception of Euclidean space is non-necessary (WP p. 515). 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 Wagner’s symbol of eternal youth in The Ring of the Nibelung (The Rhinegold, Scene 2) and thus suggests Nietzsche’s quasiPlatonic interest in eternal recurrence as a doctrine of immortality (KSA 10: 16[63]). See Teichmüller’s analogy (pp. 42–43) and Small’s commentary on this Teichmüller connection (1998, p. 88; 2001, p. 53).

198 46

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52 53

54

55

56 57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64 65 66 67 68

Notes

See Fink, pp. 87–88, 92, 98–100; White, pp. 86–87; Moles 1989, p. 30; 1990, p. 418 n. 63; Small 1998, pp. 88–91. In the Schilpp volume, Einstein contends that Gödel has found such a cosmological 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). GM, III: 12. See KSA 9: 11[202]; KSA 13: 14[188] (=WP 1066). See Lampert 1986, pp. 165–166; Abel, Günter (1984) Nietzsche: die Dynamik, der Willen zur Macht, und die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, pp. 249–253. For the Stoic argument, summarized by Lucretiu, compare Book 3, lines 854–858. In EH, Nietzsche says that his doctrine might have been suggested earlier by the Stoics (EH, BT: 3). See Moles (1990), pp. 305–310; Rogers (pp. 86, 89–90); Lampert (1986, pp. 165–166); and Small (1983, pp. 95–96) on Nietzsche’s proofs of the eternal recurrence and the finite number of force combinations. See Small, 1983, pp. 95–99; Lampert, 1986, pp. 166–167. Zarathustra, III.13 § 1. See TI, ‘The Problem of Socrates’ and ‘How the True World Became a Fable’ (KSA 9 11: [148]). Plato, Phaedo, 70a–72e, 77b–d. I agree with Hackforth’s analysis (p. 80) of Plato that ‘the time before birth is the time after death’. See Zarathustra, III.13 § 2. See also KSA 13: 14[188] (=WP 1066). For a contemporary hypothesis, see Gott (2001). Also see Deleuze’s (1994, pp. 241 ff.), Krell (1996, pp. 158–176) and also Small 2001, pp. 127–128. Zarathustra, III.13 § 2. I will explore how Zarathustra’s pre-vision is actually fulfilled in my forthcoming book, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In an interesting aside, Socrates confesses that he may even be advancing false arguments in support of his continued existence (91a–91c). Plato, Phaedo, 84c–85b. See also Socrates’ remark in Plato’s 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). Ibid., 107d–e. See Apology 31c–d, 40a–c, 41d. Nietzsche refers to the dying Socrates’ prophetic daimonion in BT, pp. 13–14. Nietzsche refers to this passage in BT 15. See also Socrates’ reference to a dream prophesying to him the day of his death, in Plato’s Crito, 44a–b. Nietzsche’s precise phrasing, ‘Mein Gedanke lief zurück’, alludes to Zarathustra’s earlier description of the long lane behind (zurück) upon which every possible thing has already run. Hollingdale’s translation omits Nietzsche’s noteworthy shift here from ‘jener’ to ‘dieser’. The Odyssey, Books 10–11: 539–731. Plato, Phaedo, 71c–72d. KSA 9:11[318]. See Loeb (2002) for my interpretation of the dwarf’s fate. Plato, Phaedo, 70b.

Notes 69 70 71 72

73

74

75 76

77 78 79

199

Ibid., P 66e. Ibid., 72e–77a, 91e–92e. GS, pp. 340–341. In Loeb (2005), I argue that this account coheres as well with Nietzsche’s account of memory in the Genealogy and I explain at more length Nietzsche’s ‘psychoanalytic’ depiction of Zarathustra’s 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 demon’s message in GS 341 as a recollection of life’s eternal recurrence. Plato, Phaedo, 75d–e. Nietzsche, however, is led to affirm the claim that Plato’s Socrates dismisses as nonsensical, namely, that this knowledge is forgotten at the very same moment in which it is acquired (P 76d). Ibid., 60e–61b. In his earlier D Nietzsche had claimed that in the fantasizing of dreams a person’s memory goes sufficiently far back to rediscover that prehistory and those primal experiences which were forgotten for the sake of evolving into an adult civilized condition (D, p. 312). Zarathustra, III.15 § 3. In citing Zarathustra’s ‘Sleepwalker Song’ as expressing views that Nietzsche takes seriously, I disagree with Rosen (1995, pp. 242–244) and Gooding-Williams (2001, pp. 20, 280, 288–290) that this song is a ‘caricature’ of Zarathustra. I discuss my ground for this disagreement in Loeb (2007). Zarathustra, IV.19 § 3. Ibid., I.3. See Nietzsche’s remark to Overbeck, on 22 October 1883: ‘Dear old friend, in reading Teichmüller I am ever more transfixed with wonder at how little I know Plato and how much Zarathustra πλατονι´ζει.’ (KSB 6, p. 449).

