4
Zarathustra’s Disease: Intellectual Conscience
Following the market square fiasco, Zarathustra’s animals come in search of the proud “prophet” who, looking for all the world like a mountebank hawking another placebo, has come among ‘the unteachable flock’113 to prophesy a new “anti-Christian” redeemer; but who, in an untimely moment of shamefaced self-reflection, has rashly let fall his mask upon discerning at the root of his redemptive Übermensch his own profoundly Christian need for hope and redemption (‘The need for redemption, the quintessence of all Christian needs […] is the most honest expression of decadence […] The Christian wants to be rid of himself CW. Epilogue). As the parable of the ropedancer serves to demonstrate, moral idealism (the ropedancer) will always be brought low by scoffing reflexivity (the buffoon). Hearkening to the voice of his ‘intellectual conscience’ (GS.2), to the rigorous demands of ‘unconditional honesty’ (UM.III.1), Zarathustra abandons his ‘proud, deceptive consciousness’ (his animals), and plunges ignominiously to his dramatic death. Thus it is that Zarathustra’s forsaken animals come to ascertain whether the erstwhile “prophet” is still alive. He is not, of course, as the corpse of the ropedancer somewhat crudely demonstrates. Reminiscent of the manner in which Leonce, in Büchner’s Leonce and Lena, lays out his love’s corpse in his head (I.i), Zarathustra lays the corpse of the ropedancer ‘in a hollow tree at his head’ (Z.Prol.8); the so-called prophet has laid to rest his ideal of the Übermensch in a mind temporarily bereft of pride and cunning. In so doing, Zarathustra the madman is no longer able, in all conscience, to bring to life Zarathustra the prophet. He discards the mask, only for it to be hastily retrieved by those who crafted it: his proud eagle and his clever serpent.
‘A timeless creation of the imagination, and so more real and consistent than the changeable reality of the actor’,114 the mask of the prophet remains intact despite the temporary failure of the actor to animate it. Zarathustra’s animals know, moreover, that the role of prophet, with its grand soliloquies and visionary rhetoric, is one with which Zarathustra, once he has mastered the role, will be loth to part. Thus, like an author in search of one of his characters, Zarathustra’s animals return to teach Zarathustra the art of characterization. A hermit for ten long years, Zarathustra must now relearn the art of ‘human prudence’ (Z.II.21) if he is to ‘go down’ (untergehen, Z.Prol.1) into society and not “go under” (untergehen), for it is ‘more dangerous among men than among animals’ (Z.Prol.10). Dramatically speaking, Zarathustra does, initially, go under. His opening performance is quite literally an abysmal failure. At the critical moment, he listens to his conscience, forgets his part, and acts out of character: the proud and skilful ropedancer ‘lost his head and the rope, he threw away his pole and, faster even than this, shot into the depth, a whirl of legs and arms’ (Z.Prol.6). Abject and disillusioned, Zarathustra the actor vows to leave the theatre of delusion, where death masquerades as life, and shame as pride. ‘I need companions’, he cries, ‘living ones – not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I want […] Zarathustra shall not speak to the people but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be a sheep-dog to the herd’ (Z.Prol.9). But even a more select audience cannot possibly be appealed to without a certain degree of herd subtlety and dissimulation, and so it is that, in spite of himself, Zarathustra requires the assistance of his animals and their timeless creations. This assistance, we shall see, is in no greater evidence than during Zarathustra’s convalescence, as recounted in ‘The Convalescent’ (Z.III.13).
Zarathustra’s Symptom: Pessimism
‘The Convalescent’ is divided into two parts: the first rehearses the immediate cause of Zarathustra’s collapse while the second deals with Zarathustra’s self-diagnosis of his illness and the types of treatment prescribed by his animals.
In Part 1 of ‘The Convalescent’, we discover Zarathustra in his ‘loneliest loneliness’, deprived by his intellectual conscience of the company of his animals and their fabulous circus. Left entirely to his own devices, Zarathustra gamely, but somewhat rashly, essays the part of a swaggering, sabre-rattling hero. Summoning up from his entrails his most ‘abysmal thought’ (the content of which we are not told until Part 2 of ‘The Convalescent’), Zarathustra succeeds in flushing out his dæmonic opponent from its abysmal lair. Lacking the usual costume and props (provided by his ever-obliging eagle and serpent, respectively), Zarathustra suddenly loses heart in these mock heroics and, faced by the very real danger of a life-threatening antagonist, is ‘crushed’ by the ‘greatest weight’ of his abysmal thought.
