Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 by C.G.Jung

C. G. Jung, James L. Jarrett, James L. Jarrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317530008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a life-long influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members of his inner circle about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies.
Since there was at that time no thought of the seminar notes being published, Jung felt free to joke, to lash out at people and events that irritated or angered him, and to comment unreservedly on political, economic, and other public concerns of the time. This seminar and others, including the one recorded in Dream Analysis, were given in English in Zurich during the 1920s and 1930s.

AUTUMN TERM

October / December 1934

LECTURE I

10 October 1934

Dr. Jung:

Ladies and Gentlemen: We stopped before the vacation at the death of the rope-dancer, so we will start in now with section 7.

Meanwhile the evening came on, and the market-place veiled itself in gloom. Then the people dispersed, for even curiosity and terror become fatigued. Zarathustra, however, still sat beside the dead man on the ground, absorbed in thought: so he forgot the time. But at last it became night, and a cold wind blew upon the lonely one. Then arose Zarathustra and said to his heart:

Verily, a fine catch of fish hath Zarathustra made to-day! It is not a man he hath caught, but a corpse.

Sombre is human life, and as yet without meaning: a buffoon may be fateful to it.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud—man.

But still am I far from them, and my sense speaketh not unto their sense. To men I am still something between a fool and a corpse.

Gloomy is the night, gloomy are the ways of Zarathustra. Come, thou cold and stiff companion! I carry thee to the place where I shall bury thee with mine own hands.

What do you think is remarkable in this passage?

Mrs. Crowley: I think this chapter is the repetition of that scene of the lightning and the Superman. It brings up that point again. But I feel that it is like a preface to the next one, that it cannot be separated, and that chapter 8 again goes back to chapter 2. We can get it only by analogy with the second one, where he is coming down from the mountain.

Mrs. Baynes: To me it is that he accepts the corpse as his companion.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. You see, we could almost expect that Zarathustra, having watched the catastrophe of the rope-dancer, would be rather disinterested, because it would seem to have really happened outside of himself. He might philosophize about it but there would be no close or intimate connection between the rope-dancer and himself, unless it was the very near connection which we established in the former Seminar—namely, that the rope-dancer is the human form of Zarathustra, Nietzsche himself as the human being. It is just that which explains why he cannot leave the corpse; he has to remain with it, to make the corpse his companion. Now, this is a pretty gruesome spectacle, I should say: that Nietzsche the man should be in any sense the corpse that accompanies Zarathustra, the corpse that is carried by him. This is in fact the gloomy aspect of Zarathustra, a cloud hanging over the whole book—Nietzsche being dragged along by that figure of Zarathustra—and it comes to the daylight here for the first time. “Verily, a fine catch of fish hath Zarathustra made today! It is not a man he hath caught, but a corpse.” We must pay attention to this sentence. It is important, because later on comes the realization that he needs other people just because he has not caught a man. He realizes that he ought to have other people instead of that corpse. You see, if the corpse is himself, then he is dead really, and he has to replace himself by the other people he catches—or one could almost say, by other corpses. They must be, then, instead of himself; he hands over to others his human life which he should have lived. Therefore, he says that human existence is uncanny and without a meaning.

The jester, as you know, is the negative aspect of Zarathustra, which means that an unconscious figure, like Zarathustra (we dealt with the different aspects of these figures in the last Seminar) could prevail against the human being to such an extent that the latter would be destroyed. That explains why he calls the Superman a lightning out of that dark cloud, man (lightning is, of course, utterly destructive), and also why he puts himself between a fool and a corpse. For people in general were quite unable to see who Zarathustra was, and so they took him either for a jester or the corpse; either it was Nietzsche himself, the corpse, or it was a sort of malevolent fool—in other words, insanity. People would not see the archetype which Zarathustra represents, the archetype of the wise old man. Inasmuch as this archetype was obvious to them at all, it appeared only as a jester or a corpse, a being which would either make a man insane or kill him. But Zarathustra is not only the archetype; he contains the self at the same time and is therefore an exceedingly superior figure. Now, what about this identity of an archetype with the self? Can that be?

Miss Hannah: No, because the archetype is the general idea, and the self the particular thing in the Here and Now.

Dr. Jung: Yes. The archetype is a collective thing; it is by its definition a content of the collective unconscious. It is an omnipresent eternal figure which one encounters everywhere, while the self is not to be encountered everywhere. The self is, by definition, the most individual thing, the essence of individuality. It is the uniqueness. And that one can only encounter where?

Answer: In an individuated human being.