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Hammer and the Greatest Weight 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

Robert B. Pippin (1988) ‘Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, (eds) Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy Strong, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. We do not mean here to ‘drama’, understood in the Christian sense a pathos, one to which Nietzsche opposes to Tragedy. Moreover, a self-conscious, or political, master, or ruler, he who dominates, as Deleuze rightly points out, can just as easily be a slave, in Nietzsche’s sense, just as much as a politically enslaved person might be masterful, in terms of the person’s own existence, or concrete lived life. Nietzsche (1988) GM, Preface, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The term ‘being’ here, in relation to Nietzsche, is obviously not radically divorced in the Platonic manner from becoming. Indeed, though we will not pursue this, the status of WP in Nietzsche’s thinking, in relation to the extreme anti-foundationalism of his thought is a key question when approaching it. I would suggest its visibility in his published works particularly, testifies to what we are driving at here. GM, Preface, Aphorism 2.

200 8 9

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Notes

Ibid., 12. This is suggested by Hollingdale in the introduction to his 1969 Penguin Classics translation of Zarathustra and in his Nietzsche: The Man and His Works. Let us think this thought in its most terrifying form: this existence, as it is, without sense of purpose, but by necessarily returning, without finale into nothingness ‘the Eternal Recurrence’, Nachlass, 6, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, (eds) Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York (1967–1977) 1988, vols. 7–13; vol. 12, pp. 211–217, fragment VIII 5 [71]. Of course here what is discounted is naturalistic justifications concerning ‘wonder’, or philosophy as the ‘highest pleasure’.

Zarathustra on Freedom 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Z, I, ‘On the Way of Creators’. All translations from Nietzsche’s texts in this essay are mine. TSZ, ‘Prologue’, p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., I, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’. KSA 1, UB 4, p. 506. TSZ, II, ‘Of Priests’. Ibid., I, ‘Of the Tree on the Mountain’. HH, I, 542. TSZ, I, ‘Of the Passions of Joy and Pain’. KSA 13, p. 485, 16[7]. D, p. 560. EH, ‘Why I am so Clever’, p. 9. The first verse of Goethe’s poem Selige Sehnsucht reads: Sag es niemand, nur den Weisen,/Weil die. Menge gleich verhöhnet,/Das Lebend’ge will ich preisen,/Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet. TSZ, I, ‘On the Way of Creators’. Ibid., I, ‘Of Thousand and One Goals’. Ibid., II, ‘On Self-Overcoming’. Ibid., ‘Prologue’, p. 2. Ibid., I, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’. Ibid., ‘Prologue’, p. 9. Ibid., I, ‘On the Virtue of Giving’, p. 3.

Nietzsche – On the Regenerative Character of Dispositions 1

2 3 4

Nietzsche, F. (1995) Z, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, p. 220. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 157.

Notes 5

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8 9 10

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13 14 15 16

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Nietzsche characterizes the morbid life of his biological father in EH, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, p. 222. 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 wäre’, Vienna: Turia & Kant. 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. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 220. Ibid. On the experimental character of life under postmodern conditions see Avital Ronell (2005) The Test Drive, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. On Nietzsche’s 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. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference And Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 94. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 218. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 141. Compare Nietzsche, F. (1874) The Use and Abuse of History For Life, Kritische Studienausgabe Band 1, p. 270. 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. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 94. See also Arno Boehler (2005) Singularitäten. Vom zu-reichenden Grund der Zeit, Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Agamben, G. (1999) Potentialities, Stanford: Stanford Univesrity Press, p. 267. Nietzsche (1974) On the Use and Abuse of History, pp. 243–334. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 141. On performative speech-acts, see John L. Austin (1962, 1975) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. On the medial performance of linguistic dispositives, see Judith Butler (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. On the mediality of being-in-the-world in the mode of ‘Everyday Being One’s Self and the They’, see Martin Heidegger (1996) Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, pp. 118–122. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 147. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 215.

202 31

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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). Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., pp. 215–216. Ibid., p. 216. 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. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 216.

