3
Prudent Imagination
And behold! An eagle swept through the air in wide circles, and from it hung a serpent, not like a prey but like a friend – for it coiled itself around the eagle’s neck.
‘It is my animals!’ said Zarathustra and rejoiced in his heart.
‘The proudest (stolzeste) animal under the sun and the cleverest (klügste) animal under the sun…’82 (Z.Prol.10)
Like much of the symbolism in Zarathustra, the eagle and the serpent are hackneyed emblems which Nietzsche makes no effort to revivify through novel employment: accordingly, we have the proud eagle and the clever serpent. Traditionally, the eagle represents the aerial and the spiritual, and the serpent the chthonic and the material,83 but whereas the eagle straightforwardly symbolizes the solar and is thus implicitly associated with divine wisdom and intuitive knowledge, the serpent is notoriously polyvalent, symbolizing both life and death, good and evil, knowledge and blind passion, healing and poison, perversion and destruction.84 This serpentine ambivalence is particularly evident in the shift from Greek to Christian mythology, from the serpent’s Apollonian association symbolizing medicine, music, and light, to its Satanic association with guile, “evil”, and destruction.
In Zarathustra, this symbolic ambivalence is retained, a circumstance which is best explained by reference to Nietzsche’s repeated exposure of the intrinsic conection between seeming opposites on the grounds that ‘there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis’ (HH.I ‘Of First and Last Things’ 1). The root of this error, Nietzsche suggests, can be found in man’s ‘reas’ning pride’,85 in man’s natural aversion to the idea that good might possibly be rooted in bad, or the ideal, the beautiful, and the moral in the real, the ugly and the non-moral. Pride – a Greek virtue symbolized by the eagle, and a Christian vice symbolized by the proud Lucifer – is that which unites Zarathustra’s eagle and serpent. It is the clever serpent’s “earthly” and earth-bound knowledge of the necessary kinship between good and bad, and the concomitant threat to man’s self-esteem, that leads him to enter into conspiratorial relations with the creative genius of the air-borne eagle.
On this reading, then, the soaring eagle finds its psychical analogue in imagination, and the clever serpent in the subtle and convoluted practices of reason. Proud and prudent reason courts proud imagination, and together -the serpent coiled around the eagle’s neck – they redeem man from his proud shame. Placing Zarathustra’s animals within this complex psychical framework, I will argue that the proud eagle represents the pride of imagination; that the clever (klug) serpent represents the prudence (Klugheit) of reason; and that their union symbolizes the ‘proud, deceptive consciousness’ (TL.1) of the man of ressentiment.86
Disease: Civilization
Almost fifty years before Freud’s supposedly seminal work, Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Nietzsche had analysed the irreparable psychological damage wrought by civilization on man. According to Nietzsche’s speculative anthropology, the “taming” of animal man was a world-historical event of unparallelled cruelty: henceforth man would wage war on himself. Restrained by law from discharging his aggressive drives, the romanticized noble savage was forced to turn his combative and predatory instincts back upon himself. But just as prohibition drives that which is prohibited underground, so the primal instincts, undeterred and undiminished in their thrusting lust for power,87 resort to subterfuge (GM.III.13). Instinctual aggression, formerly directed outward, must now reckon with a new (internal) opponent called consciousness, which must likewise develop subtlety and cunning if it is not to be overcome by the more formidable and resourceful powers of the unconscious:
They were awkward in the execution of the simplest tasks; in this strange88 new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and commanding (sicherführend) drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, combining cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their “consciousness”, to their poorest and most fallible organ! I believe that there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort – and at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands! Only it was hard and seldom possible to comply with them: as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications. (GM.II.16)
‘The weak in courage is strong in cunning’,89 and so it is that man’s ‘poorest and most fallible organ’ develops into his shrewdest and most sophisticated organ. Fearfully exposed to the wanton flux of instinctual and phenomenal nature, consciousness learns the art of reasoning and turns casuist. Only by adopting and refining its opponent’s strategies can the ‘small reason’ of the mind succeed in outwitting the ‘great reason’ of the body (Z.I.4).90