Reference to the ‘moving, stretching [and] rattling’ of Zarathustra’s ‘abysmal thought’ recalls the parable of the shepherd and the tenacious serpent, as narrated in part two of ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’ (Z.III.2). According to this parable, a young shepherd is in danger of choking to death on a heavy black serpent which had crept into his mouth while he was sleeping. By heroically biting off and spitting out the serpent’s head, the shepherd is simultaneously redeemed and regenerated. It is a ‘vision’ which does not, however, pose much of a ‘riddle’ if viewed in the light of the preceding section (Z.III.2.1) where, after a tiresome preamble in which Nietzsche flogs yet another dead metaphor (the heroic journey, symbolizing the crossing of the sea of life, the overcoming of its dangers, and finally, the attainment of perfection), the reader is given an autobiographical account of Zarathustra’s interminable battle with his debilitating pessimism (here represented by the ‘Spirit of Gravity’ – its gravity prefiguring the heaviness of the black serpent). It is a vision, therefore, of Zarathustra’s inner torment115 and of his longed for release from such torment.
The section ends with an invocation to heroic courage with which, as the only noble alternative to Schopenhauerian self-denial, Zarathustra hopes to haul himself out of the abyss of pessimism into which a Schopenhauerian Weltanschauung has cast him. (An obvious parallel can also be drawn here between the Zarathustra who is locked in mortal combat with his Spirit of Gravity and the Zarathustra who is later seen flexing his heroic muscle prior to challenging his most ‘abysmal thought’.)116
This connection between Zarathustra’s sickness and his earlier vision is further strengthened by the kinship which binds Zarathustra’s serpent to that of the young shepherd.117 Both serpents clearly symbolize the strangulating effects of knowledge, but whereas the youthful shepherd (a callow Zarathustra) imagines he has the courage simply to deny his pessimism (to bite off its head), a faint-hearted and recently defeated Zarathustra now cleverly utilizes the serpent’s cunning in his repeated efforts to overcome his pessimism. The subtler, more modulated shift from sickness to convalescence is, of course, far less dramatic than the crude transformation from pessimism to laughter, but the desired goal in both cases is identical: escape from pessimism. In reality, however, a terrifying abyss separates Zarathustra from his redemptive vision:
No longer a shepherd, no longer a man, – one transformed, effulgent, laughing! Never yet on earth had any man laughed as he laughed!
O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter – and now a thirst consumes me, a restless longing.
My longing for this laughter consumes me: oh how can I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!
It is hope and imagination, rather than courage, which saves the ironic man of ressentiment from choking to death on the (bad) knowledge that the bridge between Mensch and Übermensch can never be crossed: ‘even the greatest of men cannot attain to his own ideal’ (UM.III.3).
The ironic man of ressentiment is, by nature, the most solitary of men: he is condemned to solitude because the ironic distancing of a man whose intellectual conscience not only exposes his essential nihilism but also, and more critically, his inability to overcome it, sets him at odds with both himself and mankind.118 With respect to the latter, insofar as Zarathustra recognizes his Übermensch as the supreme achievement – the masterpiece, as it were – of ‘the art of metaphysical comfort’ (AS.7), and, by implication, his complicity in the tyrannical rule of nihilism, his intellectual conscience sets him apart from mankind: ‘the vast majority [of people] lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert’ (GS.2). On the other hand, insofar as he admits his failure to rise above mankind, to become a laughing Übermensch, he is forced to recognize his kinship with decadent humanity (albeit a kinship which disgusts him). In short, ‘[Zarathustra] can neither accept nor fully transcend the context that produced him.’119
With respect to Zarathustra’s contradictory relations with himself, his intellectual conscience, ‘Reasoning upon its own dark Fiction’,120 scorns the cowardly subterfuge of his ‘proud, deceptive consciousness’121 and demands the courage of open combat, the ‘courage that attacks’ (Z.III.2.1) and that the prudent and cunning man of ressentiment by definition lacks. In both the visionary parable and the preamble to ‘The Convalescent’, the voice of conscience122 rings out. In the former, the young shepherd heeds his inner voice:
‘Bite! Bite!
