6

The Decadence of Modernity

Schopenhauerian Pessimism: The Soothsayer

To live with tremendous and proud composure; always beyond –. To have and not to have one’s affects, one’s for and against, at will, to descend to them for a few hours; to seat oneself on them as on a horse, often as on an ass – for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To preserve one’s three hundred foregrounds; also the dark glasses: for there are times when nobody may look into our eyes, still less into our “grounds”. And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one’s four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy and solitude. (BGE. 284)

The above citation constitutes Zarathustra’s ironic form of ironic distance; and in Part IV, ‘philosophical pessimism’, a symptom of romanticism (GS.V.370), is the first cultural ‘vice’ to which Zarathustra condescends. Schopenhauer and his philosophy of the will is a ‘fact’ of Zarathustra’s life, one of those ‘accidents of people and books’ (BGE.44); but to suffer incurably from ‘romantic pessimism, that is to say the pessimism of the renunciators, [of] the failed and defeated’ (HH.II.Pref.7), from ‘the last great event in the fate of [his] culture’ (GS.V.370), is his fate. If Zarathustra, a true child of his time, cannot elude the fate of all higher men, he can, however, with the immensely ‘proud composure’ – so proud, in fact, that one is forced to doubt its immensity – of a consummate actor, affect an ironic distance to it. ‘Six thousand feet above’ (EH ‘Why I am so wise’ 4), but not quite ‘beyond’, modern man, Zarathustra pensively traces ‘the shadow of his [undeniably modern] figure in the ground’, while his industrious animals are away fetching fresh supplies of honey – ‘for Zarathustra had wasted and squandered the old honey down to the last drop’ (Z.IV.1). Low on illusion and thus brought low by heightened integrity, Zarathustra finds himself face to face with his romantic pessimism. But just as in tragedy ‘the Apollonian snatches us out of Dionysian universality and charms us with the individual’ (BT.21), so in Part IV Zarathustra objectifies the Weltschmerz of modern man. In the interest of self-preservation, the tolerable face of an historical figure, a representative individual, is preferable to the unbearable face of inexorable fate – ‘for only if [the failed genius] is thought of as being entirely distant from us […] does he not wound us’ (HH.I.162). Zarathustra’s ironic distance is, however, a fragile Apollonian artifice and the ‘Dionysian flood and excess’ (BT.21) of tragic insight eddies beneath ‘a sky-blue lake of happiness’; Zarathustra’s proud composure, like his happiness, is oppressive and ‘acts like molten pitch.’

Schopenhauer, as the ‘objective correlative’ of Zarathustra’s romantic pessimism, is referred to throughout Zarathustra as ‘the soothsayer’. This is a significant appellation, and one which needs to be distinguished from ‘prophet’.¹⁵³ Whereas a prophet (Prophet) is an inspired teacher, a soothsayer (Wahrsager) speaks the truth. The former is eager to bestow upon mankind the “gift” of his “wisdom” (Z.Prol.2), while the latter, like Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, is reluctant to utter the truth of his terrible knowledge. The inspired teaching of the prophet inspires discipleship and hero-worship among those who would sooner believe in someone other than themselves (Z.I.22.3) and who would rather ‘flow out into a god’ (GS.285) than create a god out of themselves (Z.I.17), whereas the soothsayer, with his ‘plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth’ (GM.I.1), simply alienates. Schopenhauer’s ‘truth’ is of the latter variety: according to Nietzsche, ‘the ungodliness of existence was, for Schopenhauer, regarded as something given, palpable, indisputable […] His whole integrity rests on this point: unconditional, honest atheism is simply the presupposition of his way of looking at the problem [of existence]’ (GS.V.357). For Schopenhauer, as for Nietzsche, ‘the decline of faith in the Christian God [and] the triumph of scientific atheism’ (ibid.) gave rise to the pessimistic Weltanschauung endemic in post-Enlightenment Europe. Indeed, this cataclysmic moment in history is perhaps nowhere more fearfully and ominously evoked than in Nietzsche’s famous ‘madman scene’ (GS.125) in which the madman’s lantern symbolizes, on the one hand, man’s need of warmth in the cold ‘age of reason’, and on the other, a flicker of hope to preserve him in the grim wake of God’s death.

Thus, when Zarathustra confronts the soothsayer and looks into his eyes, it is the reflection of his own romantic pessimism that he perceives there. The ‘bad tidings and ashen lightning-flashes’ that he sees run across the soothsayer’s face are not the lightning-flashes of the Übermensch prophesied by an ecstatic Zarathustra in the market square (Z.Prol.4), but the terrible tidings which the madman, one year before, had felt constrained to yell out in the same market square with the same contumelious results (GS.125).¹⁵⁴ Too truthful to be a prophet, and not truthful enough to be a soothsayer, Zarathustra ‘recognizes’ (Z.IV.2) in the soothsayer (‘the soothsayer, who had perceived what was taking place in Zarathustra’s soul, wiped his hand across his face, as if he wanted to wipe it away; Zarathustra did the same. And when both had thus silently composed and fortified themselves, they shook hands as a sign that they wanted to recognize one another’ ibid.) that which will forever preclude his return to the market square – tragic insight. As Zarathustra learnt in his stillest hour, his ‘fruits are ripe but [he is] not ripe for [his] fruits’ (Z.II.22). Having once ‘looked truly into the essence of things [and] gained knowledge, […] true knowledge, an insight into the terrible truth’ (BT.7), neither the soothsayer nor Zarathustra, both ‘Argonauts of the ideal’ (GS.V.382), can block their ears to the Sirens’ song intoned by Byron’s Manfred: ‘Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth.’¹⁵⁵ This ‘immoral truth’, which proclaims the eternal flux of existence (a Heraclitean truth which Schopenhauer formulated as ‘will’ and Nietzsche as ‘will to power’), is quintessentially tragic.

That both the soothsayer and Zarathustra are afflicted by the same disease is attested to in Part II of Zarathustra. In a chapter entitled ‘The Soothsayer’, the narrator recalls how the pessimistic teaching of the Schopenhauerian cypher – ‘All is empty, all is the same, all is past! […] Truly, we have grown too weary even to die; now we are still awake and live on – in sepulchres!’ – had pierced ‘Zarathustra’s heart and transformed him’ (Z.II.19). Standing before his disciples in the approaching twilight of the gods, the private voice of the madman speaks through the public mask of the prophet: ‘Truly, this long twilight is very nearly upon us. Alas, how shall I preserve my light through it? May it not be extinguished by this sadness!’ A few days later, the madman once again gives voice to his pessimism. Upon waking from a deep sleep, he relates to his disciples the content of his nightmare: ‘I dreamed I had renounced all life. I had become a night-watchman and grave-watchman’ (not unlike his disciples, in fact, who had ‘sat around him in the long watches of the night and waited anxiously to see whether he would awaken and speak again and be cured of his sorrow’). Keeping his midnight vigil over the living dead, he is suddenly startled by three loud knocks on the door of the vault. Shortly thereafter, a roaring wind rips the wings of the door apart and hurls at him a black coffin which suddenly ‘burst asunder and spewed forth a thousand peals of laughter.’ Terrified, Zarathustra screams as he never screamed before, and wakes up. Zarathustra gradually recovers from the shock of his nightmare and, while his favourite disciple indulges him with a benign (mis)interpretation¹⁵⁶ of his dream (in Zarathustra, the prophet’s disciples serve the same function as the hermit’s pets), finally grasps its import. It is not Zarathustra – as his disciple would have it – who laughs at night-watchmen and grave-watchmen, but rather his ‘dearest dead ones’ (Z.II.11) whom he buried long ago (Z.Prol.8); it is the ghosts of his youthful illusion who now mock Zarathustra’s compulsive graveyard vigils. Thus enlightened by self-knowledge, Zarathustra ‘gazed long into the face of his disciple who had interpreted the dream, and shook his head.’