Symptom: Ressentiment
In the transition from wilderness to society, the prototypical man of ressentiment is born. Ressentiment is defined as an indignant sense of injury received, and the man of ressentiment is characterized by the shrewd (serpent-like) way in which he reacts91 to this feeling. Resentful of the loss of instinctual freedom and the suffering attendant upon relentless internal warfare, the man of ressentiment avenges himself as only the weak can: through cunning and artifice. The man of nature becomes a man of reason, ‘active forces become reactive’,92 and in the struggle for survival, subtlety and prudence usurp the former rights of brute force.93 Just as Prince Hal/Henry V rejects Falstaff – who is ‘not only witty in [him]self, but the cause that wit is in other men’94 – so consciousness seeks to deny its unconscious determinant and thus its chaotic and subtle foundations. Asserting legitimacy by the denial of its historical contingency, the Pretender, intellect, disingenuously planks over the flux of existence (Z.III.12.8); metaphysics becomes the comfort food of vain philosophers.95
Daunted and dispirited by the inexorable will to power inherent in nature, reason, with the aid of imagination, devises the reassuring but false polarities of real and ideal (Plato); spirit and matter, immortal and mortal, good and evil (Christianity); noumenal and phenomenal (Kant). As Nietzsche avers: ‘“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses’ (TI ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’ 2), and with her contempt for the body and her devaluation of the sensible in favour of the suprasensible, reason imaginatively invents the “noble” lie and thereby ushers nihilism into the annals of history.
Physic: Nihilism
Within the context of Nietzsche’s work as a whole (and his Nachlaß in particular), the term “nihilism” displays formidable versatility. This is not the place, however, for a detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic employment of this term;96 suffice it to say that Nietzsche distinguishes between four basic forms of nihilism, which might be termed optimistic or idealist nihilism, pessimistic nihilism, apathetic nihilism, and affirmative nihilism. The first three types are characterized by a denial of life, and the fourth by a denial of life-denial. The optimistic nihilist denies the value of this world of becoming by weighing it against the (believed/imagined) supreme value of an ideal (believed “true”) world of being; the pessimistic nihilist denies the value of this world and the existence of any other, and inveighs against both; the apathetic nihilist, or what Zarathustra contemptuously refers to as ‘the last man’, is a resigned pessimistic nihilist who has found contentment in stagnation; and finally, the affirmative nihilist, posessed of an übermenschliche love of life as it really is, denies himself all forms of life-preserving life-denial.
The history of optimistic or idealist nihilism is the ‘history of an error’ (TI ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’), an error perpetrated by the man of ressentiment: first by the shrewd reason of the philosopher-king (Plato); then by ‘the diseased reason in the priest’ (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6) (Christianity); and finally, by the “pure practical reason” of the philosopher-theologian97 (Kant). In his breathtakingly concise six-part history entitled ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’, Nietzsche dissects the metaphysical malaise and charts the decline and fall of the so-called “true world”. Parts 1 to 3 rehearse the gradual refinement and rarefication of this bastard child of reason and imagination, and parts 4 to 6 depict the dawn of positivism, of a world-view purportedly unclouded by theology and metaphysics.
1. The true world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man – he lives it, he is it.
(Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever (klug),98 simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)
Nietzsche’s application of the adjective ‘klug’ here is significant: it suggests that Plato’s idea of the Forms is simply a clever ruse, a “noble” lie, devised by one who seeks to authenticate his truth claims. It is a relatively clever idea by virtue of its simplicity and in contradistinction to those ingenious ideas which lack credibility by being too-clever-by-half (see 3 below). Plato’s idea of a “true world” is intelligible in both senses of the word: it is an idea that is both comprehensible (to all) and apprehensible (albeit to philosopher-kings only).
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (“to the sinner who repents”).