In Search of the Wellsprings of the Future and of New Origins 1

2 3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

My translation from Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, München: dtv, 1980 (KSA) vol. 4, p. 265. All further translations in the present article from KSA into English by the author (UNB). Nietzsche, Z, Part III, ‘On Old and New Tablets’, nr. 25; KSA 4, p. 265. Her father originated from a Huguenot family in southern France, came to St Petersburg with his parents, became a colonel and was raised to hereditary nobility by Czar Nikolaus I, on grounds of his services during the Polish insurrection of 1830/31; later on he was promoted by Czar Alexander II to the rank of a general. Compare Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie, vol. 2, München: dtv, 1981, p. 130. My translation from Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, München: dtv, 1986 (KSB), vol. 6, p. 222; letter to Heinrich Köselitz on 13 July 1882. – All further translations in the present article from KSB into English by the author (UNB). Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug of 1 January 1883; KSB 6, p. 314 f. Citation by Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 170. Compare Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 128. Cited according to Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 149. Nr. 96; KSA 3, p. 87 f. Letter to Heinrich von Stein, Genua, beginning of December 1882; KSB 6, p. 288. KSA 10, p. 117, Nachgelassene Schriften, November 1882 – Februar 1883 4[34]. A duration of 18 months for the pregnancy of elephants was reported by Arrian, Roman historiographer of Alexander the Great respectively of the Indische Nachrichten, ‘Fortsetzung und Ergänzung der Geschichte der Feldzüge Alexanders’; Arrian’s works were published by the Verlag der Metzlerschen Buchhandlung, Stuttgart und Wien, 1832.

Notes 14

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21 22 23 24 25

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Nietzsche, EH, Preface, nr. 4; KSA 6, p. 259. See also Z, Part II, ‘The Stillest Hour’; KSA 4, p. 189. 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 für Japon’; in spring 1886, Nietzsche also mentions the apparent victory of the ‘Japonisme’ in Berlin. 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. Compare Dighanikaya. Das Buch der langen Texte des buddhistischen Kanons. In Auswahl übersetzt von Franke, R. Otto, Göttingen/Leipzig: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht/J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1913, p. 199 f. Nietzsche, GM, III, nr. 23; KSA 5, p. 396. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Fünftes Buch, nr. 382; KSA 3, p. 636. Compare Dialogues of the Buddha, Part III. – German edition: Dighanikaya, Franke, R. Otto; compare Nr. 8. Z, Part I, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’; KSA 4, pp. 31, 80. Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. III, p. 139 f. KSB 6, p. 282. KSA 13, pp. 439 f., Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frühjahr 1888 15[45]. 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. Franke adds: ‘Vielleicht eignete sich ‘Übermensch’ am besten als Übersetzung, wenn dieses Wort Goethes nicht durch die modernste Philosophie eine ganz spezielle Färbung und durch die Manie einer literarischen Mode einen Stich in’s Lächerliche erhalten hätte’ (p. 87, nr. 10). 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. ‘Tötender Messias’; in Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, 7 May 1999: Funde aus der Wüstenbibliothek. An exposition of original documents from Qumran by the Dead Sea in the Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen. The footnote in his book Glaubenswelt Islam occurs in the context of Schaefer´s explanations concerning the Mahdi in the orthodox Islam: The Mahdi will restitute 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 Shiísm, Albany, NY, pp. 175 ff., and Moojan Momen (1985) An Introduction to Shiíh Islam. The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiísm, Oxford, p. 169. KSA 13, p. 440, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frühjahr 1888 15[45]. See also Heinrich Zimmer, Religion und Philosophie Indiens, Zürich 1961, 1979, p. 130 f.;

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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. SS-circles showed great interest in Tibet, especially with regard to the practice of power and the dogma of the Gelugpa Lamas. (Hitler and Himmler’s admiration for the rigid power structure of the Catholic Church sprang from similar motives.) 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). Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (1998) (eds) Religion, Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Zimmer, Religion und Philosophie Indiens, p. 130. KSA 13, p. 236; Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frühjahr 1888, 14[37]. Steven Wasserstrom (1999) Religion after Religion. Gersholm Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nr. 149. KSA 3, p. 141 f. Nietzsche, Z, Part III, ‘Of Old and New Tablets’; KSA 4, p. 246. KSA 11, p. 563; Nachgelassene Fragmente, Juni–Juli 1885 36[31]. Nietzsche, EH, Warum ich ein Schicksal bin, nr. 1; KSA 6, p. 365 f. Compare Nietzsche, HH I, nr. 237; KSA 2, pp. 199 f. Compare KSB 6, p. 288, letter to Heinrich von Stein, Genua, beginning of December 1882.