In Part IV, the soothsayer returns to mock Zarathustra, but with less devastating effect than in Part II. The Gothic has mellowed into the tragicomic: sinister laughter dissolves into gentle irony, and the Munchean scream into mute fear and, finally, ‘benevolent dissimulation’ (HH.I.293).¹⁵⁷ A more mature, more ironic Zarathustra is now much better equipped to deal with the eternal ‘resurrection’ of ‘predilection and prejudice, youth [and] origin’, from those ‘agreeable musty nooks’ (BGE.44) ‘buried’ deep in the ‘caves’ (Z.IV.2) of his soul. After the initial shock of recognition, Zarathustra replaces his ‘dark glasses’, as it were, and greets the soothsayer with ‘that roguish and cheerful vice, courtesy’ (BGE.284). Notwithstanding this disguise, however, Zarathustra and the soothsayer understand each other perfectly: they know only too well that cheerfulness often masks a deep-seated melancholy, and that for such a creature to fish for happiness in ‘the belly of all black sorrow’ is indeed an incredible ‘stupidity’ (Z.IV.1). ‘There is for everyone a bait which he must take’ (HH.I.359), and just as Zarathustra had fittingly baited the soothsayer with (ill-concealed) pessimism, so the soothsayer now equally fittingly uses the same bait to ‘seduce’ Zarathustra to his ‘ultimate sin’ – the sin of pity.

Pity and pessimism are, of course, the twin poles in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: given man’s shared experience of the horrors of existence and, in particular, the subtle machinations of an egoistic and malicious will, his sole redeeming inclination, albeit a rare one, is pity. Nietzsche, however, sees this sympathetic magnetism in the ethical sphere as a dangerous double negative. For him, pity born out of a hatred of suffering is the stigma (‘our morality of pity, against which I was the first to warn, that which one might call l’impressionisme morale, is one more expression of the physiological over-excitability pertaining to everything decadent.’ TI, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ 37) and the stigmata (‘Is not pity the cross upon which he who loves man is nailed?’ Z.Prol.3) of Schopenhauerian morality. Pity affords the decadent not only an escape from personal suffering, but also from ‘[t]his strange disease of modern life’,¹⁵⁸ and, ultimately, from life itself. According to Nietzsche, pity is the seedbed of nihilism in all its forms:

What was at stake was the value of morality […] the value of the “unegoistic”, the instincts of pity, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and idealised (verjenseitigt) for so long that at last they became for him “value-in-itself”, on the basis of which he said No to life and also to himself. But it was precisely against these instincts that there spoke from me an ever more fundamental suspicion, an ever more entrenched scepticism! It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime enticement and seduction – but to what? to nothingness? – it was precisely here that I saw the beginning of the end, the dead stop, a retrospective weariness, the will turning against life, the tender and melancholy signs of the last illness: I understood the ever-spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of our European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to – nihilism? (GM.Pref.5)

In the revaluation of moral values, the stakes are unspeakably high: ‘He who deviates from the conventional is the sacrifice of the extraordinary; he who remains in the conventional is the slave of the same. In either event he perishes’ (HH.I.552). Life itself is at stake: on the one hand, in Schopenhauer’s ‘enticement’ to, at best, a devaluation of the self and, at worst, a European strain of Buddhistic nihilism; and, on the other, in the increased suffering from life and its attendant pessimism consequent upon Nietzsche’s ethical imperative to murder all gods ‘for the sake of morality’ and so ‘live alone “without God and morality”’ (KSA.11.571). The former is nihilism, but the latter is also nihilism – nihilism of a far more fatal kind.¹⁵⁹

Although Schopenhauer’s will to asceticism suggests a denial of life, it does in fact express a fundamental will to life: ‘the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and redemptive¹⁶⁰ instinct of a degenerating life, which seeks by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence’ (GM.III.13). Conversely, Nietzsche’s moral ‘cleanliness’ – which compelled him to renounce the teaching of his mentor and idol by ‘taking sides against myself and for everything that was painful and hard especially for me’ (HH.II.Pref.4) – demanded of him ‘that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of all romantic mendacity’ (ibid.) and that alone could nobly preserve him from the fatal consequences of extreme pessimism. It is precisely courageous pessimism, however, that Nietzsche lacked in the moral war he nobly but misguidedly waged against himself. Once this deficiency is acknowledged, the question needs to be asked: at what price morality? When life and morality hang in the balance and romantic pessimism precludes courageous pessimism, the moral either/or: ‘“Either abolish your reverences or – yourselves!”’ (GS.V.346) is necessarily outweighed by the existential either/or: “Either abolish your reverences and (consequently) yourselves or transcend moral fastidiousness by means of artistic distance.” Discretion is the better part of valour, and faced with a vital moral dilemma – namely, Schopenhauer’s “unegoistic” morality of egoistic pity which impoverishes life but nonetheless preserves it, or his own “egoistic” morality of unegoistic self-contempt which increases the moral value of life but at the (possible) cost of life itself – Nietzsche saves himself from almost certain death by leaping into amoral aestheticism.

From an artistic distance, Zarathustra laughs and weeps over the irony of his “transcendence”: hovering high above ‘good and evil’ (that is, Christian morality), he is yet far from being beyond his own ultimate “sin” of pity. A protracted convalescence has deluded him into believing that he is now strong enough for a rediscovery of ‘the hero no less than the fool in [his] passion for knowledge’, and for a pure morality that goes ‘beyond good and evil’. Consequently, and in the absence of his diverting animals, he decides to entertain himself with a dramatic extemporization of his long-repressed inner strife. It proves to be a foolhardy decision, for his desire to rediscover the foolish heroism of his past is itself motivated by an equally foolish and heroic passion for self-knowledge and, by implication, moral rectitude. In Part I, he had taught that ‘the thought is one thing, the deed another, and the image of the deed yet another’ (Z.I.6). The hero must be superior to pity: ‘resolute for the fray, but unattached to the result’,¹⁶¹ but in struggling to overcome the old morality within himself (KCA.10.180), the hero in Zarathustra, like that in the ‘pale criminal’, was ‘equal to the deed when he did it: but he could not bear its image after it was done’ (Z.I.6).

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his cap and bells, Zarathustra’s irritable honesty continues to embroil him in moral warfare ‘for the sake of over-severe demands’ (GS.107) which his heroic folly makes upon him. ‘To have and not to have one’s affects, one’s for and against, at will’ (BGE.284), from however great an artistic distance, is to become a ‘virtuous monster and scarecrow’ (GS.107). And to ‘remain master of one’s four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, solitude’ (BGE.284) is to recognize that these reappraised virtues – virtues which do not spring from the nihilistic root of Christian ressentiment – are, in all honesty, not those possessed by Zarathustra. His courage is not of the kind which ‘destroys giddiness at abysses’ and which thereby ‘also destroys [the] pity’ which accompanies tragic insight – for ‘pity is the deepest abyss, as deeply as man sees into life, so deeply does he also see into suffering’ (Z.III.2.1); nor is his sympathy of the kind which ‘conceal[s] itself under a hard shell’ (Z.I.14); nor his solitude an Elysian haven where ‘the godly are offered auspicious escape’¹⁶² and where, ‘with warm feet’, Zarathustra purportedly runs ‘hither and thither upon [his] mount of olives’, and in a ‘sunny corner […] sing[s] and mock[s] all pity’ (Z.III.6). On the contrary, it is precisely Zarathustra’s contemptuous pity for man which robs him of the ‘courageous pessimism’ and the ‘[in]active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak’ (A.116), which together will enable him to return to society and thus bring to an end his wintry and interminable solitude.

