Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for their help and encouragement: Michael Tanner, Neil Gascoigne, Michael Henry, Mike Walters, Terry Llewellyn, Paul Hewett, Margaret Harding, and John Shand. I would also like to thank Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for furnishing me with a handsome set of rooms under the eaves of Leckhampton House where most of the ideas contained in this book were originally conceived.

List of Abbreviations

See ‘Texts and Translations’ for full bibliographical information.

Introduction

Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?

Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Broadly speaking, responses to this question vary according to whether or not the respondent (a) attends to the contextuality of Zarathustra’s utterances; (b) deems the end of Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to mark the completion of Zarathustra’s Bildung; or (c) acknowledges the importance of Part IV as a means of gaining additional insight into the “character” of Zarathustra.

(a) Contextuality

In his essay, ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’, Heidegger insists that, in order to answer his question, ‘it is not enough merely to compile sentences showing what the advocate and teacher says about himself. We must heed how he says it, on what occasions, and with what intention.’,¹ Three excellent suggestions, to which I would add a fourth: the even greater need for meticulous attention to how (and on what occasions, and with what intention) Zarathustra speaks about others, especially his ‘higher men’.

In response to his own question, and his own interpretative precepts, however, Heidegger completely disregards the how of Zarathustra’s discourse by failing to interrogate its possible ironic, parodic, satiric, rhetorical, fictional, confessional function within Zarathustra. As for heeding the context of Zarathustra’s utterances, Heidegger only perfunctorily complies with this hermeneutic injunction. Finally, when Heidegger looks for Zarathustra’s intent, he looks not within the context of Zarathustra, nor within the larger context of Nietzsche’s published works, but in Nietzsche’s posthumously published notes where, according to Heidegger, the sole source of ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy proper’² is to be found.

Heidegger’s reliance on Nietzsche’s Nachlaß is unsurprising given the former’s specific philosophical preoccupation, but it is a methodological prejudice that inevitably leads to a highly idiosyncratic reading of Zarathustra. Seeing Nietzsche’s protagonist principally, if not solely, in terms of ‘the relation of Being to the human being’,³ compels Heidegger to reformulate his question thus: ‘who is this being who appears within metaphysics at its stage of completion?’⁴ This reformulation effectively removes the subject of the question from his natural habitat and places him in a (Heideggerean) world that is entirely alien to him.

(b) Delimitation

Many Nietzsche commentators consider Part III of Zarathustra to mark the completion of Zarathustra’s Bildung and accordingly dismiss Part IV as little more than a postscript to the “whole” which precedes it. Hollingdale’s assessment is typical in this respect: ‘the glowing conclusion of the third part is the book’s true climax and the seal upon what was by then a complete philosophical outlook on the world’.⁵ Lampert, however, while endorsing Hollingdale’s judgment thus: ‘Everything points to the end of Part III as The End’,⁶ and accordingly confining his discussion of Part IV to a (relatively) brief appendix, unwittingly defends the significance of Part IV by insisting that ‘the existence of a fourth part violates the end of Part III’ (emphasis added).⁷ If this violation is intentional – and this book submits that it is -then Part IV is vital to an understanding of Parts I to III.

Another involuntary defender of Part IV’s integral relation to the book’s preceding parts, is Ackerman, who points to its expository function: ‘These additional materials seem to have been added after the first version had seemed incomprehensible to readers, in the hopes of facilitating communication, at least to Nietzsche’s close friends’.⁸ Once again, if this suggestion concerning Nietzsche’s possible motive for writing Part IV were to be removed from its context – in this case, from Ackerman’s largely descriptive account of Zarathustra⁹ – and wantonly ‘deconstructed’¹⁰ from the perspective of violation and disclosure, then the suggestion that Parts I to III (which deal with a predominantly affirmative protagonist) might have seemed incomprehensible (inauthentic, certainly) to Nietzsche’s more discerning readers, until exposed as mere bluster and bravado by the addition of Part IV, is remarkably apropos.