Justice and Gift-Giving in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1

2

3

4

Translation by the editor, from (1990) Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in Zwei Banden, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. In the recent reception of Z, the relation between justice and gift-giving has not been sufficiently taken into account. See Robert Gooding-Williams (2001) Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 125–126; Laurence Lampert (1986) Nietzsche’s Teaching, New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 78; Gary Shapiro (1991) Alcyone: Nietzsche, on Gifts, Noise and Women, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, and Alan Schrift (1997) The Logic of the Gift, ed. by Alan D. Schrift, New York and London: Routledge. On the double meaning of gift as gift and poison, see Emile Benveniste (1966) Problème de Linguistique Générale, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 315–326. Nietzsche’s anti-utilitarian conception of gift-giving is comparable to Marcel Mauss (2000) The Gift (New York and London: W. W. Norton) and Alain Caillé (2001) ‘Notes on the Paradigm of the Gift’, in The Gift (Milano: Edizioni Charta).

Notes 5

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For more animals and gift-giving, see ‘The Honey Sacrifice’, ‘The Cry of Distress’, and ‘The Welcome’. For more, see also Alan D. Schrift (1996) ‘Rethinking Exchange: Logics of the Gift in Cixous and Nietzsche’, Philosophy Today, p. 199. 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. See in comparison Gary Shapiro (1989) Nietzschean Narratives, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 53–59, and Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gift, Noise and Women, pp. 68–69. For a discussion of the various meanings of Untergang and Übergang in Z, see now Martha Kendal Woodruff (2007) ‘Untergang und Übergang: The Tragic Descent of Socrates and Zarathustra’, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 34: 61–78. For a different reading of the relation between gift-giving and going-under, see Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, p. 125. 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. See, Michel Haar (1995) ‘Du symbolisme animal en général, et notamment du serpent’, Alter. Revue de Phénoménologie, no. 3, p. 324. For more on the meaning of Zarathustra’s descent, see Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, p. 62. 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. 2–3, New York: Zone Books. 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’. 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, Nietzsche’s Teaching, p. 79). Georges Bataille (1985) ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 116–129. For Derrida’s 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. 165–190. 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. 101–102. See in comparison Heidegger’s notion of the gift in the context of a reflection on Ereignis as the gift-event of Being, and Shapiro’s commentary on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, ‘On Presents and Presence: The Gift in Thus

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Spoke Zarathustra’ in Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gift, Noise and Women, pp. 13–52. See Schrift, The Logic of the Gift, p. 286. On the anti-utilitarian aspect of gift-giving, see also Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching, p. 74, and Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gift, Noise and Women, pp. 18–19, 35–36. See in comparison Derrida who also holds that ‘in giving the reasons for giving, in saying the reason of the gift, it signs the end of the gift . . .’ (Ibid., p. 156). See Eric Blondel (1991) Nietzsche, the Body and Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 1. Jacques Derrida (1997) Politics of Friendship, London: Verso. See Z, ‘On the Friend’ on our lack of knowledge of the ‘other’. See HH, p. 44 on the friends’ practice of gratefulness and revenge, in contrast to those in whom virtue makes small. On the prohibition to judge as a pre-condition for the attaining of justice, see also, ‘Pour en finir avec le jugement’ in Gilles Deleuze (1993) Critique et Clinique, Paris: Editions de Minuit, pp. 158–169. Derrida also argues that a true gift ‘ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor’ in Given Time, pp. 13–14, and on ‘excessive forgetting or the forgetful excess’, pp. 101–102.

Bibliography and Further Reading Ansell-Pearson, Keith (1994) Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, John L. (1962, 1975) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Avital, Ronell (2005) The Test Drive, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Babich, Babette (1996) ‘Nietzsche and Music: Selective Bibliography’. New Nietzsche Studies, 1: 1/2, 64–78. Bataille, Georges (1994) On Nietzsche, trans. by Bruce Boone, New York: Paragon House. Berkowitz, Peter (1995) Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. de Man, Paul (1979) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978) Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. by Barbara Harlow, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Donadio, Stephen (1978) Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will, New York: Oxford University Press. Einstein, Albert (1949) ‘Remarks to the Essays Appearing in this Collective Volume’. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. VII, ed. and trans. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Evanston, IL: pp. 663–688. Fink, Eugen (1973) Nietzsches Philosophie: Dritte, verbesserte Auflage, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality’. In The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow, trans. by D. Bouchard & S. Simon, London: Penguin. Gödel, Kurt (1949) ‘A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy’. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. VII, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Evanston, IL: pp. 557–562. Gooding-Williams, Robert (2001) Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gott, J. Richard (2001) Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hackforth, R. (1972) Plato’s Phaedo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatab, Lawrence J. (1978) Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence: The Redemption of Time and Becoming, Washington, DC: University Press of America.