In Part II, from the icy peaks of his solitude (which Apollonian illusion disingenuously transforms into a sunny ‘mount of olives’), Zarathustra had taught that ‘for one person, solitude is the escape of an invalid, for another, solitude is escape from invalids’ (Z.III.6); but in Part IV, the erstwhile prophet has learnt that his solitary convalescence is the ignominious escape of an invalid from like invalids. Far removed from the pitiful ugliness of the human face (HH.I.320) – which acts as a constant reminder of the disease of decadence afflicting all modern men, but from which the ‘greater’ modern man suffers ‘more acutely than the smaller’ (UM.III.3) – Zarathustra cannot escape the ugliness of his own features mockingly reflected in his fool’s mirror.

In tempting Zarathustra to his ultimate sin, all the soothsayer need do is hold up this ironic mirror before his victim, who, temporarily bereft of his pets’ transfiguring mirror, can no longer evade the piercing gaze of his own thinly veiled torment. Beneath the calm surface of his ‘sky-blue lake of happiness’, Zarathustra clearly discerns the surging ‘waves of great distress and melancholy’, concealed behind the mask of ‘a cheerful old man’ (Z.IV.2) is the ‘whole inner “hopelessness” of the higher man’ (BGE.269). ‘It is high time!’ comes the soothsayer’s parodic cry; high time for the ‘great event’ (Z.II.18) of Zarathustra’s self-unmasking. This great event is prefigured in Part II, in a chapter entitled ‘Of Great Events’. A mariners’ tale recounts how Zarathustra was seen flying through the air, ‘like a shadow’, in the direction of a smoking volcano situated on an island not far from ‘Zarathustra’s Isles of the Blest’.¹⁶³ Just as Empedocles, afflicted by excessive self-consciousness and an acute sense of his spiritual ‘untimeliness’, hurled himself into the crater of Mount Etna, so, in similar fashion, Zarathustra’s shadow hurtles towards the crater of nihilism.¹⁶⁴ But who or what is Zarathustra’s ‘shadow’? It is the reflection of his (distressed and melancholy) soul – a shadowy reflection which he fears ‘will ruin [his] reputation’ (Z.II.18).¹⁶⁵ On his so-called ‘Isles of the Blest’ – where, according to Greek mythology, ‘the blessed among the dead live again in bliss’¹⁶⁶ – an ungodly Zarathustra lives among the buried remains of his past, only to keep reverential and nostalgic watch over them in a distressed, and in any case far from blissful, state. ‘It is high time!’ mocks the soothsayer; high time for Zarathustra to stop the absurd pretence of happiness and finally heed the human ‘cry of [inner] distress’ which escapes from the melancholy depths of his ‘black sea’:

‘Do you hear? Do you hear, O Zarathustra?’ cried the soothsayer. ‘The cry is meant for you, it calls to you: Come, come, come, it is time, it is high time!’

Hereupon Zarathustra was silent, confused, and deeply shaken; at last he asked like one undecided: ‘And who is it that calls me?’

‘But you know who it is,’ answered the soothsayer vehemently, ‘why do you conceal yourself? It is the higher man that cries for you!’

‘The higher man?’ cried Zarathustra, honor-stricken. ‘What does he want? What does he want? The higher man! What does he want here?’ – and his skin was covered with sweat.

The soothsayer, however, did not respond to Zarathustra’s anguish, but listened intently towards the depths. But when it had remained quiet there for a long time, he turned his gaze back and saw Zarathustra standing and trembling.

‘O Zarathustra,’ he began in a scornful voice, ‘you do not stand there like one made giddy by happiness: you will have to dance if you are not to fall over!

‘But even if you were to dance before me and indulge in all your tricks, no one could say: “Behold, here dances the last happy man!”

‘Anyone who sought him here would visit these heights in vain: he would find caves, certainly, and caves behind caves, hiding-places for the hidden, but not mines of happiness and treasure-houses and new gold-veins of happiness.

‘Happiness – how could man find happiness with such buried men and hermits!’

Drowning in the flood of pessimism which has, through his own agency, burst through his dam of repression, Zarathustra staunches the flow by silencing the soothsayer and resuming his former cheerfulness. Thus ‘concealed’, Zarathustra can with a good (Christian) conscience go in search of the distressed higher man whose cry has reawakened his latent and ineluctable pity for ‘higher men into whose rare torment and helplessness some accident allowed us to look’ (BGE.41). His pity is indisputably of the Christian variety: just as agape is, according to Nietzsche, a “moral” means of escaping from one’s ‘personal necessity of misfortune’ (GS.338),¹⁶⁷ so too is Zarathustra’s need to wage war with representative higher men a way of escaping the cry of personal distress which emanates from his own inner being. In common with his creator, Zarathustra’s incisive critique of Christian pity (and of solitude) owes its insight to self-knowledge, to which latter insight, however, Zarathustra attains only in his declining years. Thus, whereas in Part I, Zarathustra taught: ‘One man runs to his neighbour because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself (Z.I.16); in Part IV, Zarathustra learns that in attempting to lose himself in his pity for objectified higher men, he has succeeded only in finding himself – his own contingent, historical creation – and thereby the Christian source of pity: empathic identification. His attempt to escape the higher men within him, to deny his own inner reality, is merely another form of nihilism; a ‘roguish’ ruse which, like his cheerful mien, can neither fool nor long evade the exigencies of his romantic pessimism:

‘O Zarathustra, you are a rogue! [said the soothsayer]

‘I know it already: you want to get rid of me! You would rather run into the forests and hunt evil beasts!¹⁶⁸

‘But what good will it do you? In the evening you will have me back; in your own cave I shall be sitting, patient and heavy as a millstone (Klotz) – and waiting for you!’

Upon regaining his artistic distance, Zarathustra ironically invites the soothsayer to make himself at home in his cave and to help himself to any honey he might possibly find there, in preparation for an evening (the time of the day when Zarathustra’s pessimism is at its most oppressive) of revelry. Ironic distancing and mocking self-reflection enable Zarathustra to resign himself to his fate. With the high spirits vouchsafed to him by irony (when honey is lacking), he trips off in philanthropic search of the distressed higher man who, it transpires, is a type – more precisely a ‘decadent’ type – rather than a specific individual.

Political Abdication: The Two Kings and an Ass

‘A journeyman to grief’,¹⁶⁹ Zarathustra sets off on his pilgrimage in search of the lost, but still cherished, illusions of his youth: beloved higher men who now cry out for deliverance from prolonged and brutal repression. His first encounter is with two biblical refugees leading their symbolic ass out of Matthew 21 and onto the Zarathustran stage. ‘There is a point in every philosophy’, writes Nietzsche, ‘when the philosopher’s “conviction” appears on stage: or, to put it in the words of an ancient Mystery: adventavit assinus / pulcher et fortissimus’¹⁷⁰ (BGE.8). The ass symbolizes what one might call pragmatic method¹⁷¹ as applied in all areas of science,¹⁷² and ‘the conscience of method demands’ that the only reality is ‘our world of desires and passions’ (BGE.36). Accordingly, he who sits ‘with immense and proud composure’ upon his own ass symbolizes sovereignty, that is, the ability ‘to have and not to have one’s affects, one’s for and against, at will, to condescend to them for a few hours; to seat oneself on them as on a horse, often as on an ass: – for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as their fire’ (BGE.284). Just as an ass was brought to Jesus by two of his disciples so that the philosopher-king¹⁷³ might ride triumphantly into Jerusalem, so too an ass is now brought to Zarathustra by two of his disciples, ‘for the highest man should also be the highest lord on earth’ (Z.IV.3). But pragmatic method further demands that the highest lord should also be the highest beast – that is to say, a dynamic synthesis of ‘creature and creator’ (BGE.225) – and so, with the courage of his convictions,¹⁷⁴ Jesus mounts the ass of his “wisdom” and rides to his death at Golgotha where he finally suffers into truth: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:47).¹⁷⁵ Similarly, it is Zarathustra’s convictions which lead him down from the mountain and, heedless of the hermit’s warning (Z.Prol.2), into the market square where he makes, as it were, a complete (but edifying) ass of himself (Z.Prol.3–6).