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more cunning (feiner), more insidious (verfänglicher),99 more incomprehensible – it becomes woman, it becomes Christian …)
Once again, the adjectives ‘feiner’ and ‘verfänglicher’ draw the reader’s attention to the increasing subtlety of reason in its desperate bid to deny and vilify the more sensible truth claims, as it were, of the instincts. The incomprehensibility of the idea lies in its cunning removal to an “afterworld”, to a world from which no-one ever returns; a world, therefore, which can neither be proved nor disproved. In this, of course, lies its enticing mystery; but, for Nietzsche, the cosmetics of mystery, like those of woman, are meretricious.
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but even as thought, a comfort, a duty, an imperative.
(The old sun, basically, but seen through fog and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northern,100 Königsbergian.)
Here is Kant’s postulated noumenal world, a world which lies beyond the phenomenal, beyond the empirical, beyond the sensible, beyond the causal and the conditioned, and so, for Nietzsche, beyond the pale. Here is the same old sun: bright enough at first to cast a shadow in Plato’s allegorical cave, then growing hazy as the sun becomes shrouded in mystifying mists and clouds of frankincense, and finally eclipsed by Kant’s categories of the understanding. But just as the eclipsed sun shines forth in a halo of light, so the Platonic and Christian incandescence of ‘pure spirit and the good in itself’ (BGE.Pref) irradiates Kant’s halo of pure practical reason and the ‘categorical imperative’ of its postulated moral law.
4. The true world – unattainable? Unattained, in any case. And if unattained also unknown. Consequently, also not consolatory, redemptive, obligatory: to what could something unknown obligate us?
(Grey dawn. first yawnings of reason. Cockrow of positivism.)
5. The “true world” – an idea which is no longer of any use, not even an obligation, – an idea which has become useless and superfluous, consequently, a refuted idea, let us abolish it!
(Broad daylight; breakfast, return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushes for shame; pandemonium of all free spirits)
6. The true world we have abolished: what world remains? the apparent world perhaps? … But no! with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!
(Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; highpoint of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA)
According to the above history, then, nihilism finally annihilates itself; but does it? If one scrutinizes the whimsical asides of parts 4 to 6, an autobiographical dimension reveals itself. In the cockcrow of positivism, the cheerful pandemonium of the free spirits, and the clarion call of INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA, one can hear the distant echo of Nietzsche’s respective and retrospective efforts – in Dawn, The Gay Science and Zarathustra – to extricate himself from the metaphysical mire. But, as we shall see in chapter 6 below, positivism is just another, more refined form of nihilism; and with the arrival of Zarathustra and his prophecy of the coming Übermensch, we seem to have come full circle. For if Nietzsche can congratulate himself on having abolished the “true world”, he must surely be blushing for shame at his need to invent a character who is courageous and heroic enough to be true to a world whose truth is both ungodly and unsightly. Zarathustra’s Übermensch represents the ‘highpoint of humanity’: a man who not only lives truly in this world – he ‘lives it, he is it’. But if this real world is truer than Plato’s ideal world, Zarathustra’s ideal lover of this real world is truly just another “noble” lie.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche had argued that man’s contempt for life and himself would begin to ebb ‘as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god’ (GS.285). Zarathustra’s propehtic beginning, however, is a veritable flood, an outpouring of vitriol against the contemptible ‘last man’ and a promised redemptive sea into which the latter can ‘flow out’: ‘In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea to be able to absorb a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the Übermensch: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can drown’ (Z.Prol.3). The Übermensch is, of course, an (perhaps the) affirmative nihilist who, giddy with happiness and exuberant dancing, ecstatically embraces life. It is, however, an optimistic nihilist who, in prophesying the redemptive Übermensch, weighs man against the (believed) supreme value of an ideal of human perfection, ‘a type of supreme achievement, in opposition to “modern” men, to “good” men, to Christians and other nihilists’ (EH ‘Why I write such good books’ 1).
On this showing, then, history repeats itself. Nihilism is self-perpetuating rather than self-defeating: no sooner is one idol obliterated (whether it be the Forms, God, or the ‘Ding-an-sich’, or any of its secular manifestations such as socialism and positivism), than another blossoms in its place.