Part IV is most frequently condemned on stylistic grounds, and Lea’s judgment in this respect is representative: ‘Part IV, an after thought […] is also an anticlimax. Diffuse where the other [parts] are concise, allegorical where they are figurative, it took far longer than they to write, and the reason is all too plain: it is uninspired.’¹¹ But if the stylistic excesses of Part IV lead Lea to reject this final part as ‘a baroque extension’,¹² they provoke Fink to a far more damning condemnation: ‘the fable now erupts violently, even insistently; it comes to an embarrassing and terrible derailment; the entire fourth part is a fall. Somehow the poetic-intellectual vision seems exhausted. This fourth part of the work is added like an evil, malicious satyr play that opens up a new, tragic view of the world.’¹³ Fink is, I believe, correct in ascribing Zarathustra’s ‘fall’, from the azure heights of poetic-philosophical vision to the stygian depths of tragic insight, to crude authorial intrusion. To assert, however, that ‘Zarathustra as the thinker of new thoughts stands beyond Nietzsche’s psychology’¹⁴ is to impose upon the author an objectivity which the author himself categorically repudiates. Indeed, it is this thinly veiled publication of Nietzsche’s psychology – his tragic Weltanschauung which in Part IV threatens to break through the exquisite fabric of Apollonian illusion and to destroy the carefully wrought Zarathustran persona of Parts I to III – that makes Part IV so worthy of detailed analysis. For, ultimately, neither the private publication of Part IV nor its allegorical form could prevent the exposure of that which Nietzsche had hoped to keep secret, namely, the profoundly tragic nature of his heroic self-projection. ‘Nietzsche is tremendous’, claims Fink, ‘as long as he speaks, thinks and teaches, as it were, as Zarathustra – he becomes weak when he talks over Zarathustra. There he is not enough of a poet.’¹⁵ But it is precisely there, at the point where the lying poet yields to the penitential author, that this book seeks to probe most deeply.

(c) Rehabilitation

Standing apart from the detractors of Part IV is a handful of Nietzsche commentators struggling, by various means, to give it the critical attention which it deserves. Most prominent¹⁶ among these critics are Higgins¹⁷ and Shapiro,¹⁸ whose respective approaches to Part IV are primarily informed by modes of interpretation that place far greater emphasis on external than on internal sources of explication. For example, both Higgins and Shapiro rely heavily upon Mikhail Bakhtin for theoretical support, while Higgins bases her entire reading of Part IV on a systematic, unconvincing and arguably misconceived comparative study.

Higgins contends that Part IV is ‘a satire constructed on the model of Apuleius’ Golden Ass’, leading her to conclude that ‘the parallels between The Golden Ass and Zarathustra, Part IV, indicate that Part IV is Menippean satire.’¹⁹ Certainly, the structural parallels facilitated by Bakhtin’s (The Dialogic Imagination) analysis of The Golden Ass, and the formulaic parallels provided by Northrop Frye’s (The Anatomy of Criticism) characterization of Menippean satire, are persuasive, but they remain, nevertheless, merely formal correspondences. As for the deeper resonances which Higgins purports to find between Apuleius’ work and Part IV of Zarathustra – for example, the common nature of Lucius and Zarathustra’s folly, pretensions and asininity – these would appear to tend more towards the trivial than the trenchant. Paradoxically, however, Higgins’ mistaken premise and the trite conclusion to which it leads her – that ‘Error and its unfortunate consequences serve the positive function of expediting insight that makes a new level of maturity possible’²⁰ (which is, of course, just a paraphrase, or paraphrasis, of that old adage: ‘We can all learn from our mistakes’) – likewise serve the positive function of expediting insight. On the basis of her comparative study of Lucius and Zarathustra – the respective “asses” whom she sees united not only in their folly but, more importantly, in their ability to see their folly ‘as valuable for its instructive incitement to wisdom’²¹ – Higgins concludes that ‘the straightforward thematic insistence on Zarathustra’s own folly and pretensions in Part IV […] casts a new and important light on the material in the preceding parts. It brings to completion in unmistakable clarity Nietzsche’s effort to modify Zarathustra’s doctrinal message with reflections of its limited nature.’²² This reading of Part IV as ‘a self-ironical satire’ (although not, as Higgins claims, ‘after the fashion of a particular antique gerne’)²³ has serious implications not only for the status of Zarathustra’s teaching, but for the apparently affirmative characterization of Zarathustra in Parts I to III. It is with these implications that this book deals in considerable detail.