There are, however, two important distinctions to be made regarding the relative status of the philosopher-king and the two disciples as represented in both “pragmatic” parables. With respect to the philosopher-king, whereas Jesus, ‘flooded with the light of certain delusions’ (HH.I.144), believed unequivocally in his teaching, an aged Zarathustra has recanted (but not fully relinquished) much of his earlier teaching.¹⁷⁶ By Part IV, Zarathustra has become ‘a sceptic’, whose ‘grand passion’ for knowledge (cf. GS.107) has ‘used and used up’ his convictions as a means to this knowledge (A.54). Having finally attained a degree of ironic distance, Zarathustra will now only seat himself upon the ass of his former passions and convictions as a satirical device, for in every successful self-parody, ‘one must know how to make use of [one’s] stupidity as much as of [one’s] fire.’ With respect to the two disciples, whereas in the biblical story they are simple men who by nature are more inclined to learn from a prophet than from the vagaries of their own instincts and who accordingly lead the ass to one who, unlike them, has the courage of self-determination; in Zarathustra, they are kings who, above all others, are expected to rule in their own right and to seat themselves upon their own ass rather than scour the land in search of a surrogate ruler. What this juxtaposition of kings and disciples reveals is the levelling effect of two thousand years of Christianity. ‘Without the pathos of distance, which arises out of inveterate (eingefleischten) class-distinction’ (BGE.257), plebeian values have been allowed to usurp the authority of noble values: disciples have become kings and kings disciples.

Nietzsche’s principal purpose in re-presenting this biblical parable is, I would suggest, an ethical one. He aims to show that life itself should be a means to knowledge (GS.324), that only by ‘living dangerously’ can man attain to any kind of knowledge, particularly self-knowledge: ‘Build your cities on Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with people like yourselves and with yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!’ (GS.283). According to Nietzsche, ‘the higher nature is more irrational: – for those who are noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificial¹⁷⁷ do succumb to their instincts’, as opposed to ‘common natures [to whom] all noble, magnanimous feelings appear inexpedient’ (GS.3). It is precisely this masterful exploitation of the beast¹⁷⁸ within – ‘the monstrum in animo’ (TI ‘The Problem of Socrates’ 9) – which distinguishes ‘master morality’ from ‘slave morality’ (BGE.260). Whereas the noble values of the former promote warlike virtues so that man may have the strength and the courage to unfetter the beast, for ‘this hidden core (Grund) needs to erupt from time to time’ (GM.I.11), the decadent values of the latter advocate pity and repression so that the ‘“creature in man”’ (BGE.225) may be castrated and domesticated rather than gainfully employed. One’s ‘morality’, writes Nietzsche, ‘bears decided testimony to who [one] is – that is to say, in what order of rank the innermost drives of [one’s] nature stand in relation to one another’ (BGE.6). Jesus’ morality (not to be confused with “Christian” and thus ‘slave’ morality) is decidedly of the ‘master’ variety, bearing witness to an order of rank and a system of government analogous to liberal feudalism as opposed to tyrannical repression. Enthroned upon an ass, Jesus symbolizes the noblest form of, as it were, esprit de corps: the proud freedom of sovereign man who enjoys within himself the symbiotic unity of ‘creature and creator’.

In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake claims that ‘There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato and Cicero did Inculcate before him’.¹⁷⁹ If this is the case, then Jesus’ crucifixion marks the demise of master morality and the rise of slave morality: it marks the death not only of Jesus, “King of the Jews” – representing the last in a long and illustrious line of Hebrew kings, prophets and judges, who traditionally rode on white asses¹⁸⁰ – but of all great philosopher-kings. After the death of Jesus and the rise of the Church (fashioned by Paul out of the “crafted” timber of Jesus’ wooden cross), the tragic fate of all higher men was (irrevocably?) fixed: the ‘gruesome superlative’ of the paradoxical crucifixion (BGE.46) would henceforth symbolize the ‘gruesome’ paradox of great-souled men who would never become truly great or who, becoming great merely by some stroke of luck, would never be acknowledged as such, because the concept of greatness had been nailed to the cross (BGE.269). According to Nietzsche, Paul was the arch-enemy of Jesus: he converted an historical figure into the “meaning” of Christ; homily into theology; and a vague ethic into doctrinaire moral precepts. Moreover, it was Paul who systematically inverted Jesus’ teaching and rendered his noble values ignoble. Pauline precepts required those of “Christian” faith – a faith which guarantees “salvation” (Rom. 5:1–3) – to trade life for death, to sacrifice ‘all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit’ (BGE.46) on the doctrinal altar of ‘the Church, that form of mortal enmity to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of spirit, to all frank and gracious humanity’ (A.37). Freedom of thought and action was henceforth to be enslaved to an immoral – immoral, that is, from a non-Christian perspective – system of morality, which dictates that honest pride¹⁸¹ is evil and humility good, and that spiritual self-confidence is “egoistic” and evil whereas self-mutilating spiritual repression is “altruistic” and good. ‘One seeks in vain’, writes Nietzsche, ‘a grander form of world-historical irony’ than that of ‘mankind falling on its knees before the opposite of the source, the meaning, the right of the gospels’. Christianity, as ‘sanctified in the concept “Church”’ (A.36), is a travesty of its genesis; the ‘Evangel’, Nietzsche tells us, the first and last true Christian, died on the cross (A.39).

The ‘paradoxical “formula” god on the cross’ represents for Nietzsche the stigma of truly “fallen” man; the sign of the cross (like that which betokened plague victims) marks the disease of Christianity. This turning point in the history of humanity Nietzsche sees reflected in the Bible. Whereas in the Old Testament he finds ‘great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naïveté of a strong heart; what is more, I find a people’; in the New he finds ‘nothing but petty sectarianism, mere rococo of the soul’ (GM.III.22). After the cataclysmic crucifixion a noble people slowly but inexorably degenerated into a contemptible “mass” of pious mediocrity. Sectarian indoctrination in the manner, say, of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans – with its ‘exhortations’ to self-sacrifice, humility and charity (Ch.12); with its appeals for neighbourly love and Christian unity (Ch.15) – led to the diminution and devaluation of man (BGE.203) and disseminated the seeds of modern democracy.¹⁸² ‘With the aid of a religion which has indulged and flattered the most sublime herd-animal desires’, writes Nietzsche, ‘it has got to the point where we find even in political and social institutions an increasingly evident expression of this morality: the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement’ (BGE.202).

The most sublime expression of this “demoralization” of man is to be found in the French Revolution and in the ‘moral fanaticism’ (D.Pref.3) instinct in Robespierre’s perversion of revolutionary and religious ideals: dictatorship masquerading as the “common interest”, and a bloody appropriation of the divine right of kings masquerading as “virtue”. Nietzsche claims that ‘with the French Revolution, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal: the last political noblesse in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and eighteenth century, collapsed beneath the popular instincts of ressentiment’ (GM.I.16). Debilitated by a long and gradual decline, the old nobility – in particular, kings and philosopher-kings, as representatives of political control and self-control – finally perished under the weight of an ideological paradox exemplified in Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’.¹⁸³ Individual liberty (in Nietzsche’s sense of ‘the sovereign individual’, liberated from ‘the morality of mores and the social straitjacket’ GM.II.2) was now to be sacrificed to collective liberty. Both in the political and in the moral sphere the will to power of the ignoble man would henceforth flaunt its vulgar victory in the ‘mottled’ (Z.II.14) livery of mob-rule and ‘slave morality’.

