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Thus Spoke Zarathustra: poetry or philosophy? Part 2

Part One of TSZ begins with a long preface that sets the stage for the entire work. The major themes of Nietzsche’s teachings are introduced in a series of connected dramatic episodes that illustrate Zarathustra’s destiny as prophet of the death of God and the coming of the superman. A careful analysis of this preface gives us a coherent view of the inner unity of what appear in the sequel to be discontinuous meditations, revelations and dreamlike events. We are prepared in this way for the subsequent vicissitudes in Zarathustra’s prophetic career.

We first meet the prophet in his thirtieth year: the age of Jesus as his mission comes to fulfilment. But Zarathustra does not attempt to save mankind at the age of thirty. Instead, he goes up to the mountaintop for ten years of additional ripening. The work effectively begins when he is forty; as a classical scholar, Nietzsche would have known the Greeks regarded forty as the peak of human life. Greek culture, which is represented obliquely in the opening passage as the sun or Apollo, is required to overcome Christian decadence.

A small but important detail: Zarathustra addresses the sun as you (du in German). He is on terms of intimacy with it. Intimacy with nature replaces intimacy with a personal God. The happiness of the sun requires it to have beings that it illuminates. This is also true of Zarathustra. So, he emphasizes the fact that the sun has risen to his cave for ten years; it has come up to him. The image is one of anthropocentrism rather than heliocentrism. Zarathustra gives the sun its significance. This expresses very well Nietzsche’s synthesis of ancients and moderns, or the peculiarly modern way in which he attempts to return to the early Greeks. Nietzsche advocates a return to nature, but from a human perspective. For this reason, the pagan gods, and in particular Apollo the sun god, are useful to Nietzsche whereas the deus absconditus, or supernatural God, of the Judeo-Christian tradition is not.

The sun would have become fatigued with its light and with its trip to Zarathustra’s cave, ‘without me, my eagle and my snake.’ Animals play a crucial role in TSZ. The eagle soars high in the sky, and the snake crawls on the surface of the earth. The eagle exhibits strength and cruel nobility; the snake exhibits cunning and deceit. The animals are associated with Zarathustra not with the sun. It is obvious enough that they are metaphors for human attributes, but that is only part of their significance. Zarathustra refers later to man as the not completely constructed animal. But the eagle and the snake are completely constructed; they are not open interpretations of human attributes, but natural paradigms. The animals, precisely as Zarathustra’s favoured companions, express his loneliness and inability to make genuine contact with human beings.

The ‘Overhuman,’ which we used earlier for the superman, is attained through the overcoming of the human - as intimated by the word’s first occurrence, in Zarathustra’s first words to the people: ‘I teach to you the Overhuman. The human is something that shall be overcome.’ Part of what this means is that the Overhuman emerges from our going beyond the human perspective and transcending the anthropocentric worldview. Nietzsche’s image of the superman betrays his own ambivalence while unfolding an entire existential drama.
The Overhuman or superman represents a higher biological type and would be the product of deliberate breeding. However, he can also function as an ideal for anyone who wishes to gain power over himself and cultivate his ‘virtues’, anyone who is creative and knows the whole spectrum of the human capacity for thought, fantasy and imagination. Nietzsche’s superman is the consummate realization of human potential and, in a sense, is also the response to the ‘death of God.’ The superman is the Promethean man who has discovered his own creative talents. The God outside of him is dead, but the God who is known to live through man and in him is alive.
God is a name for the creative power of man. This creative power enables man to partake of the vast dimensions of existence. The first book of TSZ closes with these words: ‘All the gods are dead; now we want the Übermensch to live.’ The Nazi appropriation of the superman is an example of cultural theft and misapplication. Nietzsche did not envisage a blond, blue-eyed, arrogant beast.

The will to power is the second pivotal idea which appears repeatedly in TSZ. It has been misunderstood so that we need to have a clear idea as to what Nietzsche had in mind. It is not the kind of willpower exerted by the human ‘I’ or ego; nor is the ‘power’ any kind of brute force exercised by human beings. For Nietzsche, brute force is the crudest, most vulgar form of power and restricted in its range.
At the other end of the spectrum is the power of ideas. Socrates and Jesus had no physical power over others, but their ideas have been enormously powerful and far-reaching. Their ideas are compelling insofar as they interpret the world in a new way, offering a different understanding of existence. To the extent that they give powerful interpretations of human existence they are engaging in philosophy, which Nietzsche characterises as ‘the most spiritual will to power.’

The first mention of will-to-power in TSZ is in the chapter ‘On the thousand and one goals,’ where Zarathustra says: “A tablet of things held to be good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of its over comings; behold it is the voice of its will to power.” A people’s will to power is expressed in its interpretations of the world, especially in terms of value judgements of good and evil.

It was seven years after his epiphany on the shore of Lake Silvaplana that Nietzsche called eternal recurrence “the basic conception of Zarathustra” and “the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained.”
The eternal return appears as a thought experiment in an earlier book, ‘The Gay Science.’
What would you think if a demon told you that everything in life would recur, over and over again, eternally? How would you answer the question, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’
This question, Nietzsche says, “would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight.” It tests your ability not to be overcome by the world’s horror and meaninglessness. The demon warns that the weight could be lethally crushing. But it could also be transformative, especially if we have experienced a tremendous moment in which we were so well disposed to ourselves and life that we could say: ‘Yes, I want this once more and innumerable times more.’ But this requires our also reliving eternally our life up to that moment, with ‘nothing new in it… and all in the same order and sequence.’

Towards the climax of TSZ, Zarathustra sings: “Did you say Yes to a single joy? Oh, my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained together, entwined in love…”
This is why affirming eternal recurrence is tantamount to ‘amor fati’, love of fate, since it involves saying Yes to everything that has contributed to any single moment of one’s life that one wants to affirm. The thought of eternal recurrence is not to be taken as something to think about intellectually, but rather as a possibility that can inform and clarify our existential choices.

In the wake of the death of the one creator God, the task of creation devolves on human beings, who will not, however, create ex nihilo but rather in interaction with the forces of nature and history. When all transcendent sources of value turn out to be empty, creation of new values becomes an urgent task and one that requires the destruction of old values. The necessity for concomitant creation and destruction is at the core of what Nietzsche calls ‘the Dionysian,’ a crucial feature of eternal recurrence, where what must be willed is the recurrence of everything that has led up to the present moment.
Nietzsche explains how Zarathustra can shoulder the heavy burden of fate and yet be “the lightest:” Zarathustra is a dancer which is how he who has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, who has thought the “most abysmal thought, nevertheless finds in that no objection to existence, nor even to its eternal recurrence - but rather one more reason for being himself the eternal Yes to all things… that is the concept of Dionysus.”

TSZ is certainly a philosophical work, but Nietzsche chose to express it in rich imaginative prose, with a cadence which reminds us of the Bible, and with a musicality which even his quondam friend Wagner might have admired.

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