Its head off! Bite!’ – Thus it cried out of me, my horror, my hate, my disgust, my pity, all my good and evil cried out of me with a single cry (Z.III.2.2),
as does Zarathustra in the latter:
Zarathustra sprang up from his bed like a madman [and] cried with a terrible voice [… which] rang out in such a way that his animals approached him in terror […] Zarathustra, however, spoke these words:
Up abysmal thought, up from my depths! (Z.III.13.1)
So far so good: in common with the young shepherd, Zarathustra is now suitably prepared (his shrewd animals having been petrified by the ‘Minotaur of conscience’ BGE.29) for open, as opposed to covert, combat. ‘Courage […] slays dizziness at abysses’ (Z.III.2.1), assures Zarathustra, but on the edge of his own abyss, courage is not forthcoming. Whereas the visionary shepherd bites off the serpent’s head and becomes like one transformed, Zarathustra tragi(comi)cally (the entire scene is a hideous hotchpotch of mixed metaphors and crude histrionics, or what Luke would describe as ‘a kind of rhetorical debauch of images’)123 chokes on the disgust engendered by direct confrontation with his abysmal thought, keels over into the abyss, and remains prostrate for ‘a long time.’
In Part 2 of ‘The Convalescent’, Zarathustra’s abysmal thought is unmasked to reveal the ghastly face of the ‘eternal recurrence’ of all things.
A great many theories have been put forward regarding the cosmological validity of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence, but these need not detain us here. It was not the scientific verifiability of this metaphysical doctrine which principally concerned Zarathustra, but rather the ‘moral imperative’124 (not to be confused with Kant’s categorical imperative)125 that he deemed it to carry.126 The former may have interested Nietzsche, but the latter compelled him, and in section 341 of The Gay Science, the ancient dictum of carpe diem, implicit in the idea of eternal recurrence, is made explicit:
The greatest weight. – What if some day or night a devil were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the devil who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
To will eternal recurrence, the highest expression of amor fati and the highest affirmation of life, is, for Nietzsche, man’s greatest test of courage.127 Only he who is able to affirm life in all its aspects – who is able to will the past (Z.II.20), the present (Z.III.2.2) and the future (Z.III.4) – can embrace the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The Schwerpunkt of this doctrine resides in the present, for every ‘moment’ contains within it the infinity of past and future (Z.III.2.2). Both the doctrine and its emphasis on the present are ideas which Nietzsche most probably appropriated from Schopenhauer. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer argues that: ‘the present alone is that which always exists and stands firm and immovable.’128 He then goes on to claim that ‘whoever is satisfied with life as it is, whoever affirms it in every way, can confidently regard it as endless’ (emphasis added).129 Zarathustra, however, is not only dissatisfied with life as it is, but disgusted with it to the point of asphyxiating despair. Would not his answer to the devil’s question be ‘the answer of Empedocles’ (UM.III.3)? Does not Zarathustra share Schopenhauer’s suspicion that ‘perhaps at the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and at the same time in possession of his faculties, will ever wish to go through it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete non-existence.’?130 It is not surprising, therefore, to find Zarathustra’s animals fashioning the exquisite mask of the Übermensch (a non-existent figure) in order to conceal, among other things, the grim countenance of the eternal recurrence of all things.