‘Incipit Zarathustra’, writes Nietzsche, and beginning (as we saw in Chapter 1) where his illustrious forbears left off, Zarathustra enters the market square peddling his latest (übermenschliche) “form” of the old ascetic ideal. The question is, of course, whether Zarathustra realizes that his Übermensch is but another nihilistic lie; another subtle strategy of a proud and deceptive consciousness.
Physician: Prudent Pride
In reas’ning Pride (my friend) our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the Skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods.101
The philosopher, according to Nietzsche, is ‘the proudest of men’ (TL.1), and just as Eve felt that her divine origin entitled her to a share in divine knowledge, so the philosopher/metaphysician, with his ontological and epistemological pretensions, lays claim to divine wisdom. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche mocks the ‘subtle pride’ of those ‘philosophical labourers [who,] after the noble model of Kant and Hegel, must establish and press into formulas […] some great facts of high regard – that is, former positings of value, creations of value, which have become dominant and for a long time been called “truths”’ (BGE.211). But this will to conceptualize and systematize, to abstraction and simplification, is nothing compared to Kant’s and Hegel’s vaunted claims to absolutism. Indeed, Kant’s audacious attempt to lay the groundwork to a metaphysic of morals on unconditional, “free” and hence groundless grounds, and Hegel’s conviction that ‘das absolute Wissen’ can only be consummated in philosophy, would seem to suggest, after the noble model of Plato and Pythagoras, nothing short of the divine right of philosopher-kings. The ‘magnificent arrogance’ of these two archetypal philosopher-kings leads to their denunciation in The Gay Science as ‘monsters of pride and self-satisfaction’ (GS.V.351).
It is with apparent pride and self-satisfaction that Zarathustra sings of his ‘wild wisdom’, which became pregnant upon lonely mountains (Z.II.1), and with impetuous desire (Z.III.12.2) now proudly wings its way across the sea (Z.II.8). But a glance at Nietzsche’s anguished Dionysus-Dithyramb, ‘Amid Birds of Prey’, leads one to suspect that Zarathustra’s wild wisdom is but an instance of proud reason, having fallen heavily pregnant with the gravity of its knowledge, seeking periodic relief in flighty imagination.
Now –
alone with yourself
twain in self-knowledge,
amid a hundred mirrors
false before yourself
amid a hundred memories
uncertain,
weary from every wound
cold from every frost,
strangled in your own ropes,
Self-knower!
Self-executioner!
Why did you bind yourself
with the rope of your wisdom?
Why did you lure yourself
into the old serpent’s paradise?
Why did you sneak into yourself
yourself – yourself? …
Now an invalid
sick with the serpent’s poison; […]
towered over by a hundred burdens,
overloaded by yourself,
a knower!
a self-knower!
the wise Zarathustra! …
You sought the heaviest burden:
there you found yourself –,
yourself you cannot throw off …
[…] And only recently so proud!
on all the stilts of your pride!
Only recently the hermit without God,
co-dweller with the Devil,
the scarlet prince of all high spirits!
The serpent’s gift102 of knowledge is here seen to be received at the behest and self-bequest of pride, and the biblical link between pride and the Fall is rehearsed. Just as proud Lucifer, the angel of light, waged open war on the plains of heaven, fell into darkness, and must now rely on cunning and artifice to satisfy his pride; so a proud and godless Zarathustra, having entered into mortal combat with his battalion of inner selves and fallen from wounded pride, makes a pact with the devil and cunningly creates for himself a new god. Armed with this new amulet, Zarathustra enters the fray once more (Z.Prol.3–5), is defeated by injured pride once more (overthrown by the mocking, rope-dancing buffoon Z.Prol.6), and must once more resort to subtlety and disguise if he is to retain a modicum of human dignity.
A distinction must be made between clever (klug) and wise (weise). Just as man is ‘a manifold, mendacious, false, and devious animal, uncanny to the animals less on account of his strength than on account of his cunning and cleverness’ (BGE.291), so klug is a consummate and versatile actor, and a German etymologist might well raise an eyebrow or two at those Nietzsche commentators who display a tendency to mistake the role for the actor. Klug’s repertoire includes clever and intelligent, witty and sophisticated, wise and sound, prudent and shrewd. And in the following dialogue from Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (Weise), Nathan gives a shrewd account of the incestuous relations obtaining between clever and wise:
Saladin: I have long wished to know the man whom [the people] call wise.