208

Bibliography and Further Reading

Hawking, Stephen (1988) A Brief History of Time, New York: Bantam. Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, pp. 118–122. — (1984) Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. by David Farrell Krell, New York: Harper & Row. — (1982) Nietzsche, 2 vols. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Vol 1: trans. by David Farrell Krell, New York: Harper & Row. — (1977) ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’ In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, trans. by Bernd Magnus, ed. by David B. Allison, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 64–79. — (1973) The End of Philosophy, trans. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper & Row. — (1972) What Is Called Thinking ? trans. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper & Row. Heller, Peter (1966) Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann, and Kafka, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Higgins, Kathleen (1987) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Homer (1996) The Odyssey, trans. By Robert Fagles, New York: Viking Penguin. Irigaray, L. (1991) ‘The Crucified One’. In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by G. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press. Jaspers, Karl (1966) Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, Chicago, IL: Henery Regnery. — (1961) Nietzsche and Christianity, Chicago, IL: Regency. Jung, Carl (1988) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaufmann, Walter (1980) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, fourth edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klossowski, Pierre (1998) Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Krell, David Farrell (1996) Infectious Nietzsche, Bloomington, MN: Indiana University Press. Lampert, Laurence (1986) Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loeb, Paul S. (2007) ‘The Thought-Drama of Eternal Recurrence’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 34, pp. 79–95. — (2005a) ‘Finding the Übermensch in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 30: 70–101. — (2005b) ‘Identity and Eternal Recurrence’. In A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. by Keith Ansell Pearson, London: Basil Blackwell, 171–188. — (2002) ‘The Dwarf, the Dragon, and the Ring of Eternal Recurrence: A Wagnerian Key to the Riddle of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, Nietzsche-Studien, 31: 91–113. — (1998) ‘The Moment of Tragic Death in Nietzsche’s Dionysian Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: An Exegesis of Aphorism 341 in The Gay Science’, International Studies in Philosophy, 30: 3: 131–143.

Bibliography and Further Reading

209

Love, Frederick R (1963) Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill, NC: University of Carolina Press. Löwith, Karl (1997) ‘On the History of the Interpretation of Nietzsche (1894– 1954)’. In Nietzsche’s 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) ‘Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology’, International Studies in Philosophy, 21: 3: 21–35. 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) Nietzsche’s 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) Zarathustra’s 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) ‘Simmel’s Mistake: The Eternal Recurrence as a Riddle about the Intelligible Form of Time as a Whole’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 21: 77–95. 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, Jörg (1989) ‘Der Ungeheure Augenblick’, Nietzsche-Studien, 18: 317–337. Salter, W.F. (1968) Nietzsche, the Thinker, New York: Unger. Savitt, Steven F. (1995) Time’s Arrows Today: Recent Physical and Philosophical Work on the Direction of Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

210

Bibliography and Further Reading

Schaberg, William H. (1995) The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schacht, Richard (1983) Nietzsche, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scheler, Max (1972) Resentiment, trans. by W.W. Holdheim, New York: Free Press. Schutte, Ofelia (1984) Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Seung, T.K. (2005) Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Shapiro, Gary (2001) ‘Nietzsche’s Story of the Eye: Hyphenating the Augen-blick’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 22: 17–35. Silk, M.S. and Stern, J.P. (1981) Nietzsche On Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (2001) ‘Zarathustra’s Four Ways: Structures of Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 9: 83–107. — (1998) ‘Zarathustra’s Gateway’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 15: 79–98. Small, Robin (1983) ‘Three Interpretations of Eternal Recurrence’, Dialogue, 22: 91–112. Stack, George (1989) ‘Riemann’s Geometry and Eternal Recurrence as Cosmological Hypothesis: A Reply’, International Studies in Philosophy, 21: 3: 37–40. Stambaugh, Joan (1987) The Problem of Time in Nietzsche, trans. by J.F. Humphrey, New Jersey, NJ: Associated University Presses. — (1972) Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. Teichmüller, Gustav (1877) Darwinismus und Philosophie, Dorpat: Verlag von C. Mathiessen. Wagner, Richard (1976) The Ring of the Nibelung, trans. by A. Porter, New York: W.W Norton & Company. White, Alan (1990) Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth, New York: Routledge. Young, Julian (1992) Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yourgrau, Palle (1999) Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe, Chicago, IL: Open Court.