Zarathustra’s Physic: Self-Deception
In Part 2 of ‘The Convalescent’, Zarathustra finally regains consciousness and with it his incurable pessimism, and for seven days thereafter languishes under the paralyzing weight of his affliction. During this critical period, we are told that Zarathustra’s animals never leave his side. This is because Zarathustra requires their help in devising for himself and his own peculiar illness, the type of ‘comfort’ and ‘convalescence’ most likely to effect a speedy recovery. Particulars of the remedy which Zarathustra and his animals concoct, can be found in section 25 of Beyond Good and Evil:
Flee into concealment! And have your masks and subtlety, so that you may be mistaken for someone else! Or feared a little! And do not forget the garden, the garden with golden trelliswork! And have people around you who are as a garden – or as music on the waters in the evening, when the day is turning into memories. Choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, easy solitude, which gives you too the right to remain in some sense good! How poisonous, how cunning, how bad every protracted war makes one, that cannot be waged with open forces. These outcasts of society, these long-pursued, wickedly persecuted ones – also the enforced recluses […] – always finally become sophisticated vengeance-seekers and brewers of poison, even if they do so under the most spiritual masquerade … (BGE.25)
Once again, Nietzsche alludes to the serpent’s dual nature, to the intrinsic and insidious connection between bad and good, between the enforced, detested, impossible solitude and ‘the free, wanton, easy solitude’, between cunning reason and proud imagination. For man is ‘the proudest animal under the sun and the cleverest animal under the sun’, and when Zarathustra’s pride succeeds in fending off the categorical and pernicious demands of his intellectual conscience, prudence is free to make wanton display of her self-preservative skills:
As a means of preserving the individual, the intellect unfolds its principal powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves – since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man: here is deception, flattery, mendacity and delusion, talking behind the back, posturing, living in borrowed splendour, masquerading, hiding behind convention, play-acting before oneself and others, in short, the continuous fluttering around a flame of vanity … (TL.1)
Vanity is, of course, one of the dominant traits of the man of ressentiment, who would rather be ‘mistaken for someone else’ than taken for who he really is; shame before oneself and others quickly learns the prudent art of dissimulation.
Zarathustra’s Physician: Poetic Imagination
Upon regaining consciousness, and mindful of the principal cause of his collapse – an untimely meditation to which his animals were not privy – Zarathustra is eager to draw his animals back into his confidence and so benefit from their restorative skills. On the seventh day Zarathustra completes the work of creating what he and his animals have been busily engaged in.131 On this holy day of rest, Zarathustra is determined to enjoy the fruits of their joint labour: the world transfigured into an Elysian garden ‘with golden trelliswork’ – hung, no doubt, with lusciously Edenic clusters of the vine with which to cure the ‘purple melancholy’ (Z.III.14) of Zarathustra’s soul. His animals indulge him with a rhapsodic evocation of their new creation, and under the burning sun of a prudent “wisdom”, which casts a golden light over these enchanted ‘Isles of the Blest’ (Z.II.2), Zarathustra ‘bathes his nakedness’ in the refreshing waves of his animals’ gay chatter.
For Zarathustra and ‘the poet of Zarathustra’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 4), the lyricism of language is man’s greatest creation and his greatest comfort:
‘O my animals’ replied Zarathustra, ‘chatter on like this and let me listen! Your chatter is so refreshing to me: where there is chatter, there the world lies before me like a garden.
‘How sweet it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between eternally-separated things? […]
‘Are things not given names and sounds, so that man may refresh himself with things? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with it man dances over all things.’132 (Z.III.13.2)
With language, man ‘dance[s] over all things’, because language empowers him to create out of the chaos of existence a beautiful, harmonious, unified whole: it transforms tropes into truths, descriptions into explanations, interpretation into meaning, similarity into identity and the ‘eternally-separated’ into unity. In this way, and only in this way, language represents man’s ‘most spiritual will to power’; as the proudest and cleverest (but by no means the wisest) animal under the sun, man arrogates to himself the right not only ‘to name all things’ but to imagine that this act of naming entitles him to ‘dominion over all things’. As Nietzsche points out in one of his earliest essays, ‘On the Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, so-called ‘truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out’ (TL.1). Far from doing ‘justice’ to things,133 therefore, this most spiritual will to power is audaciously unjust both in its nihilistic denial of the chaos which constitutes the world and in the prodigious deception which it thereby perpetrates.
The masterfully deceptive power of the intellect ‘is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more skilful and more daring’ (TL.2) than when it succeeds in deceiving itself. According to Nietzsche, man has ‘an invincible inclination to let himself be deceived and, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the play appears more regal than a real king’ (TL.2). It is in such an entranced manner that Zarathustra – ‘a sick man made weary by his terrible torment’ (Z.III.2) – listens to the rhapsodic tones of his animals’ voices, for ‘only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency’ (TL.1).134 Far from imparting wisdom to his unenlightened animals, Zarathustra is the needy pupil of his animals’ proud and clever “wisdom”. With a wry smile and an uneasy sense of dependency, Zarathustra allows his animals to charm him into blissful self-forgetfulness.