Nathan: And what if he was mockingly so called? If wise to the people was nothing more than clever? And clever only he who knows where his advantage lies?
Saladin: His real advantage, you mean?
Nathan: In that case, of course, the most selfish would be the cleverest; in which case, of course, clever and wise would be one. (2,272)103
Is not Zarathustra’s “wisdom” only mockingly so called, and his ‘wild wisdom’ merely an imaginative conceit ‘And Reason in her most exalted mood’?104 As evidenced by the following textual references, imagination is inextricably bound up with Zarathustra’s so-called wisdom; his youthful wisdom – possessed at a time when he had ‘wanted to dance beyond all heavens’ – resided in (Wagnerian) ‘visions’ and (Schopcnhauerian) ‘consolations’ (Z.II.11); his ‘laughing, wakeful day-wisdom that mocks all “infinite worlds”’, finds the courage to do so – that is to say, without the aid of his metaphysical crutch, the Übermensch – only in a dream, a dream in which the finite world appears to him in the utopian splendour that imagination alone can supply (Z.III.10.1); his ‘wild wisdom’ is, ‘in truth’, a ‘wise’ and ‘great desire with rushing wings’ (Z.III.12.2), an exalted feeling and a passionate longing; in a chapter appositely entitled ‘Of the Great Longing’, Zarathustra sadly recalls how he gave his soul ‘all new wines and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom’, and how even these heady intoxications are insufficient to cure his soul of its heavy melancholy (Z.III.14); and finally, in a chapter entitled ‘Of Human Prudence’,105 one encounters Zarathustra’s imaginary ‘Übermensch joyfully bathing his nakedness in the burning sun of wisdom’ (Z.II.21).
Klugheit loves to strut about in the golden106 robes of Weisheit – ‘At all times arrogance has rightly been called the “vice of the knower (Wissende)”’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 26) – and Zarathustra himself, as his animals betoken, is no stranger to this dissembling art. He learns that amongst the nauseating and pitiful herd his ‘best wisdom’ (beste Weisheit) is to ‘forget and pass by’ (Z.III.9). Furthermore, it is precisely his disgust at the sight of the ‘polluted river’ of mankind, that prudently creates for itself the redemptive sea symbolized by the Übermensch (Z.Prol.3), and ‘wings to soar away into distant futures’ (Z.II.21).107 In short, Zarathustra’s all-too-human prudence consists in disguising himself so that he may ‘misjudge’ himself and others (Z.II.21). But to what effect? A conscious counterfeiter, as opposed to an unconscious counterfeiter (see EH ‘The Case of Wagner’ 3), cannot afford the luxury of self-deceit. Herculean effort and selective blindness may enable Zarathustra to ‘pass by’ suffering humanity with, at best, an air of studied indifference, but his brutally suppressed pity threatens anarchy with every passing step. And ‘to soar away into distant futures’ is, at the very least, a disingenuous activity for one who exhorts man to be ‘true to the earth’ (Z.Prol.3). Only when intellectual conscience and bitter irony are, as it were, up-staged by reason and imagination, can Zarathustra tolerate himself, humanity, and life. Life, like wisdom, is for Zarathustra in all things a woman: ‘fickle and defiant’, and perhaps ‘wicked and false’, wisdom and life share the same serpentine qualities (Z.II.10). Is it any wonder, therefore, that so many readers of Zarathustra confound prudence and wisdom, and fail to see the man of ressentiment hiding behind the mask of the prophet, and the wizened face of prudence grimacing behind the joyful mask of ‘wild wisdom’?108 Above all else, Zarathustra is a clever man, a prudent man, a resentful man; a man who, in the interests of self-preservation, would rather ‘conceal and deny [a] broken, proud, incurable heart’ (BGE.270) than choke to death on self-contempt.