Rigidly distinguishing between parody and burlesque, allegory and carnival, Shapiro asserts that ‘a radical shift in the narrative from the mode of allegory to that of carnival and festival’²⁴ occurs midway through Part IV of Zarathustra. This division of Part IV into discrete parts results, most significantly, in the destruction of the parodic and allegorical continuity which this book argues is manifest throughout Part IV in the allegorical higher men’s relentless parody of Zarathustra. Further, instead of placing the carnivalesque Zarathustra in the context of the self-ironical festivities of the Middle Ages²⁵ (self-irony being, perhaps, Zarathustra’s most endearing and, on my reading, most prominent character trait), Shapiro turns to Bakhtin’s (Rabelais and His World) reconstruction of the popular carnival of the late Middle Ages. This over-reliance on Bakhtin, especially concerning the nature of carnival laughter and carnival thrashing,²⁶ leads Shapiro to overlook the self-referential aspect of Zarathustra’s (internal) carnival, and to underplay the highly ambiguous nature of Zarathustra’s seemingly playful, triumphant, affirmative and, at times, even übermenschliche stance.

Shapiro’s positive assessment of Zarathustra’s buffoonery stems from his perception of an ironic distance separating Zarathustra from his higher men.²⁷ Whilst sharing this perspective, this book submits that the ironic distance is neither as great nor as sustained as Zarathustra would sometimes have us believe, and marks the point at which its reading of Part IV breaks with tradition (such as it is). With one glaring exception,²⁸ it is the received view that while the higher men represent the fragmentary and chaotic nature of Nietzsche/Zarathustra’s many-souled self,²⁹ Zarathustra nevertheless stands beyond them. The most emphatic proponent of Zarathustra’s self-assured superiority is Alderman, who claims that ‘[t]he gap between Zarathustra and the higher men consists of [sic] the fact that they lack Zarathustra’s prudent attention to the arguments of experience which teach the craft of appropriate affirmation.’³⁰ But if, on the contrary, the higher men symbolize precisely those ‘arguments of experience’ which have taught Zarathustra the “art” of prudent affirmation’ – the experience, that is, of decadent modern culture and decadent ancient culture – then the alleged gap between Zarathustra and his higher men becomes significantly more problematic. As Nietzsche observes with his characteristic acuity: ‘It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and identity’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 251). On this reading, Zarathustra’s buffoonery in Part IV is closer to exigency than complacency, and less akin to the comedy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream³¹ than to the tragi-comedy of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. What Zarathustra desires from his art is not ‘to delight in his own nature [… but] to get over and away from his nature for a time’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 371); not, as Alderman believes, ‘revelation and celebration’, but ‘escape’.³²

Autobiographical Perspectives

Who, then, is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? As we have seen, this question is not one that can be answered simply or definitively. The most that one can hope for is ‘a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations’ (GM.III.12), and it is in this joint spirit of ‘perspectivism’ and subjectivism that the question will here be addressed. With regard to subjectivism, one can do no better than to recall Nietzsche’s observation that ‘ultimately, no one can extract from things, including books, more than he already knows. What one has no access to from experience, one has no ear for’ (EH ‘Why I write such good books’ 1). In respect of perspectivism, if, as Nietzsche claims, ‘the poet dips only from his own reality’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 4) and, as Zarathustra claims, ‘poets lie too much’ (Z.II.17), then Zarathustra both is and is not Nietzsche.³³

Autobiography and fiction are, therefore, the dual but not discrete perspectives from which the character of Zarathustra is here viewed, and the deployment of Nietzsche citations now in support of, now in opposition to, Zarathustra serves to highlight the skein of psychological contiguity that ensnares author and reader alike. For, more than any other, Nietzsche’s work exposes and dissolves the artificial boundaries between literature and philosophy, subjectivity and objectivity, author and text; as Nietzsche observes: ‘every great philosophy has hitherto been […] the personal confession of its author and a sort of unconscious (and unintentional (ungewollter) unvermerkter) memoir’ (BGE.6).