Dancing attendance on their patient, eagle and serpent continue to humour Zarathustra with their chattering dance over all things. Now privy to the cause of the convalescent’s seizure (terror at the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things) and principally responsible (as healing agents) for the rehabilitation of their charge, Zarathustra’s sick-nurses set about their tranquilizing task. With soothing ‘words’ and harmonious ‘sounds’, they fashion a benign and alluring mask with which to cover the sickening face of Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought. Physicians metamorphose into metaphysicians: the ‘moral terrorism’135 of the interminable ‘Round of Existence’ (Ring des Seins), and the unendurable pressure which it places on the ‘moment’, are adroitly excised by Zarathustra’s animals and the wound treated by ‘a cosmic therapy’136 which transforms this vicious circularity into a wheel of innocent becoming, renewal, and rebirth. Zarathustra is delighted by these remedial skills of his animals but, unfortunately, with all their talk of wheels and rings and cycles – a circumlocution which cleverly avoids any mention of the noxious ‘eternal recurrence’ – Zarathustra is reminded of his illness:
‘O you rogues and barrel-organs!’ replied Zarathustra and smiled again, ‘How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days: –
‘and how that monster crept into my throat and choked me! But I bit its head off and spat it away.
‘And you – you have already made a hurdy-gurdy song out of it? But now I lie here, still weary from this biting and spitting away, still sick from my own redemption.
‘And you watched it all? O my animals, are you also cruel? Did you want to watch my great pain, as men do? For man is the cruellest animal.’
He is also the pettiest animal. Having enlisted the help of his animals to redeem him from the sickness of his own redemption (for, unlike the parabolic shepherd who sprang up – ‘transformed, effulgent, laughing!’ – after his victory over the serpent, Zarathustra ‘fell down like a dead man and remained like a dead man for a long time’), Zarathustra, the irredeemable man of ressentiment, now avenges himself on his animals: ‘Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready to avenge himself […] for the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy’ (GS.290). He rebukes them for watching him suffer (reasoning, no doubt, that had they not deserted him in his hour of need – which was, paradoxically, also to be his finest hour – he would not be in his present bathetic state). All men of ressentiment need a scapegoat and Zarathustra, like all ‘enforced recluses [… who] always finally become sophisticated vengeance-seekers’ (BGE.25), is no exception. He blames his animals for not intervening when he precipitately, and now regretfully, decided to cast in his lot, albeit temporarily, with his intellectual conscience. It is a case of sour grapes, but what begins as peevishness soon escalates into a wholesale accusation of man. The vicious circle of Zarathustra’s nihilism repeats its eternal cycle: shame breeds self-disgust, self-disgust burgeons into disgust at man, and disgust at man explodes into an all-consuming pessimism: ‘There are days when I am afflicted by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy -contempt for man’ (A.38). Once again, Zarathustra finds himself reeling on an emotional precipice:
‘The great disgust at man – that choked me and had crept into my throat: and what the soothsayer prophesied: “Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes”.
‘A long twilight limped in front of me, a mortally-weary, death-intoxicated sadness which speaks with a yawn.
‘“The man of whom you are weary, the little man, recurs eternally” – thus my sadness yawned and dragged its feet and could not fall asleep.
[…] ‘“Alas, man recurs eternally! The little man recurs eternally!”
‘I had seen them both naked, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to one another, even the greatest all-too-human!
‘The greatest all-too-small! – That was my disgust at man! And eternal recurrence of even the smallest! – That was my disgust at all existence!
‘Ah, disgust! Disgust! Disgust!’ Thus spoke Zarathustra and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness.
At this point, Zarathustra’s life-preserving animals – still smarting, no doubt, from their recent scolding, and not wishing to provoke a repetition of the same – intervene and hastily administer to their patient the placebo which all three had spent seven days perfecting. Waxing lyrical and repeating the ‘same old tunes’, Zarathustra’s ‘hidden barrel-organs’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 155) try to entice Zarathustra back from the brink of abysmal pessimism, but not one of their pastoral ‘rainbows’ – neither ‘gardens’ nor ‘roses’, ‘bees’ nor ‘doves’, ‘song-birds’ nor ‘songs’ – succeeds in charming Zarathustra out of his depression. Not even a special reference to the Übermensch – normally guaranteed to uplift Zarathustra’s spirits – can distract him from his gloomy thoughts:
he lay still with his eyes closed, like one sleeping, although he was not asleep: for he was conversing with his soul. The serpent and the eagle, however, when they found him thus silent, respected the great stillness around him and softly withdrew.