Notwithstanding the savage splendour of Napoleon (‘a last signpost to a different route’ GM.I.16), who briefly revived not only some of the nobler values of the ancien régime,¹⁸⁴ but also some of the more barbaric¹⁸⁵ (hence Nietzsche’s ambivalent characterization of Napoleon as the personification of the ‘ideal of antiquity itself […] the problem of the noble ideal in itself made flesh […] Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman (Unmensch) and Übermensch’ ibid.),¹⁸⁶ the eventual corruption and ruination of ‘the more profound and comprehensive men of [the nineteenth] century’ (BGE.256) had become the rule. Neither kings nor philosopher-kings would be seen sitting triumphantly astride an ass because ‘herd’ values had effectively precluded the synthesis of ‘creature and creator’. Man was no longer to exploit and master the beast within, but to yoke himself to the collective beast of burden. Yoked thus to the “sinner”, who is fearfully weighed down by the concepts of ‘guilt, punishment and immortality’ (A.58), the noble and independent of spirit cannot but suffer from being the ‘bad conscience of their time’ (BGE.212). Gradually, the “untimely” are vitiated and worn down by the “timely”, and empathic identification of one individual with another ultimately mutates into a monstrous and nauseating collective identity.

Kings have become courtiers and courtiers kings. Rulers must now swear allegiance to the mob and pretend to serve the common interest: ‘“I serve, you serve, we serve” – so here too the hypocrisy of the rulers intones – and woe, if the first ruler is merely the first servant!’ (Z.III.5.2). Even philosopher-kings – ‘creative men’ who initiate a change in values (Z.I. 15) – are constrained by the popular demands of the new ideology. Those who condescend to play to the gallery¹⁸⁷ do so at the cost of artistic purity and intellectual integrity, while those who steadfastly refuse to debase themselves in such a fashion suffer at best notoriety and at worst anonymity. Both wait: the former upon the new bourgeois “nobility” and the latter upon the world’s oldest nobility, “Lord Chance” (Z.II.4). The nobler courtier plays a perverse kind of waiting game which almost invariably defeats its own objective:

The problem of those who wait – It requires strokes of luck and much that is incalculable if a higher man in whom the solution of a problem lies dormant is to act – “to erupt”, one might say – at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth sit men who wait, who hardly know to what extent they wait, but even less that they wait in vain. From time to time the awakening call, that chance event which gives “permission” to act, comes but too late – when the best part of youth and strength for action has already been used up through sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror, just as he “sprang up” that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! “It is too late” – he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth forever useless. – Could it be that in the realm of genius, ‘Raphael without hands’, taking this phrase in the widest sense, is perhaps not the exception but the rule? (BGE.274)

Among those who wait on “Lord Chance”, and wait in vain, is Zarathustra. Old and grey, and well past his prime, Zarathustra sits in solitary exile awaiting “permission” to return to man. ‘Here I sit and wait, surrounded by old shattered law-tables and also new, half-written law-tables. When will my hour come? / – the hour of my going down and going under: for I want to go among men once more!’ (Z.III.12.1). But in what capacity and to what end will he return to the people? To whom will Zarathustra the lawgiver dictate his tables, those same unfinished laws which in Part III he could only recite to himself (Z.III.12)? Just as Jesus had destroyed in vain Moses’ Tables, inscribed by the finger of God,¹⁸⁸ so Zarathustra has to little or no purpose shattered the Christian Tables, inscribed by Paul and recently appropriated by ‘the new idol’. This godless monster, the state, confuses ‘the language of good and evil’, and to the impotent, idolatrous mob perfidiously roars: ‘“On earth there is nothing greater than I: I am the ordering finger of God”’ (Z.I.11). The people have their new idol and a new set of worldly values, what need have they of an iconoclast who can guarantee neither material nor spiritual salvation, merely the ‘madness’ of trying to create an Übermensch out of the creature in man (Z.Prol.3)?¹⁸⁹

Upon whom, then, will Zarathustra bestow the “gift” of his “wisdom” (Z.Prol.2)? Certainly not upon the people, who do not even deserve a king (Z.III.12.21), much less a philosopher-king; and certainly not upon precursory Übermenschen, in whose miraculous coming, to be heralded by the sign of ‘the laughing lion with the flock of doves’ (Z.III.12.1), Zarathustra has absolutely no reason to believe. No, the sole beneficiaries of Zarathustra’s “gift” will be those doomed higher men who, in common with their benefactor, share the bequest of a higher culture which has been vitiated by the increasing prevalence of ‘slave’ values. Not the laughter of the lion but the cry of distressed higher men – ‘men of great longing, of great disgust, of great weariness, and that which [his higher men] called the remnant of God’ (Z.IV.11) – is the real, as opposed to the ideal, sign of the times.

These higher men, in whom the ‘hidden mob’ still lurks, come to Zarathustra not ‘as signs that higher men are already on their way to me’ (ibid.) – a wil[l-to-power]ful flight of fancy taken by his ‘wild wisdom’ – but as a sign of “gravity”; a “timely” reminder that in the age of reason what goes up must come down. Just as it is the soothsayer who first hears the cry of distress, and who later mocks Zarathustra’s fanciful talk of ‘laughing lions’, Edenic gardens, Isles of the Blest, and a ‘beautiful new race’ (ibid.) of Übermenschen, so it is Zarathustra’s Schopenhauerian ‘Spirit of Gravity’ which mocks the soaring pride and imagination of his wild wisdom: ‘“You have thrown yourself so high, but every stone that is thrown – must fall!”’ (Z.III.2.1). Indeed, each higher man whom Zarathustra encounters is one more millstone round his neck, sinking him further and further into his abysmal ‘black sea’, into ‘the abyss where the glance plunges downward and the hand grasps upward’ (Z.II.21): downward towards the real world of suffering and upward towards an ideal world of redemptive gods and Übermenschen.

In the abysmal depths of Zarathustra’s heart lies his ‘twofold will’, his will to honesty and his will to artifice: ‘That my glance plunges into the heights and that my hand wants to hold on to the depths and count upon them – that, that is my precipice and my danger’ (Z.II.21). From out of this abyss the more nauseating aspects of Zarathustra’s own repressed ‘hidden mob’ gaze pathetically and searchingly up at him, because ‘when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you’ (BGE.146). But his involuntary pity for the creature in man forces his hand to caress and comfort (Z.III.9) where it should smash and re-create (BGE.225).

Disgust and pity constitute Zarathustra’s fundamental ambivalence: his dual need for solitude and humanity. If the soothsayer comes to seduce Zarathustra to pity, the choleric king’s¹⁹⁰ pathological disgust for his ‘rabble kingdom’ (Z.IV.3) reflects Zarathustra’s own apoplectic disgust at mob-rule. What distinguishes the latter’s disgust from that of the former, however, is ironic reflexivity. Zarathustra knows how pervasive and deep-rooted ‘slave’ values are, and his will to honesty everywhere discerns, particularly within himself, the ubiquitous ‘small man’. It is this tragic and pitiful insight which compels Zarathustra to life-preserving artifice, to the fantastic invention of free spirits and Übermenschen; and it is precisely this lack of insight which serves to disclose the kings’ partial kinship with those whom they once governed and now despise.