Dr. Jung: Well, only in yourself. You cannot even encounter it in anybody else, only in yourself. The self is the immediate awareness of your uniqueness, and it is a uniqueness which is in a way most personal, most intimate. It is your uniqueness. Now, I grant you it is exceedingly difficult to understand such a thing intellectually, because it is most contradictory. Of course, we always have to keep in mind that the self is in the first place the personal Atman—to use the Indian formulation of that concept. But their definition is that the personal Atman, the self, is in everybody; it is the smallest thing, the thumbling in the heart of everybody, yet it is the greatest thing in the world, the super-personal Atman, the general collective Atman.¹ And we can accept that definition. It can be grasped intellectually even by an occidental mind. Yet it is not grasped properly at all, because the super-personal Atman is not the thumbling in everybody. It is the thumbling in myself. There is only the self, and that is my self, for by definition the personal Atman is uniqueness.

Now, I cannot guarantee whether the East understands it in this way, but at all events we can be satisfied with the fact that there are mandalas and formulas in the East, ready-made, so we can assume that people have understood this peculiar secret of the self. For instance, take the worship of a mandala, not like these chakras on the wall which represent evolution, but a mandala of completion, a Lamaistic chakra, where in the center there is either the thunderbolt, the vajra, the abstract symbol of concentrated divine power, or Shiva and Shakti in embrace.² When the Tantric initiant enters the center of the mandala through the four gates of the functions,³ it is understood that he approaches the god, which in the philosophy of the Upanishads would be the super-personal Absolute Atman. In other words, the initiant brings the personal Atman back to its divine source, the super-personal Atman. In the end, when he has entered through the four gates and has reached the center, then the climax of the contemplation would be the complete identity of the initiant with the god—if he is a man, with the Shiva, and if a woman, with the Shakti, the female aspect of the god. The two aspects merge finally into one, in the nonexisting yet existing Brahman, the potential world being. Now, in this case an individual self has become the universal self, yet when you approach the universal self through the personal, you carry the individual consciousness into the universal consciousness. Then the universal conciousness is identical with the individual consciousness; there the self in all its particularity, in all its peculiar personal being, is at the same time the universal being. This is utterly paradoxical, just as paradoxical as that old German mystical poet, Angelus Silesius, for instance, when he wonders mildly that he and God are just the same, that there is no difference between himself and God.⁴

You see, we must keep in mind that in our unconscious psychology there are these thoughts, which are evolved as the Tantric system, say, in India, or in Lamaistic philosophy, or as mystical thought in the West, and so we have to talk of them. This is not mysticism, this is psychology. It is simply the scientific consideration of such facts, which are constantly reproduced by our unconscious in this form or another. And here we find such a form in Zarathustra, because Zarathustra is on the one side very clearly the archetype of the wise old man, and on the other side that concept of uniqueness. Therefore, the absolutely indissoluble interwovenness of Nietzsche himself and Zarathustra of which we have spoken. This peculiar identity and nonidentity is in exactly the same relation as the personal and super-personal self, or the personal Atman and the super-personal Atman. Even when Nietzsche is Zarathustra, he is his own uniqueness, his own personal self as it were. Now, this thing should not be an archetype at the same time; the archetype should be differentiated or discriminated from the self.

Mr. Baumann: Could one not say that the archetype stands only for the unconscious, and the self for the conscious and unconscious together?

Dr. Jung: Exactly. The self is always the sum total of conscious and unconscious processes. It comprehends consciousness; consciousness is included in the self like a small circle in a bigger circle. The self cannot be contained in an archetype because an archetype is merely a content, a figure, of the collective unconscious, and cannot possibly contain the thing in which it is contained. The archetype is contained in the unconscious, and the unconscious and the conscious together make the self. “The self” is a concept of totality which contains all the archetypes and individual consciousness at the same time. The symbol of totality is always a circle, and one can say that in the center is the conscious, and around it is the unconscious containing the archetypes, among them the archetype of the old man. And that cannot contain the self, because the whole circle is the self, the totality of the conscious and unconscious. So it can only be a transitory condition in which the idea of the self or the idea of totality appears as a content in an archetype. Now, how would you characterize such a transitory condition? When is it possible for that condition to appear in one archetype, the archetype of the old man? There is one definite situation in which that can be.

Mr. Baumann: I think it can be when the archetype includes something eternal, not referring to the past alone, but including the whole development. The wise man ordinarily implies the old man who has had only past experiences, but he might take a form without time limit, though I have no idea what it would be.