‘The Convalescent’ ends with the animals’ withdrawal, but this in no way marks the end of Zarathustra’s convalescence. On the contrary, as Zarathustra’s proud and deceptive consciousness gives way to thrusting and inexorable instinct, the full extent of his sickness becomes glaringly apparent. Conversing with his soul in the succeeding chapter, the convalescent continues to lament and whine over the incurable melancholy of his recalcitrant soul, and in the last four chapters (13–16) of Part III, Zarathustra bears the unmistakable marks of romantic pessimism.
Unable to ‘“overcome” this time in himself’, he continues to suffer precisely ‘from this time, his untimeliness, [and] his romanticism’ (GS.V.380). Decadent modern culture – represented by the soothsayer (pessimistic philosophy), the two kings (political misrule), the conscientious man of spirit (scholastic science), and the sorcerer (theatrical/histrionic art) – and decadent Christian culture – represented by the last pope (faith, hope, and love), the ugliest man (bad conscience, shame, and pity), and the voluntary beggar (meditation, benevolence, and philanthropy) – infest Zarathustra’s soul. The decadence of contemporary man prevents him from willing the eternal recurrence of all things (Z.III.13) and from alleviating the ‘purple melancholy’ of his decadent soul (Z.III.14). Irreversible and inextinguishable decadent deeds seduce him into a dance of death with life (Z.III.15) and compel him to concede that if and only if he were not a modern man, but rather an Übermensch, he would be able to ‘lust after eternity and the wedding ring of rings – the ring of recurrence!’ (Z.III.16).
By the end of Part III, the doomed prophet still more closely resembles a tragic hero than a fool. The tragic myth, recording the inexorable fate of all higher men from Prometheus and Oedipus (BT.10) down to Schopenhauer, Wagner, and finally Zarathustra, denies the tragic hero any possibility of ‘transcendental buffoonery’. Part III closes with Zarathustra’s Apollonian vision of the Übermensch positively lusting after eternity: ‘Dionysus [still] speaks the language of Apollo’ (BT. 21). In Part IV, the Dionysian hero finally avails himself of the cap and bells: Apollo (in the figure of the buffoon) finally speaks ‘the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained’ (ibid.). But is it?
113. Horace, Epode 16, Altera iam teritur, 1. 38.
114. Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. John Linstrum, Act I.
115. Although this vision is intensely personal, Zarathustra is not its unique author, it is a parable which can be found in Sufi mythology: ‘A wise man was riding along (at the moment when) a snake was going into the mouth of a man asleep. / The rider saw that, and was hurrying to scare away the snake, (but) he got no chance (of doing so). / Since he had an abundant supply of intelligence, he struck the sleeper several powerful blows with a mace. / The strokes of the hard mace drove him in flight from him (the rider) to beneath a tree. / There were many rotten apples which had dropped (from the tree): he said, “Eat of these, O you in the grip of pain!” / He gave the man so many apples to eat that they were falling out of his mouth again. / […] Till nightfall he (the rider) drove (him) to and fro, until vomiting caused by bile overtook him. / All the things he had eaten, bad or good, came up from him: the snake shot forth from him along with what he had eaten. / When he saw the snake outside of him, he fell on his knees before that beneficent man. / As soon as he saw the horror of that black, ugly, big snake, those griefs departed from him. /[…] “Oh, blest (is) the hour that you saw me: I was dead, you have given me new life…”’ See ‘The Amir and the sleeping man into whose mouth a snake had crept’. The Mathnawi of Jalalu ‘ddin Rumi Book II, trans. Reynold A Nicholson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 318–9.
116. Lampert notes how part one of ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’ and part one of ‘The Convalescent’ both end ‘just after courage has been summoned for a decisive encounter’ (p. 211). What he fails to point out, however, is that on both occasions the summoned courage is not forthcoming.