Once one has lost the ‘pathos of distance’ it becomes harder to differentiate between contrivance and creation, guile and genius. As Zarathustra taught in Part I, ‘The people have little understanding of greatness, that is, of creativeness. But they have a taste for all performers and actors of great things’ (Z.I.12). Thus, because Zarathustra speaks to his pupils differently than he does to himself (Z.II.20); because he ‘performs’ well; the kings mistakenly believe not only in the greatness of Zarathustra but also in his rhetoric of redemption. They further mistake – on account, perhaps, of the violence of his ‘theatrical rhetoric’ (CW.8) – Zarathustra’s address to ‘War and Warriors’ (Z.I.10) as an apostrophe to the bloody wars of the past and as an urgent call to arms to those who feel threatened and spiritually impoverished (“demoralized”) by the current predominance of mob-rule. But when Zarathustra teaches, ‘You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war – a war for your opinions’ (ibid.), he is exhorting one not to civil war, but to internal warfare. It is a call to the battlefield of pragmatic method, where one must have the courage to attack one’s convictions.¹⁹¹

What these two figureheads fail to understand is that when Zarathustra proclaimed that ‘The age of kings is past: what today calls itself a people deserves no kings’ (Z.III.12.21), he had hoped that the loss of political sovereignty would incite erstwhile kings and (enlightened) subjects to assume personal sovereignty. But, instead of riding their own ass and trying to attain a higher degree of self-governance, the two kings lead to Zarathustra ‘the ass of [his] wisdom’ (KSA.10.448).¹⁹² Repelled by the mercantile “nobility”, the two kings seek to find in Zarathustra the precursor of a ‘new nobility’: a nobility of the future which, by being ‘the adversary of all mob-rule and all despotism, and [by writing] anew upon new law-tables the word “noble”’ (Z.III.12.11), shall ‘redeem all that is past’ (Z.III.12.12). But in common with the two kings Zarathustra is tainted by modern culture and its rabble values and thus lacks not only the classically inspired nobility which alone has the right to inscribe the word “noble” on new law-tables, but the divinely inspired (übermenschliche?) conviction which alone will guarantee the completion of Zarathustra’s law tables (after all, even Moses required a providential hand in the writing of his law [Ex. 34]).

Zarathustra’s “nobility” is just as false as that displayed by the two kings, ‘cloaked (überhängt) and disguised in the old, yellow pomp of [their] grandfathers’ (Z.IV.3), and their common desire for a ‘new nobility’ is fundamentally atavistic. Both Zarathustra and the ‘king on the right’ dream not only of ‘redeeming’ but also of reviving the past: the latter wishes to revive the bloodthirsty bellicosity of his ancestors and – even more retrogressively, yet part of the same continuum – the romantic myth of the noble savage; while Zarathustra’s future nobility of ‘higher, stronger, more victorious, more cheerful men, such as are upright in body and soul’ (Z.IV.11), of beautiful heroes who ‘stand with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will’ (Z.II.13), bears a striking resemblance to the sublime nobility of homeric and other lion-hearted heroes of antiquity on the one hand, and of quixotic heroes of the romantic period on the other.

Irony alone induces Zarathustra to mount the ass which has been brought to him by two of his disciples. Seated upon the ass of his wisdom, Zarathustra ironizes his past follies which have yet brought him to knowledge. He knows that what he once presented as convictions of his wild wisdom are in truth no more than ‘hermit phantasmagoria’; he knows that his future nobility of neo-classical and neo-romantic heroes, upon whom the two kings wait, is a vain fantasy. It is with mocking irony, therefore, that Zarathustra tells his two regal disciples: ‘My cave will be honoured if kings would sit and wait in it; but to be sure, you will have to wait a long time!’ (Z.IV.3).

Scholastic Science: The Conscientious Man of Spirit

Pressing on ‘through forests¹⁹³ and past bogs’, Zarathustra penetrates ‘farther and deeper’ (Z.IV.4) into the abyss of that ‘unknown sage’ called ‘self (Z.I.4). En route, he stumbles over the body of the ropedancer which he had tenderly laid to rest, many years before, ‘in a hollow tree’ hidden deep in the forest (Z.Prol.8). As we saw in Chapter 2, the fatal fall of the ropedancer symbolizes the destructive powers of critical reflexivity and the consequent failure and concomitant decline into nihilistic pessimism of ‘an audaciously daring, magnificently violent, high-flying and high-climbing type of higher man’ (BGE.256). The law and the spirit of gravity dictate that soaring spirits fall to earth as a result of the gravitational pull of the critical spirit: as Zarathustra teaches, ‘Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life’ (Z.II.8). Fear of what Zarathustra calls ‘“the beast within”’ (Z.IV. 15), of man’s wild and voracious passions, causes the ropedancer to falter on the tightrope stretched between the real ‘world of desires and passions’ (BGE.36) and the ideal world of heroic perfection. As the representative of the inner beast (otherwise known as ‘will to power’), and the ironic mediator between the prophet and the madman (the public and the private), the buffoon is at once the fearful voice of tragic insight and the means of ironic suspension above the inexorable ‘reality of our drives’ (ibid.).

Zarathustra’s act of burial symbolizes his renunciation of idealism – ‘all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 10) – and leads him to reflect seriously upon the “wisdom” and “virtue” of becoming a popular leader or, as he puts it, ‘a sheep-dog’ (Z.Prol.9). To adopt Zarathustra’s trope: the sheep-dog, realizing that all the while he has been barking up the wrong tree, finally abandons the herd and withdraws with his tail between his legs. The clumsiness and abysmal failure of Zarathustra’s rhetorical acrobatics is bodied forth in the ropedancer’s inept and tragi-comic spectacle; and, to return once again to Zarathustra’s metaphor, the sheep-dog’s compassion for ‘the dead dog’ – the buffoon’s contemptuous sobriquet for the ropedancer (Z.Prol.8) – is clearly much more than a case of empathic identification. Zarathustra buries the ‘dead dog’ deep in the forest because the pitiful sight of the ‘whole inner hopelessness of the higher man’, and thus of his own tragic destiny, ‘may perhaps cause him one day to turn bitterly against his own lot and to make an attempt at self-destruction’ (BGE.269).

With the ‘self’-confidence of one whose hovering irony has given rise to a false sense of security, and toying, perhaps, with the idea of a brief but complacent vigil at the symbolic burial site of the ropedancer, Zarathustra returns to the same dark and perilous forest. Stumbling over the prostrate but very much alive figure of the ropedancer, Zarathustra jumps clean out of his ‘lion-skin’ (the ‘spotted skin of the beast of prey and the matted hair of the inquirer, seeker, conqueror’, being the sham and shabby mantle of would-be ‘famous wise men’ Z.II.8). Tired, no doubt, of his prolonged and solitary exile, and eager to rewrite his own history with a Kantian emphasis on the good rather than the thwarted intentions of the will,¹⁹⁴ the ropedancer undergoes a figurative metamorphosis and reappears as ‘the conscientious man of spirit’ (Z.IV.4). In this guise, the broken and twisted remains of Zarathustra’s former insatiable passion for knowledge and for a life lived in fearless celebration of this knowledge – ‘amor fati’ (GS.276) – crawl out of hiding and now lie defiantly across Zarathustra’s path.

Amor fati is Nietzsche’s ‘formula for greatness in a human being’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 10). But it would appear that that is all it is: a formula, an ideal, a pretty lie ‘in the face of what is necessary’ (ibid.). The violent reaction of the erstwhile prophet of ‘self-overcoming’ – ‘in his fright he raised his stick and brought it down on the man he had trodden on’ (Z.IV.4) – testifies to a failure to overcome fearfully repressed drives (to let sleeping dogs lie) and to a patent lack of amor fati. No sooner, however, has Zarathustra registered the alarming magnitude of his vulnerability than he regains the equanimity of his former ironic distance and, in a supreme effort to distance himself even further from this resurgence of fear, proceeds to regale the man he has just ‘trodden on’ and beaten down (but not stamped out) with the following parable:

How a wanderer dreaming of distant things, unexpectedly stumbles over a sleeping dog on a lonely road, a dog lying in the sun:

how they both started up and let fly at one another like mortal enemies, these two, frightened to death – thus it happened to us.