Focusing on Nietzsche’s unconscious as opposed to conscious memoir, this book draws primarily on his published works³⁴ and, given the anachronic nature of unconscious memoir, eschews any retrospective and hence to some extent contrived periodization. By means of an intertextual mode of argumentation that juxtaposes Nietzsche’s philosophy and Zarathustra’s buffoonery, both Nietzsche and Zarathustra are judged on, and specifically with(in), the terms of the other. This form of ‘immanent critique’ (to borrow a phrase from Adorno) serves, on the one hand, to demonstrate how Nietzsche’s philosophy, as taught by the prophet Zarathustra in Parts I and II (and, to a lesser extent, Part III), is severely undermined by the self-parodying Zarathustra of Part IV, and on the other, to underscore the intensely ironic³⁵ nature of Nietzsche’s relationship to this most romantic of quixotic heroes.

Literary Conceits

The specific aim of this book is to reveal, by means of a detailed analysis of the allegorical/parabolical figures dramatized in the Prologue and Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the ineluctable pessimism and nihilism lurking behind the affirmative mask of the prophet of redemption. It is submitted that Zarathustra is a man of ressentiment: a quintessentially romantic figure who resents his time, struggles incessantly to overcome it, and fails.

Chapters 1 and 2 take a close look at the parable of the ropedancer and show how the latter’s ignominious fall at the hand of the buffoon prefigures Zarathustra’s ultimate mortification by the scourge of bad conscience.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine Zarathustra’s emblematic eagle (proud imagination) and serpent (cunning reason), and disclose the extent to which Zarathustra’s deep-rooted ressentiment is reliant upon a proud and deceptive consciousness.

Chapters 5 to 7 demonstrate the way in which the seven ‘higher men’ personify the effects and affects of decadence which infest Zarathustra’s soul. The effects of decadent modern culture are allegorized in turn by the soothsayer (pessimistic philosophy), the king on the right (sovereign abdication), the conscientious man of spirit (scholastic science), and the sorcerer (theatrical/histrionic art); and the affects of decadent Christian culture by the last pope (faith, hope, and love), the ugliest man (bad conscience, shame, and pity), and the voluntary beggar (meditation, benevolence, and philanthropy). Finally, the decadent soul turns penitent and casts its shadow across the pilgrim’s path; in its grim reflection of the anarchy obtaining within Zarathustra’s soul, this shady spectre is seen to foreshadow the death of hope.

Chapter 8 deals with the tension between self-loathing and masquerade. The forced gaiety of the ‘Last Supper’ is atoned for in the malicious self-parody of the ‘Ass Festival’, and this ritual cycle of release and repentance, despair and deluded hope, is employed to support the contention that Zarathustra’s last confession is ultimately a confession of bad faith that affectively explodes the Zarathustran myth. Perfidy, flushed out in the penultimate section, is flaunted triumphant and transparent in the closing section, and the prophet’s mask of affirmation and redemption is torn away to reveal the pathetic figure of a tragic buffoon.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, in David B Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (London: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 65. In a footnote to his chapter on Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, Alderman refers to a conversation that he had with Heidegger on 24th May 1973, in which Heidegger maintained that the above cited essay contains the best summary of his Nietzsche interpretation. See Harold Alderman, Nietzsche’s Gift (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 177.

2. Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol I, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991), p. 8. See also Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 73.

3. Heidegger, in Allison (ed.), p. 78.

4. Ibid, p. 77.

5. R J Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 190.

6. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 287.

7. Ibid.

8. Robert John Ackerman, Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 57–8.

9. Ibid., pp. 43–59.

10. One way of defining the verb ‘to deconstruct’ is to separate the text from its author and to place it in a ‘semiotic’ no-man’s land that lies (to borrow Derrida’s formulation) ‘beyond the mythology of the signature [and] beyond the authorial theology’. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 105.

