What is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?

A Philosophical Confrontation

Heinrich Meier, Justin Gottschalk

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226581736
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most famous and most puzzling work, one in which he makes the greatest use of poetry to explore the questions posed by philosophy. But in order to understand the movement of this drama, we must first understand the character of its protagonist: we must ask, What Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? Heinrich Meier attempts to penetrate the core of the drama, following as a guiding thread the question of whether Zarathustra is a philosopher or a prophet, or, if he is meant to be both, whether Zarathustra is able to unite philosopher and prophet in himself. Via a close reading that uncovers the book's hidden structure, Meier develops a highly stimulating and original interpretation of this much discussed but still ill-understood masterwork of German poetic prose. In the process, he carefully overturns long-established canons in the academic discourse of Nietzsche-interpretation. The result is a fresh and surprising grasp of Nietzsche's well-known teachings of the overman, the will to power, and the eternal return.

What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?

I

Suffering from solitude is also an objection.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: Ecce Homo

The tragedy begins with Zarathustra’s first speech. It is addressed to the sun and precedes the speech in the market, “which,” according to the testimony of the new evangelist, “is also called ‘the prologue.’”9 We may infer from it what the transformation that induces Zarathustra to leave the mountains, in which “for ten years” he “did not weary” of enjoying “his spirit and his solitude,” is all about. He obviously believes that he has more than sufficient wisdom, and longs for takers for his supposed overflow: “I am surfeited of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands that reach out for it.” More precisely, his wisdom is not sufficient to him because he is not sufficient unto himself. He strives to give, to gift, to create, and hopes for receptivity, love, co-creation by those to whom he wants to descend. He mirrors his own neediness in the imagined neediness of the sun, to which Zarathustra, as the narrator reports, “thus spoke”: “You great star! What would your happiness be, if you did not have those whom you illuminate! / For ten years you have come up here to my cave: you would have grown tired of your light and of this path without me, my eagle, and my serpent. / But we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you and blessed you for it.” It seems that Zarathustra ties his happiness to his being for others, to his effect on their destiny. For the sake of a future happiness he is prepared to commit himself to dependence on men, an endeavor for which he assures himself of an undivided cosmic support. It is not only for the hoped-for happiness that he invokes the star which shines brightest, but also his deed is to be in harmony with the sun and follow its example: “I must, like you, go under, as men call it, to whom I want to descend.” Finally he expressly entreats the highest blessing for his action, with which he sets about to carry the “reflection” of the great star’s bliss “everywhere.” In this he is certain of directing the entreaty to a “tranquil eye, which can look without envy at even an all-too-great happiness.” Zarathustra will not speak to men in the name and on behalf of a zealous God. But, in contrast to the imaginary dependence of the speech’s addressee, the dependence he enters into in order to fulfill his mission is most real. And unlike the everyday going-under of the sun, the going-under that stands before him is no natural event. Zarathustra will not follow as one and the same his always-alike course, descending and ascending again. When the narrator speaks of “Zarathustra’s going-under” in the twelfth verse, he is speaking of a historical event. It is based on the far-reaching change of heart to which the first verse refers and which Zarathustra puts into these words at the end: “Zarathustra wants to become man again.” The speech, in which Zarathustra turns toward the sun and communicates with himself, shows us the change into the prophet.10