‘Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity’,109 and time and again in Nietzsche’s work, amidst a barrage of vitriol, contumely and general polemic, one encounters this contemptible figure. One of Nietzsche’s favourite bêtes noires, this exceptionally clever beast is almost invariably exposed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Nietzsche has, of course, particular sheep in mind, namely, the Christian “flock”. According to Nietzsche, prudence masquerades as morality, and the Christian virtues are a motley collection of cunning disguises. Just as the ugliest man in Part IV of Zarathustra decks himself out in a crown and purple (symbolizing sacerdotal power) sashes – ‘for, like all the ugly, he loved to disguise and beautify himself (Z.IV.11) – so weakness cloaks itself in strength, vice in virtue. These ‘protean arts’ (BGE.230) of prudence owe their subtlety and ingenuity to the circumspect leaders of the Christian movement, those Church Fathers ‘who are clever, clever to the point of holiness’ (A.59), and whose ‘Serpent Reasonings us entice / Of Good and Evil, Virtue & Vice.’110
Zarathustra is (apparently) no Christian prophet, but, as an ironic man of ressentiment struggling and failing to overcome his cultural past, he is forced to recognize his own deep implication in the priestly heritage; the ironic man of ressentiment acknowledges that he is a man of ressentiment. If consciousness developed with the aid of the intellect, then the supreme sophistication of the latter was achieved by clerical casuistry. A cunning prudence invented morality in order to instil pride, to establish morale,111 and so counteract the fatal consequences of self-loathing. Out of the same materials (prudence and cunning), Zarathustra fashions for himself gaily painted masks: self-love masks self-contempt; pride, shame; and the prophet of the redemptive Übermensch masks the madman who fears the nihilistic consequences of the death of God (GS.125) and his dire need of metaphysical comfort.
The Christian God and the “anti-Christian” Übermensch are two sides of the same metaphysical coin in the currency of shame, hope and redemption. The old morality, invented by the priestly caste and perpetuated by the pride and prudence of rational imagination, is embodied in Zarathustra’s animals. Far from symbolizing Zarathustra’s noble, anti-Christian virtues,112 the proud eagle and clever serpent typify the Christian “virtues” so often denounced by Nietzsche; and on Nietzsche’s own admission, the hardest task for Zarathustra will be to free himself from the old morality. As early as the Prologue to Zarathustra, this task is seen to be impossible, an impossibility that, as we shall now see, the periodic appearances of Zarathustra’s animals serve to underscore.
82. Both Kaufmann and Hollingdale refer to the serpent as ‘the wisest animal under the sun’ (emphasis added). This very generous rendering of ‘klügste’ necessarily proceeds from a positive reading of Zarathustra’s character; for if Zarathustra is deemed to be a noble figure, then his animals will be seen to symbolize his noble qualities. If, on the other hand, Zarathustra is perceived to be more base than noble, more reactive than active, more Mensch than Übermensch, then his animals will be taken to represent his ignoble qualities. On this latter reading, Zarathustra’s serpent appears to have less of the genius about him than the ingenious: far from being the wisest animal under the sun, he is the cleverest animal under the sun. For a discussion on the significance of partiality in Nietzsche translation see Cauchi, ‘Rationalism and Irrationalism: A Nietzschean Perspective’, History of European Ideas, 20:4–6 (1995), 937–943.
83. For a history of these two symbols with respect to Zarathustra, see David Thatcher, ‘Eagle and Serpent in Zarathustra’, Nietzsche-Studien 6 (1977), 240–60.
84. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 146/7.
85. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ll. 119–122.
86. While I have chosen to retain the French word ‘ressentiment’, I do not share Kaufmann’s misgivings concerning its English equivalent ‘resentment’. Harraps’ French-English Dictionary gives ‘resentment’ as the primary translation of ‘ressentiment’, and one wonders why Nietzsche necessarily had another meaning in mind, as Kaufmann seems to imply. Rather, Nietzsche’s originality could be seen to lie not in giving ‘ressentiment’ a new “meaning” (I do not believe that he does), but in extending its application to the moral sphere: ressentiment as the source of herd and slave morality (see GM.I). In choosing the French word rather than the German, Nietzsche’s purpose might simply have been to draw attention to his novel application of this noun.