Index abyss, abysmal 6, 23, 24, 51, 94, 96, 100, 106, 110, 121, 122, 124, 144–5, 148–50 affirmation 4, 25, 34, 64, 72, 120, 124, 147, 178 Agamden 147 alms (or, charity) 6, 165, 167, 170–2, 179 Ambapali 156–8 amor fati 147 analytic ‘revolution’ 1–2 anarchy 134 animal passions 17 animal virtue 6, 165–81 animalistic interpretation of eternal recurrence 147 animality 169–70, 173 anti-christ 40 Anti-Christ, The 43, 44 antiquarian history 56 Apollo, Apollinian 58, 90, 100, 101 archetype 48, 152, 160 Ariadne 20, 26 Aristotle 3, 63, 81, 84 art, artist 10, 28, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61 artist-philosopher 61 asceticism 51, 52, 58, 65, 69, 152, 154, 157–8 Autenrieth, J. H. F 78 autobiography 4, 5, 9, 29, 31, 32, 36, 45 avant-garde 154 Badiou, Alain 3 Bataille, Georges 3, 162, 172 Beethoven, Ludwig van 11 Benjamin, Walter 160, 162 Beyond Good and Evil 29, 32, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 51, 63

Birth of Tragedy, The 2, 48, 50, 78 Bizet, Georges 27 Blanchot, Maurice 2, 3 body 14, 16, 17, 28, 65, 94, 96, 99, 100, 108 Boehler, Arno 6, 141–50 Bonnet, Jules 152, 154 Brobjer, Thomas 4, 29–46 Buddha, Buddhist, Buddhism 26, 151, 152, 155–64 Burnouf, Eugéne 155 Byron, Lord 39 camel 36, 66, 68–71, 72, 131 Carnap, Rudolf 1, 2, 3 Case of Wagner, The 40, 43, 52 cave 14, 18, 24, 62, 83, 140 Cerberus 102 character typology 53, 60 Charon 92 child 16, 18, 36, 66, 71, 72, 105–6, 135–7, 139–40 Christ, Christian, Christianity 5, 6, 19, 20, 64, 65, 69, 70, 93, 109, 110, 123, 126, 151, 158, 162, 165, 167, 169, 171, 178, Cohen, Mark David 5, 75–90 contempt 130–3 continental philosophy 1, 3 convalescence 4, 6, 23, 84, 87, 93, 94, 141–50 cosmology 4, 50, 55, 57, 61, 80, 88, 90, 146 creativity 3, 15, 16, 22, 33, 54, 55, 60, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 89, 116, 120, 122, 130, 136–9, 141–50, 167 critical history 56 critical theory 4

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Index

cultural philistine 53, 54 cultural revolution 64 cultural typology 50, 61 Cupid 20

Euterpe 10 Evola, Julius 162 Existentialism 4, 45 exploitation 6, 167

dance 13, 23, 28, 83, 142 Darwinism 35, 59 Davids, Rhys 156, 158, 163 Dawn 133, 154–5, 161, 163 death of god 14, 30, 34, 55, 109, 111, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124–6, 160 deconstruction 4, 160, 161 deed 58 Deleuze, Gilles 144, 147 Democritus 48 Derrida, Jacques 3, 6, 160–1, 166–8, 170, 174, 176–7 Deussen, Paul 161 Dighanikaya 6, 151–64 Dionysian Dithyrambs 40, 42 Dionysus, Dionysian 2, 3, 4, 5, 14, 18, 20, 26, 27, 42, 43, 44, 45, 58, 64, 82, 90 disposition 141–50 dithyramb 20, 23 domination 6, 120, 133, 165, 167, 178–80 drives (Triebe) 10, 14, 15, 133–4, 138

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 20 forgetting, forgetfulness 3, 71, 136, 137, 167–8, 170, 173, 180–1 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 33, 37, 153 Franke, R. Otto 158 free death 17 free spirit 54, 55, 56, 69, 124 freedom 4, 5, 6, 54, 55, 70, 71, 120, 129–40, 165–6, 168–70, 172–3, 174, 176–7, 179 friends, friendship 15, 18, 33, 166–7, 169, 174, 177–9, 181 Fries, Jakob Friedrich 77

Ecce Homo 29, 31, 33, 35, 43, 48, 58, 95, 134, 154, 162 Einstein, Albert 85, 88 Emerson, Ralf Waldo 31, 36, 37, 39 Empedocles 29, 49 epochal shift 55 Eros 20 eternal recurrence of the same 4, 5, 6, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 49, 56, 61, 64, 65, 66, 72, 75–90, 91–108, 110, 111, 122–6, 143–6, 148 eternity 27