11. F A Lea, The Tragic Philosopher (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 226. To cite the allegorical style of Part IV as a methodological ‘defect’, however, is tantamount to criticizing poetry for not being prose, since ‘the absence of a sustained analysis or argument in support of [its] assertions’ is simply the nature of the allegorical beast. See Irving M Zeitlin, Nietzsche: A Re-examination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 35.

12. Ibid., p. 252.

13. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart: W Kohlhammer, 1968), p. 114. It is a great pity that Fink did not pursue his satyr play analogy, since a more detailed comparison of Part IV with certain aspects of satyric drama – for example: its customary performance, after a set of three tragedies, for the purpose of relieving the seriousness of the tragic trilogy; its subject matter, which, like that of a tragedy, was taken from an epic or legendary story; its tragic element, which was diminished but by no means absent; and, as in tragedy, the comic function of its ‘wanton, saucy, and insolent’ chorus, which generally comprised twelve or fifteen persons (see Oskar Seyffert, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, rev. and ed. Henry Nettleship and J E Sandys [London: William Glaisher, 1894] p. 559) – might have persuaded Fink to reevaluate Part IV on grounds other them stylistic.

14. Fink, p. 115. Cf. Halévy’s similar indictment: ‘Zarathustra the judge has only insults and lamentations upon his lips […] This is no longer the hero whom Friedrich Nietzsche had created so superior to all humanity; it is a man in despair, it is Nietzsche, in short, too weak to express anything beyond his anger and his plaints’. See Daniel Halévy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. J M Hone (London: J Fisher Unwin, 1911), p. 263.

15. Ibid., p. 118.

16. Less prominent, but more notable, is James Ogilvy, whose highly original interpretation of Part IV, to be found in his study of Many Dimensional Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), is remarkable not least for its freedom from the type of methodological dogmatism currently under review.

17. Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

18. Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

19. Higgins, p. 206.

20. Ibid., p. 229.

21. Ibid., p. 232.

22. Ibid., p. xvii.

23. Ibid.

24. Shapiro, p. 107.

25. In his Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard notes how on certain feast days the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages ‘conceive[d] itself ironically, eg., in The Feast of the Ass.’ See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M Capel (London: William Collins Sons, 1966), p. 270.

26. Shapiro, pp. 110 and 105–6 respectively.

27. Ibid., p. 99.

28. ‘It is a shame’, laments Lampert, ‘that so many have misunderstood the superior men of part IV as parodied fragments of Nietzsche himself, as if his hard joke on the best of his contemporaries were a joke on himself’ (p. 289). It is an even greater shame that, as a result of his own misunderstanding of the higher men, Lampert attacks Nietzsche’s portrayal of them as ‘low and laughable, fit objects for Zarathustra’s pity and even for ours’ (p. 291). The point that Lampert misses here is that the higher men are perceived as contemptible “figures” by Zarathustra not ‘because [Zarathustra] brings a new measure of what is high in man’ (ibid.), but, on the contrary, because the higher men represent precisely what Zarathustra perceives to be ‘low and laughable’, and hence deserving of mockery, in his own “character”.

29. Fink, p. 118; Ogilvy, pp. 176–7; Alderman, p. 117; Shapiro, p. 104; Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 59 (footnote 4), et al.

30. Alderman, p. 135.

31. Ibid., p. 115.

32. Ibid., p. 135.

33. It is not, therefore, sufficient to say that Zarathustra is ‘Nietzsche’s allegorical autobiography’ (Thiele, p. 153, footnote 10).

34. In view of the highly dubious status of The Will to Power, this book makes no reference to it at all. For an illuminating account of this non-book’s chequered history, see Bernd Magnus, ‘The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power’ in Solomon and Higgins (eds.), Reading Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 218–35.

35. For a provocative and incisive analysis of Nietzschean irony vis à vis Zarathustra, see Robert B Pippin, ‘Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ in Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B Strong (eds.), Nietzsche’s New Seas (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 45–71.