The inner change is followed by the outer profession. It finds expression in three sentences: I love men. I bring them a gift. I teach them the overman. “I love men” is the first sentence that Zarathustra addresses to a man. Zarathustra is answering the question, posed by an aged man who crosses his path downward, of why he wants to give up his solitude. He recognizes in Zarathustra another Prometheus who is carrying his fire to the valley: “Do you not fear the arsonist’s punishments?” The saint in the forest’s reply, that he now loves God and no longer men because to him man is “too imperfect a thing,” induces Zarathustra to declare: “What did I speak of love! I bring men a gift.” Zarathustra does not love men as what they are, but as recipients of his gift, as what they could become through him. The third sentence finally determines the gift as a demand. “I teach you the overman,” Zarathustra begins the famous speech in the market, immediately on reaching the town nearest to his cave, without identifying himself to his listeners or preparing them for his teaching. He continues: “Man is something that is to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” The prophet loves, promises, and demands. His love aims at the changing of man. His demand pertains to the overcoming of the existing. His gift is a teaching that is supposed to set a goal for mankind, to give men’s life a meaning, to allot to man a place in the whole. In the teaching of the overman, which the speech to the people outlines,* we catch sight of the “overflow” of wisdom that Zarathustra, as a gift-giver, wants to dispense, or with which he, as a creator, wants to undertake an experiment. At the head of the speech, which is given in three parts and launched three times, Zarathustra exhorts man to insert himself into the whole by making creating beyond himself into the object of his will. “All beings so far created something over and beyond themselves.” If mankind does not want to lag behind the other species or to drop out of the evolution, it must not consider itself to be an end. “You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is still more of an ape than any ape.” The teaching of the overman, Zarathustra gives his audience to understand, corresponds to the requirements of life itself and brings man into accord with its basic principle. Yet it does not stop at a general classification. Rather, it attributes to man a particular purpose that distinguishes him before all others. For it entrusts him with nothing less than the natural- and world-historical commission to give rise to the meaning of the earth. In the speech’s seventh verse, Zarathustra proclaims: “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” And since there is no meaning that is not affirmed as a meaning, he doubles the statement in the same verse by requesting: “Let your will say: may the overman be the meaning of the earth!” This turn of phrase makes the meaning toward which everything is supposed to be oriented, and on the basis of which everything that is of importance for man is supposed to be grasped, into a matter of the future. A new order of valuations, of reverences and contempts, of commandments and prohibitions, arises out of the purpose of the radically futurist giving of meaning. Zarathustra anchors the promised peak in decided this-worldliness, deploys earthly obligations against over-earthly hopes, declares that “now,” because “God died,” sacrilege against the earth is “what is most terrible,” and makes use of the affect of disgust against all that is suitable for keeping man in a state of “pathetic comfort.” Against the sinking down of happiness, of reason, and of virtue into such a “pathetic comfort,” he places a happiness that has to “justify existence itself,” a reason that craves “knowing as the lion craves its food,” and a virtue that makes one “rage.” The teaching of the overman, as a teaching of awakening, of transgressing, of highest aspiration, has the overcoming of the “pathetic comfort” as its first goal because it sees in the “pathetic comfort” the first obstacle on the path to greatness as well as on the path to excellence. “Not your sin—your contentedness cries out to heaven.” Against self-satisfaction and undemandingness, Zarathustra invokes the Dionysian and Platonic mania: “Yet where is the lightning that would lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be inoculated? / Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!” Zarathustra not only speaks as a prophet, he also speaks like a prophet.11

Since with his speech Zarathustra reaps only laughter from the crowd that has assembled in the market to enjoy the spectacle of a rope-dancer, for the second part he chooses a different approach: “Man is a rope, fastened between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.” With the image of the rope, Zarathustra takes a first step toward the listeners he wants to reach. As improvised and misleading as the metaphor is, not only is it related to what the bystanders’ eyes are directed toward, it also, beyond the association with the rope-dancer, quickly allows him to speak of the true object of his love for man: “what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.” In eighteen consecutive verses, which begin alike with “I love,” Zarathustra recites the contempts and reverences that the new institution of meaning requires. They all meet in esteem for devotion, for sacrifice, for the readiness to perish for the sake of the One goal: “that the earth will one day belong to the overman.” The second part makes clear that the teaching of the overman in the speech to the people is tailored to the weight-bearing spirit, to the hero or the camel, which Zarathustra will later describe as the first of three transformations that the spirit has to undergo. In the center of the “prologue” stands the “will to going-under.”12

With the second part, in which he did not leave himself entirely “without witness,” unlike in the first, and at the end of which he returns to the image of lightning that he introduced at the end of the first part, Zarathustra again encounters only laughter and incomprehension. In a monologue, the book’s second,13 he considers for the first time, or the first time perceptible to us, how the listeners are to be addressed. After two failures, he now wants to seize them in their pride, in pride regarding their education, in their self-love, which causes them to take heed of differences, to still make distinctions. “Thus I want to speak to them of what is most contemptible: but that is the last man.” The “last man” is supposed to promote pushing off, to compel decision. “It is time,” Zarathustra twice announces. “It is time,” not for the Lord to act because the law is not respected, as the Psalmist exhorts his God (119:126), but for “man to set a goal for himself,” for him to “plant the seed of his highest hope.” With a triple “Woe! The time will come,” Zarathustra then shifts into the register of the prophet who sees the impending calamity from afar and invokes the time of greatest danger—“when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing over beyond man,” “when man will no longer give birth to any star”—in order to ward off this danger. “Woe! The time will come of the most contemptible man, who is no longer able to have contempt for himself.” Zarathustra shows the most contemptible man by making the last man’s statements audible four times and by making the blinking that accompanies it visible four times. “‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is star?’—thus asks the last man, and blinks.” The last man poses no Socratic questions, and his blinking is also not winking or the clandestine communication of ideas. The four questions are expressions of the indifferent dismissal with which Zarathustra’s speech is met. The third and fourth cause the proclamation of the greatest danger to come to nothing: “What are you talking of longing and of star?” The first rejects the speech’s central concern: “What does love mean, anyway?” And the second, the only one that does not take up a statement of Zarathustra’s verbatim, acknowledges the whole teaching of the overman with a shrug: “What does creation matter? Or creating beyond oneself?” The blinking confirms the unreceptiveness to the prophet’s promise as well as to his warning. The last man lacks an unobstructed view. He does not look danger in the eye. He has no sense for the truth. The last man’s fourfold blinking in the third part of the speech corresponds to the fourfold exhibition of “pathetic comfort” in the first part. And thus the decisive utterance, at the same time the second and fourth of the four utterances that Zarathustra puts into the mouths of the last men, reads: “‘We have invented happiness’—say the last men, and blink.” The word† of invented happiness, which, as invented, is grounded in illusion, passes judgment on the last man. In Antichrist, Nietzsche will have the philosopher’s answer follow it as a late echo: “We have discovered happiness.”14