117. The connection between the two serpents has hitherto been overlooked by critics. For example, Thatcher distinguishes between Zarathustra’s serpent and the other serpents which appear in Zarathustra, arguing that ‘Zarathustra’s own serpent is clearly an agathodæmon (a good genius), but the other snakes he encounters are malign and repulsive’ (Thatcher, op. cit., p. 249); similarly, Lampert stresses that ‘the heavy black snake symbolizing Zarathustra’s fear is clearly not Zarathustra’s snake symbolizing his prudence’ (Lampert, op. cit., p. 170) – a surprising remark given the naturally intrinsic connection between fear and prudence.
118. As Beatty observes: ‘Zarathustra is […] essentially restless, wavering between his impulse to self, which is finally wearisome, and his impulse to men, which frustrates him and forces him back upon himself. See Joseph Beatty, ‘Zarathustra: The Paradoxical Ways of the Creator’, Man and World 3 (February 1970), p. 65.
119. Pippin, p. 55.
120. Blake, The Everlasting Gospel, (d).
121. ‘If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.’ Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, Plate 10.
122. A conscience which, unlike Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, is intrinsically subjective.
123. F D Luke, ‘Nietzsche and the Imagery of Height’ in Malcolm Pasley (ed.), Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 106.
124. It is this ethical dimension of the teaching of eternal recurrence which, as Ansell-Pearson convincingly argues, does not cohere with the cosmic (in the sense of the affirmation of life in its totality and unity) dimension: ‘if eternal return is to be viewed [as a kind of ethical imperative], then it cancels out the attitude of total affirmation implied in the cosmic view, and imposes on human beings the necessity, as moral beings, of making judgments on life: not only saying yes, I will that again and again, but also saying, no, never again.’ See Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 115.
125. For an account of this distinction see Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 139–40.
126. As Magnus argues: ‘Of the two versions of the doctrine of eternal recurrence which we have distinguished, normative and empirical, no sustained argument for the cosmological status of eternal recurrence exists in any work published by Nietzsche or authorized by him for publication. References to the empirical requirements of the doctrine are to be found only in the Nachlaß’ (p. 74).
127. Although, as Soll persuasively argues: ‘what appears to be the momentous human import of the doctrine is negated by its supra-historical character, which removes its consequences beyond the possible limits of the individual human consciousness and the cumulative historical consciousness of mankind’. See Ivan Soll, ‘Reflections on Recurrence: A Re-examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine, die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen’ in Solomon (ed.), p. 342.
128. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Vol I, trans. E F J Payne (London: Dover, 1969), p. 279.
129. Ibid., p. 280.
130. Ibid., p. 324.
131. Adapted from Gen. 2:1–3.
132. Lampert, however, (mis)interprets the last sentence of this citation as a sincere eulogy to the beautiful folly of speech which enables man to dance over all things: ‘These words in praise of speech assert man’s responsibility to name all things, including the animals; speech thus enacts, in a way, man’s dominion over all things, but now as man’s dance over all things, as the justice done to things by the most spiritual of things. In this way, all being comes to word through Zarathustra, and all becoming learns from him how to speak (III.9)’ (p. 214). There are two problems with this reading: in the first place, Lampert appears to be unaware of the heavy irony -signalled by the word ‘folly’ – with which Zarathustra here speaks of language (cf. Nietzsche in ‘On the Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’). Second, he exalts Zarathustra to the transcendent heights of sublime wisdom (an exaltation evidenced by Lampert’s numerous references to the ‘highest’ and ‘most spiritual will to power’ of ‘the wisest and most powerful of men’ – see pp. 213–15, 220 and 223), and consequently equates Zarathustra’s relationship to his animals with that of the “wise” philosopher-king to his subjects. But as we have already seen, Zarathustra is neither truly wise nor truly powerful, his “wisdom” being merely an imaginative construct designed to counter the crippling effects of knowledge. Indeed, the so-called divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence are no more than the ‘colourful rainbows’ of fools and poets (Z.IV.14.3) to which Zarathustra alludes in the citation in question.
133. See previous footnote.
134. In this light, the order of rank between Zarathustra and his animals is the reverse of that formulated by Lampert.
135. Daniel Halévy, p. 274.
136. Erich Heller, ‘Nietsche’s Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate’, The Importance of Nietzsche (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 185.