And yet! And yet! – how little was lacking for them to caress one another, this dog and this lonely man! For they are both – lonely!

Fear of ‘the beast within’ and the loneliness of those who inquire and seek after a scientific framework within which to cage the conquered instinctual beast, bind the ‘dreamy wanderer’ to the ‘sleeping dog […] lying in the sun’. Whether, as in the latter case, one blinds oneself to the glaring truth – ‘the blindness of the blind man and his seeking and groping shall yet bear witness to the power of the sun into which he gazed’ (Z.II.8) – or, as in the former, averts one’s gaze and dreams of distant things, one is dealing in the same counterfeit currency of idealism (GM.III.26).

Wissenschaft (science) and gewissenhaft (conscientious) share more than a merely formal resemblance; etymologically, they are rooted in the same infernal element – wissen (to know). Scholastic, scientific, and philosophical seekers after knowledge – ‘the conscientious of spirit’ – are alike constrained by an ‘unconditional will to truth’ (GM.III.24): ‘It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science – and we enlightened men of today, we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still take our flame from the fire ignited by a millennia-old faith, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine’ (ibid.). But what is the precise nature of this “truth” after which the conscientious of spirit thirst? If we take the method of ‘backward inference’ one step further – that is, ‘from the ideal to those who need it’ (GS.V.370) – we will find that a ‘metaphysical faith’ arises out of a need for ‘metaphysical comfort’ (BT.7). In other words, the “truth” which the conscientious of spirit need is a ‘picturesque’ (A.13) one: they need absolute reassurance that ‘despite all changes of appearance, life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful’ (BT.7). But, as Zarathustra teaches, ‘all deep knowledge flows cold’, and the ice-cold, ‘innermost wells of the spirit’ (Z.II.8) extinguish all too soon the metaphysical fire. Once it is discovered that the indestructibly powerful source of life is will to power (‘The world is will to power – and nothing besides’ KSA.11.611), and that endless flux is the distressing manifestation of this will (Z.III.12.8), the value of truth is immediately called into question. ‘A life-threatening, destructive principle […] ‘will to truth’ […] that could be a concealed will to death’ (GS.V.344), compels one to ask: at what price truth? In a bid for survival, the conscientious of spirit begin to turn truth on its head, and an inexorable will to truth gradually and paradoxically mutates into an equally compelling will to artifice, illusion, and fraudulent idealism.¹⁹⁵ ‘Freez[ing] to death on the ice of knowledge’ (Z.III.6), the conscientious of spirit are those most in need of anæsthetizing idealism: this ‘fieriest water of the spirit’ (UM.III.26) is the nihilistic but life-preserving intoxicant to which those benighted by enlightenment and frozen by fire are addicted.

‘All great things’, writes Nietzsche, ‘bring about their own destruction through an act of self-transcendence (Selbstaufhebung)’ (GM.III.27), and just as doctrinaire Christianity destroyed itself by its own moral dogmatism (ibid.), so science is hoist with its own petard. It is the rigour of scientific method which discloses the limitations of its own discourse: ‘spurred on by its [own] powerful illusion, science rushes inexorably to its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, perishes’ (BT.15). At the heart of the phenomenal world, science discovers a mysterious lacuna,¹⁹⁶ and it requires the ‘extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer’ to mark out distinctly and definitively ‘the boundaries and relativity of knowledge in general, and thus to deny decisively the claim of science to universal validity’ (BT.18).

Placed within this post-Enlightenment context, the scientific drive of the conscientious of spirit must, at the very least, be viewed with scepticism. ‘Is the scientific drive (Wissenschaftlichkeit) perhaps merely a fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A cunning self-defence against – truth?’ asks Nietzsche. Is it, ‘morally speaking, something like cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse?’ (AS.1).¹⁹⁷ Similarly, one might ask of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra whether his will to the Übermensch is not also ‘a fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A cunning self-defence against – truth?’ To pursue an ‘aesthetic’ (A.13) and transfiguring “truth” as a redemptive ploy against the ‘plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth’ (GM.I.1) evidenced by the senses (BGE.134),¹⁹⁸ is the ultimate idealist activity. If science is ‘an artifice for the preservation of life’ (GM.III.13) then, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s efforts to distance the philosopher, who is ‘a real human being’ (UM.III.7), from the ‘theoretical man’ (BT.15), who purportedly is not, the conscientious of spirit – insofar as they seek an ideal solution to the very real problem of being human – must be classed among those ‘decadents [who] need the lie – it is one of the conditions of their preservation’ (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 2).

Thus, notwithstanding a difference in means, Zarathustra and the conscientious man of spirit pursue the same end: to construct a redemptive raft out of the tree of knowledge so as not to be ‘swept away and lost’ (TL.2) by the truth of reality as manifested in the chaotic flux of existence. Of what significance is the fact that the conscientious man of spirit fishes for his species of metaphysical comfort – objective “truth” – in the ‘swamps’ which surround him on all sides, or that Zarathustra, with his ‘golden fishing-rod’ (Z.IV.1), fishes for his subjective “truth” in the ‘unfathomable rich sea’ (ibid.) of his unconscious? Neither of them is deceived or comforted by his solitary, scientific endeavours. An expert on the brain of the leech, the former is bled dry by the conscientious rigour – ‘hard, severe, narrow, cruel, inexorable’ (Z.IV.4) – of his rational inquiry: ‘For the sake of the leech I have lain here beside this swamp like a fisherman, and already my outstretched arm has been bitten ten times’ (ibid.); while the latter, well aware of the ‘stupidity’ (Z.IV.1) of his enterprise, vainly persists in baiting freshwater fish, as it were, in the black sea of humanity.¹⁹⁹ The groundless optimism of Zarathustra’s ‘wild wisdom’, crossing the sea (to use another Zarathustran metaphor) ‘like a sail, trembling before the impetuosity of the spirit’ (Z.II.8), will suffer shipwreck on the bedrock of reality just as surely as the equally groundless optimism of Socratic rationalism will run aground in its own shallow waters.

The leech symbolizes the spirit of inquiry, the spirit that ‘cuts into life’ and increases its own knowledge through its agony (Z.II.8): ‘The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.’²⁰⁰ Knowledge is ‘a form of asceticism’ (A.57), and the conscientious of spirit are paradigmatic ascetics. In Part II of Zarathustra, this form of asceticism is sanctified and glorified: ‘to be anointed and through tears consecrated as a sacrificial beast’ is, Zarathustra assures us, ‘the happiness of the spirit’ (Z.II.8). But after many years of ascetic indulgence and the ever-increasing danger of ‘bleed[ing] to death from knowledge of truth’ (HH.I.109) the ‘beauty’ and ‘delight’ of self-sacrifice (GM.II.18) begin to pall and by Part IV Zarathustra’s former “ascetic idealism” has become another lost illusion and the butt of cruel self-mockery. Neither Zarathustra nor the conscientious man of spirit is blessed with either happiness of spirit or holiness of spirit: the “holiness” of the scientist is not a beatific state of self-transcendence, but rather an emergency state of self-avoidance (GM.III.8). Repressive measures may succeed in sustaining life, but only at the cost of denaturalization: ‘Science is related to wisdom as virtuousness is related to holiness; it is cold and dry [… and] is as useful to itself as it is harmful to its servants, insofar as it transfers its own character to them and thereby ossifies their humanity’ (UM.III.6). Although an artifice for self-preservation, the leech of asceticism cuts into the full-blooded life of the senses and sucks it dry.