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 58 Gay Science, The 37, 39, 80, 91, 92, 93, 99, 105, 157 genealogy 3, 47, 147 Genealogy of Morals, The 29, 38, 39, 43, 46, 47, 52, 69, 114, 118, 134, 157 gentleness 137, 168, 175, 179–81 German Idealism 2 gift, gift-giving 4, 6, 57, 165–181 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 30, 39, 134 Hades 92, 94, 100, 101, 102 Handel, George Frideric 9 Hayden, Joseph 9, 13 health 41, 52, 57 hearing 11, 12, 28, 37, 58, 69, 144 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 113 Heidegger, Martin 2, 29, 57, 96, 102, 162 Heracles 92 Heraclitus 29, 49, 63, 78 hermeneutics 4, 123 Hesiod 18, 142 hierarchy 59–60, 133–4, 158, 165, 177

Index higher man 56, 140 Hinduism 111 historical typology 55, 61 historical unconsciousness 61 Hölderlin, Friedrich 39 Homer 102 Human All Too Human 31, 51, 132, 154, 162 Huntington, Samuel P. 151, 160 ideokinesis 28 imagination 28, 72, 142 innocence 5, 66, 71, 72, 109, 136, 137 innocence of becoming 25, 71 Irigaray, Luce 3 Islam 151, 158, 159, 164 Isle of the Graves 20 Isles of the Blessed 18, 19, 20, 23, 92 Jesus 49 Jewish messiah 158–64 Jews, Jewish, Jewish faith 151, 158–9, 160–1, 164 joy 142–3 Judeo-Christian 19, 110 justice 6, 16, 55, 130, 143–4, 152, 157–8, 160, 165–81 Kant, Immanuel 3, 20, 21, 31 Kastner, Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb 77 Klossowski, Pierre 162 Köppen, Carl Friedrich 155 Köselitz, Heinrich (Peter Gast) 10, 11, 12, 18 Krug, Gustav 9 last man 14, 56, 110, 131 laughter 17, 21, 37 Leibniz, Gottfried Wihelm 3, 20 Lemma, Vanessa 6, 165–81 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 51 Levi, Hermann 11 Levi Strauss 120

213

Levinas, Emmanuel 160 liberation 129–40, 165–6, 172 Licchiavi 156–7 life 20, 21, 27, 28, 31, 36, 45, 49, 64, 66, 83, 87, 99, 116, 120, 121, 141–50, 153, 154, 167, 169, 176 life affirmation 64, 65, 72 life negation 64, 65, 71, 72, 96 lion 23, 36, 66, 70, 71, 72, 131, 136, 137, 140, 153, 163 Lipiner, Siegfried 38 literary philosophy 63 literature 1–2 Loeb, Paul S. 5, 91–108 love 32, 36, 147, 169, 176, 179 Ludic philosophy 66, 67, 72 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 12 Luther, Martin 49 Mahler, Gustav 12, 27 Mann, Thomas 30 Marquis de Sade 162 Marx, Karl 160 masochism 5, 109, 123 Mayer, Robert 77 Mendelssohn, Felix 9 meta-philosophy 4, 5, 63 metaphor 12, 38, 45, 114, 139, 142, 154, 168–9 moment (Augenblick) 5, 23, 75, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91–108, 124, 147, 173 monotheism 6, 151, 160 monumental history 56 moral world-order 35 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 9, 13 Munck, Georg Wilhelm 77 Muses 141–50 music 3, 4, 9–28, 141 musical theory 4, 9–28 Musil, Robert 30 mystical 2, 162 myth, mythology 3, 50, 93, 108, 113, 114, 134

214

Index

Naturphilosophie 77–9 Newtonian physics 76 Nihilism 4, 5, 21, 52, 56, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82, 90, 109, 120, 124, 141 non-Euclidean geometry 75–90, 97 Nussbaumer-Benz, Uschi 6, 151–64 Odysseus 23, 92, 102 Oldenberg, Hermann 155–6 ontology of time 5, 75–90 opera 11, 12 Orpheus 18 otherworldliness 65 Overbeck, Franz 12, 32, 36 Pantheism 31 Parkes, Graham 4, 9–28 performative speech 6, 141–50 Perptuum Mobile 75–90 personal experience 32, 36, 44, 45, 141–50 perspective, perspectivism 59, 60, 65, 66, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96–9, 119–21, 152, 163 phenomenology 4 Philo of Alexandria 159 Philosopher’s Book, The 50 philosophical revolution 3 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 78 phoenix 134–5 physics 4, 5 pity 19, 30, 33, 131, 172, 180 Plato, Platonism 3, 5, 19, 20, 33, 48, 63, 64, 65, 94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104–8, 109 play, playfulness 36, 57, 64, 71, 72, 136, 139, 153 poetic sublimation 5, 44 poetic return 3 poetry, poetic method 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 26, 29, 33, 38, 63, 91, 92, 93, 104 political friendship 166, 177