Dr. Jung: Well, you can say the old wise man is surely the figure of the great teacher, the initiator, the psychopompos. And then he can contain the idea of the self for a while as a sort of vision or intuition. He knows about it, he teaches it, because he is the psychopompos who leads the initiant on the way to his completion. As a matter of fact, it is the rule in analysis that when the patient begins to realize the archetype of the old wise man, the self also appears in the figure. That is the reason why men have the tendency to identify at once with the wise old man. Because the self appears then, they are already in the wise old man, so to speak, and then they are sucked up and they become mana, important. They have an inflation and walk about with heavy heads, “les initiés imaginaires” as Zimmer once said very wittily.⁵ When a man is swelled up with the idea of possessing the big thing, being a hell of a fellow, getting very wise, it means that identification. And in the inflation which follows, the human being goes to hell. For one cannot possibly live as the wise old man day and night; one would be something between a corpse and a fool. People would think so and right they would be. As I said, people thought Nietzsche was a fool in reality and were always afraid there would be insanity behind it. And he suffered from terrible migraines, he only lived for his health, he was a living corpse; that is the external appearance of a fellow who has been swallowed by the wise old man. But the wise old man ought to have wings, he should be a swan, not a human being. He should not walk about. He should make use of his aeroplane that he carries within himself. You know, in the East they suppose that the perfect wise men are able to fly. That is the criterion—as long as one cannot fly, one has not attained to the summit of wisdom. So let the old wise man be an air-being, a subtle body with wings, and don’t identify with it.

This is one of the events which very often happens to the analyst; it is one of the forms of analyst-neurosis. Analysts have very peculiar neuroses. They are infected by all the transferences they get and their heads are twisted. They are poisoned, and as a rule they become sensitive and susceptible, difficult to deal with. That is always the infection of the cursed profession: they are cursed by their perfect old wise man. They should know better but they don’t. Therefore, it is important for the analyst to confess that he does not know better, or he will know worse. Then he gives a chance to the patient. But you see, there is always the prestige of the doctor. The public wants to be convinced that the doctor is a sort of sorcerer or magician. The primitive medicine man, of course, lives on that prestige. He is identical with the wise old man, so very often he is sick or insane at the same time. Therefore, primitive people are always afraid of being made into medicine men. It is not an enviable condition.

Mrs. Crowley: I thought the corpse suggested his shadow, that this was where he was first meeting his shadow.

Dr. Jung: Do you remember our great soreites syllogismos?⁶ The conclusion there is that everything is everything. So the corpse is also the rope-dancer, and the rope-dancer is the shadow sure enough. But Nietzsche himself as a human being is in the same connection with Zarathustra as the rope-dancer with the jester. You see, the rope-dancer is the negative attitude of Nietzsche himself and Zarathustra; the rope-dancer is the one who jumps over the hesitating Nietzsche. Then in the next chapter, the jester comes, and in the ninth chapter Zarathustra himself says that he is going to jump over all those that hesitate or are reluctant. “Over the loitering and tardy will I leap.”

Mrs. Crowley: But now he is giving up teaching. He has a new attitude entirely after he buries the corpse.

Dr. Jung: Ah yes, the new attitude that will come is that he needs human beings instead of himself. Another quality of the inflation by the wise old man is that one gets a mania to teach, to be a missionary, to tell people all about it and take care that plenty get into the kingdom of heaven. It always creates a sort of missionary attitude, and of course the conviction that there is no other way but this way.

Mr. Allemann: Speaking of consciousness, is it possible, when the self is made conscious, to get over that identification, at least temporarily?

Dr. Jung: Well, as a rule you go through a time when you are identical with the wise old man. Nobody can realize an archetype without having been identified with it first. If you even touch the animus or anima, the most vulgar archetypes of all, you are they, and you cannot realize them without having been thoroughly caught by them. No woman will realize what the animus is without having been identical with him, and no man will realize what the anima is without having been filled by the anima. In speaking of such things, I say: “as if”: it is as if these archetypes were each of them stronger than the ego. They easily catch hold of you and you are possessed as if they were lions or bears, say—primitive forces which are quite definitely stronger than you. You see, our prejudice is that we are sitting on top of the mountain with our conscious and our will, and nothing can get at us; and then the unconscious catches us from below. People call the thing that is below “the subconscious” instead of “the unconscious”; it sounds so much better. The subconscious is the cellar, something below your feet, and you are St. George standing upon the dragon. That is the medieval ambition, to kill the dragon and stand on top of it. But if you descend into that world, you encounter a figure which is definitely stronger than your ego complex. Therefore, quite naively, Rider Haggard speaks of: “She-that-must-be-obeyed.”⁷ Nothing doing otherwise, you have to obey. It is quite self-evident that she is the stronger part. And the complex of the wise old man is a fearful thing. Sometimes the dragon is overcome, so we can assume that it is not always so strong.

But there are plenty of whale-dragons that attack and overcome the hero, proving that the dragon is...