The “prologue” goes under in the “clamor” and the “ardor‡ of the crowd”: “‘Give us this last man, O Zarathustra§—thus they called out—make us into these last men! Then we shall gift you the overman!’” The prophet’s failure is complete. His teaching does not reach the people. The attempt to address the listeners’ pride was also misguided. The speech on the last man does not lead them to distinguish within themselves between the higher and the lower. It awakens not their revulsion, but their desire. It moves them to identification. Zarathustra, who descended from the mountains to dispense his overflow of wisdom, becomes aware of his lack of wisdom in the marketplace. He does not know to whom he speaks. He therefore also does not know how he should speak. He does not even know to whom he can speak and to whom he cannot. His failures must teach him that he has to adjust his speech to the addressee. He must let himself be told by others and only then learn for himself that his speech can put him in danger. The warning of the old saint in the forest Zarathustra casts to the winds, certain of his gift for men. At the end of the “prologue,” he realizes that with his teaching he reaps not merely laughter, but hatred: “as they laugh they even hate me. There is ice in their laughter.” Thus he becomes receptive to the warning of the jester who caused the rope-dancer to fall to his death. “Go away from this town, O Zarathustra,” he whispers in his ear, “too many here hate you. The good and just hate you and they call you their enemy and contemner; the believers of right belief hate you, and they call you the danger to the crowd.” Zarathustra shows himself sufficiently impressed by the jester’s speech to speak thenceforth of the “good and just” when he is targeting the defenders of the existing order as the enemies of his teaching, and he likewise draws on the jester’s speech when, in the “believers of right belief,” he detects his adversaries. At the end of “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” we see the prophet, after a long sleep and in possession of a new insight, resolved to draw conclusions from the failure in the market and to adopt another path: “‘let Zarathustra talk not to the people, but to companions! Zarathustra should not become shepherd and dog to a herd! / To lure many away from the herd—for that I have come.” Zarathustra will no longer speak to all. He will distinguish among the addressees of his teaching. He strives not for an immediate, but a mediate rule. He relies on subversion and an elite that is to be newly created. Hence his outer profession changes as well.15

Zarathustra’s speech to the people, “which is also called ‘the prologue,’” determines the historical position of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is not addressed to the Persian or Greek people, to the Jewish or German people, but to the people in the market of the “nearest town,” who can stand, just as well as those of any town, for mankind. The post-Christian prophet turns toward mankind. What he has to proclaim concerns all and, it seems, none in particular. He speaks neither of the faithful city nor of the best polis. He is not concerned with this or that polity, but with the future of the human race. In fact, the teaching of the overman and of the last man, the effective core of “Zarathustra’s Prologue,”16 is a post-Christian teaching in every sense. It attempts to give a response to the “greatest recent event,” which at the same time designates its most important presupposition, the event that “God is dead.”17 It wants to “teach men the meaning of their being: which is the overman, the lightning from the dark cloud man.” With its tense future-directedness, stress on longing and hope, demand for devotion and sacrifice, exhortation to decision in the face of the greatest danger and highest expectation, it is supposed to replace Christian eschatology, which has lost its believability. That the teaching of the overman and of the last man opposes the Young Hegelian elevation of man into the highest being for man belongs just as much to Zarathustra’s post-Christian situation as does the assumption of the Darwinian perspective at the beginning of the speech, in which the overman appears as a new species and does not yet figure as “lightning” that awaits its interpretation. The historical position marked by the sixty-six verses of Zarathustra’s speech to the people is further illuminated by the action in which the speech is embedded. For the “prologue” comprises only three of the ten sections of the chapter which, under the title “Zarathust...