87. ‘Every drive is tyrannical’ (BGE.6).
88. This adjective (unbekannt) is absent from Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s joint translation.
89. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, Plate 9.
90. Cf. ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘The Voice of the Devil’, Plate 4.
91. Deleuze stresses that it is the type of reaction (in fact, a failure to re-act) that designates the man of ressentiment: ‘Ressentiment designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in one way: by ceasing to be acted’. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 111.
92. Deleuze. Man’s active and reactive forces form the basis of Deleuze’s critique of Nietzsche and inform his excellent readings of the will to power, ressentiment and bad conscience.
93. Freud discusses the consequences of this transference of power from the individual to the community in Chapter 1 of Civilization and its Discontents.
94. William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, I.ii.9–10.
95. ‘If such Metaphysiques […] be not Vain Philosophy, there was never any.’ Thomas Hobbes (SOED), p. 1315.
96. For a clear and concise exposition of Nietzsche’s diverse treatment of the term “nihilism” see Chapter 2 of Alan White’s Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth (London: Routledge, 1990). For a more schematic exposition see Robert C Solomon, ‘Nietzsche, Nihilism, and Morality’, in Robert C Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 204–9.
97. As Heidegger argues in his excellent reading of Nietzsche’s ‘history’, Kant’s noumenal, suprasensuous world does not appear ‘on the grounds of basic philosophical principles of knowledge but as a consequence of uneradicated Christian-theological presuppositions. In that regard Nietzsche on one occasion observes of Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, “They are all mere Schleiermachers” ([Grossoktavausgabe] XV.112). The observation has two edges: it means not only that these men are at bottom camouflaged theologians but also that they are what the name suggests–Schleier-macher, makers of veils, men who veil things. (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol I, op. cit., p. 206). In a similar vein, Nietzsche remarks: ‘Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Strauss – all theologians’ (KSA.11.152).
98. Hollingdale here renders ‘klug’ as ‘sensible’, which, in its given context, is extremely misleading. The “true world” of Plato’s Forms is a transcendent, suprasensible reality, a world, therefore, which is apprehensible to the intellect and not, by definition, to the senses.
99. By translating ‘feiner’ as ‘more refined’, and ‘verfänglicher’ as ‘more enticing’, Hollingdale effaces the subtlety and treachery that Nitezsche is at pains to emphasize.
100. This reference to northern climes, suggestive of fog and pallid complexions, nicely juxtaposes the literal and the metaphorical, the physical and the ethereal.
101. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ll. 119–22.
102. ‘Gift’ in German means ‘poison’.
103. Jacob Grimm, Deutsches Wörtebuch, Vol. 5, ‘klug’, p. 1275.
104. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed., J C Maxwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), Book XIV, 1. 192.
105. Hollingdale misleadingly translates ‘Menschen-Klugheit’ as ‘Manly Prudence’, in spite of the fact that Zarathustra’s prudence is cowardly, and therefore typically human rather than manly.
106. It is submitted that all references to ‘gold’ or ‘golden’ in Zarathustra connote a mythical world as envisaged by fools and poets.
107. Alan White makes a similar point (p. 82).
108. Cf. ‘[Wisdom] is a screen for philosophers, behind which he saves himself from weariness, old age, cold and hardness; as a feeling that the end is near, like those instincts of prudence which animals have before they die – they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, crawl into caves, and become wise’ (GS.V.359).
109. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, Plate 7.
110. Blake, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, ‘Of the Gates’, ll. 5–6.
111. A ‘moral condition […] especially with regard to confidence and discipline’ SOED (emphasis added).
112. ‘These animals […] symbolize the virtues of pride and cleverness, vices from a Christian standpoint’ (Lampert, p. 29); ‘Pride and cleverness are consciously chosen attributes, they stand in a sought after opposition to humility and that poverty of the spirit before which the wisdom of this world becomes stupidity – they are anti-Christian’ (Fink, p. 70).