post-structuralism 4 power 9, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 60, 72, 120, 157, 179 power of sexuality 34 Pre-Socratics 48, 49 principle of sufficient reason 3 propositionalist philosophy 64–71, 72 redemption 22, 122–3, 124, 145, 146, 152, 162, 167 Rée, Paul 32, 36, 153 reincarnation 5, 92–4, 95, 99, 101–8 remembrance 147 resentment 116, 119, 120, 157, 165, 167 restricted economy 3, 166 revaluation of all values 40, 42, 43, 48, 57, 64, 112, 152, 174–5 revenge 5, 16, 19, 22, 24, 44, 49, 50, 56, 61, 124, 149, 165, 167, 180 Riemann, G. F. B. 79, 85, 97 Ring of the Nibelungen 12 Rohde, Erwin 33 Romanticism 2, 52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 11 Russell, Bertrand 63, 66 Salomé, Lou 32, 36, 37, 153–7 Scarlatti, Alessandro 12 Schacht, Richard 4 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 20, 78 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2, 3, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 52, 111, 155 Schubert, Franz 10 Schumann, Georg 10 self-overcoming 21, 32, 49, 157, 170 self propelled wheel 72, 95, 136, 151–64 selflessness 16, 44, 171–2 sexuality 17, 52, 53, 61, 65 Shapiro, Gary 175 silence 24, 58, 93, 121, 177–8

Index singing 20, 143, 144 slave mentality 5, 109–26 Socrates 5, 21, 33, 49, 50, 51, 92–108 solitude 14, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 41, 58, 67, 92, 93, 140, 148–9, 169, 174, 178 Sophists 119 Spinoza, Baruch 39 spirit of gravity (or, heaviness) 5, 15, 17, 20, 21, 25, 50, 56, 61, 93, 94–108, 124, 141 Spitteler, Carl 38 Stoics 99 suffering 14, 15, 17, 19, 22, 34, 65, 71, 99, 111, 130, 170, 179 Suzuki 158 symphonic structure 4, 9–28, 29 symptomatology 47, 109, 116, 118 technical philosophy 5, 63, 66–7 theoretical man 3, 50, 51 three metamorphses of the spirit 5, 14, 36, 39, 63–72, 141–50 tragic, tragic insight 82, 90, 164 transgression 162–3 Tuncel, Yunus 5, 47–62 Turgenev, Ivan 37, 39 type, typology 5, 11, 47–62, 112, 115, 117, 119 Twilight of the Idols 29, 40, 43, 46 Übermensch (Overman) 5, 14, 16, 17, 19, 30, 35, 47, 48, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 110, 122, 123, 124, 126, 138, 158, 174 Ulfer, Friedrich 5, 75–90 unhistorical 3 Untimely Meditations 33, 56, 131 uselessness 168, 175 Utilitarianism 6, 166, 175–6

215

value(s) 49, 50, 54, 57, 61, 64, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 177 Vattimo, Gianni 161 virtue(s) 14, 16, 17, 19, 24, 57, 130, 133, 165–81 Von Bülow, Hans 10 Von Hellwald, Friedrich 34, 35 Von Helmholtz, Hermann 77 Von Schirnhofer, Resa 36 Von Seydlitz, Reinhart 37, 156 Von Stein, Heinrich 32, 154–5, 164 Von Tevenar, Gudrun 5, 129–40 Wagner, Cosima 10, 43 Wagner, Richard 10, 11, 12, 33, 34, 39, 43, 52, 110, 154–6, 164 war 15, 137 Wenham, Alan 5, 109–26 Wilde, Oscar 45 wild wisdom 18, 20 will to power 10, 16, 17, 22, 26, 30, 64, 81, 117, 118, 119, 155, 163, 179 Will to Power, The 41, 59, 75, 80, 81, 82, 88 Windisch, Ernst 152, 156 wisdom 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 56, 58, 61, 62, 68, 151 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 63 woman, women 16, 20, 34, 36, 41, 163 Yates, Peter 5, 63–72 Zagreus 18 Zen-Buddhism 156, 158 Zend-Avesta 34 Zimmer, Heinrich 161 Zöllner, Friedrich 79, 86 Zoroaster 29