Zarathustra’s re-encounter with his resurrected idealism serves to demonstrate that he is ‘still midway between a fool and a corpse’ (Z.Prol.7). Just as in the Prologue he had shown compassion for ‘the dead dog’, so in Part IV he is drawn once again to ‘the sleeping dog […] lying in the sun’. This time, however, the identification is conscious and ironic. For whereas in the Prologue Zarathustra had glimpsed his tragi-comic reflection in the face of the jeering crowd, in Part IV it peers insolently out of the fool’s mirror with which he cruelly torments himself. The older, ironic Zarathustra is half-corpse because he has learnt that ‘the ascetic ideal’ – a form of death in life – ‘springs from the protective and redemptive instinct of a degenerating life which’, having peered into the abyss of knowledge, ‘seeks by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence’ (GM.III.13); and half-fool because the recently acquired, but somewhat precarious, ‘artistic distance’ of the ‘transcendent buffoon’ enables him to mock with bitter irony the divine folly of his youth.

This tragi-comic figure calls himself Zarathustra (‘I call myself Zarathustra’ Z.IV.4), but, as he and his conscientious reflection well know, Zarathustra is more tragic than comic, more “saint” than fool, more ascetic than corpse. A fool certainly; but not fool enough. Thus, when called ‘a fool’ by his mocking reflection, Zarathustra replies with much gravity, much irony, and not a little deterministic resignation: ‘I am what I must be’ (Z.IV.4).

Wagnerian Melodrama: The Sorcerer

Boldly retracing his steps still further along the beaten(-down) path of decadence, Zarathustra espies ‘not far below him on the same path a man who was throwing his limbs around like a maniac and who finally belly-flopped to the ground’ (Z.IV.5.1). This is the stuff melodrama is made on, and ‘the incomparable histrio’ (CW.8) whom Zarathustra sees is ‘the modern artist par excellence’ (CW.5). But if from a distance Zarathustra perceives the historical figure of Wagner, at close quarters he sees only ‘the psychologically picturesque’ (CW.8) figure of his own most insidious disease. Situated only a few paces above ‘the artist of decadence’ (CW.4), Zarathustra can squint his eyes and make believe that he ‘beholds the entire fact of man at a tremendous distance – below’ (CW.Pref). At the same level of decadence, however, he cannot fail to see – short of closing his eyes²⁰¹ – the full extent of his own cultural contamination. Running to the spot where ‘the Cagliostro of modernity’ (CW.5) lay, Zarathustra finds ‘a trembling old man with staring eyes’ (Z.IV.5.1), and a reader would be forgiven for (mis)taking this pathetic old man for Zarathustra the convalescent who not long before had also lain ‘pale and trembling’ (Z.III.13.2) like a fading romantic artist. Just as in ‘The Convalescent’ a desolate and solitary Zarathustra had shamelessly played to the gallery, had crashed to the ground like a dead man, and had looked to his ‘sick-nurses’ for (albeit transient and self-delusory) redemption from his suffering; so in ‘The Sorcerer’ the ‘first-rate acting’ (CW.8) of the grand seducer, having successfully lured a cruelly caricatured Zarathustra, resumes its ‘wicked and malicious’ parody (GS.Pref.1) by ‘continually looking around with pathetic gestures, like one forsaken by and isolated from all the world’ (Z.IV.5.1). It is, of course, a self-parody and one which reveals that ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice’ is still caught in his master’s spell.

But if ironic distance keeps Zarathustra ‘five steps from the hospital’ of modernity (CW.9) and thus from the nauseating sight of his own diseased soul, then once he has taken those five critical steps and thereby lost ‘the pathos of distance’ (BGE.257), his ‘diagnosis of the modern soul’ (CW. Epilogue) loses its objectivity and betrays its pathological roots in introspection and projection. It is, therefore, simply a matter of perspective as to whether Nietzsche’s ‘vivisection of the most instructive case’ (CW. Epilogue) of modern decadence begins with the case of Zarathustra or with the case of Wagner. In either case, the overall result will be the same because Zarathustra, ‘no less than Wagner, is a child of [t]his time; that is, a decadent’ (CW.Pref). If we return, then, with our hermeneutic scalpel to the convalescent’s bedside (Z.III.13), and take the liberty of treating the less confident, more vulnerable Zarathustra as an authorial extension, we will discover that Nietzsche’s picture of Wagner is merely one more self-portrait hanging in his own ‘pathological gallery’ (CW.5) of decadent higher men.

Klugheit,²⁰² judging by the relative frequency of its application in The Case of Wagner, is, from Nietzsche’s perspective at least, one of Wagner’s most prominent character traits. Whether this is the case or not, it is decidedly one of Zarathustra’s. As we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4, Klugheit is Zarathustra’s principal tool of redemption and one which he utilizes to full effect in ‘The Convalescent’. If, as Nietzsche claims, ‘subtlety (Raffinement) [is] the expression of impoverished life’ (CW. Second Postscript), then it is not to be wondered at if a debilitated Zarathustra – ‘a spirit who understands the serpentine cleverness (Schlangenklugheit) of changing one’s skin’ (HH.II.Pref.2) – employs ‘the cleverest animal under the sun’ (Z.Prol.10) to be his chief sick-nurse. For it is precisely when his intellectual conscience has forbidden him the fruits of self-deception that Zarathustra is most keenly at the mercy of his sickness and most desperately in need of his ministering angels. It is then that any valiant attempt at authenticity paradoxically smacks of dissimulation – because ‘there is a wicked falseness among those who will beyond their capabilities’ (Z.IV.13.8) – and inevitably leads to ignominious moral defeat. As ‘The Convalescent’ amply demonstrates, changing one’s (yellow) skin without the necessary serpentine art is simply ‘clever stupidity’ (CW.9), resulting in ‘grotesque comedy’ (UM.IV.3).²⁰³

Lacking the courage for his ‘most abysmal thought’ and so failing in his endeavour to purge himself of the “morality” of ressentiment, Zarathustra falls victim to the extreme ‘contrast between his desires and his capacity to fulfil them’ (ibid.). ‘Hollowed out and consumed by failure’ (UM.IV.2),²⁰⁴ Zarathustra looks to his proud and deceptive consciousness for redemption through art, because ‘art is there to prevent the bow from snapping’ (UM.IV.4). For Zarathustra, however, there is one art in particular ‘which most profoundly cheered and consoled him in his need [and] which most soulfully accommodated [t]his need’ (UM.IV.8): the magical elixir of ‘myth and music […] such as Wagner has dispensed as the most delicious of draughts to all who have suffered profoundly from life’ (ibid.). Accordingly, it is in the ‘psychological magic’ of Elysian myth and the lyricism of language, dispensed to him by his sick-nurses, that Zarathustra ‘bathed and healed his soul’ and returned to life ‘with the smile of convalescents’ (ibid.).

It is, however, a wry smile, for whereas ‘[t]he Wagnerian, with his believer’s stomach, is actually sated by the fare which his master conjures up for him’ (CW.8), this ‘most corrupted Wagnerian’ (CW.3)²⁰⁵ knows that – notwithstanding the incomparable talent of his ‘clever hosts […] for representing a lavish table at modest expense’ (CW.8) – the mythical ‘rainbows’ (Z.III.13.2) which his animals conjure up for him are merely the ‘dramatic emergency measures, […] designed to deceive only for a moment’ (UM.IV.3), of an ironic and penitent ‘Cagliostro of modernity’. If loving hands are needed to warm the coldness of his heart and lofty idealism to counter the shame of tragic insight; ‘if iron, leaden life should lose its gravity through golden, tender, unctuous melodies’ and his ‘melancholy [… find] rest in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection’ (NCW ‘Where I raise objections’), Zarathustra must needs repent, for ‘it is our alleviations for which we have to atone the worst!’ (HH.II.Pref.4). Thus, when the magical moment has passed, Zarathustra must once again reckon with his relentless intellectual conscience: ‘a merciless spirit that knows all the hideouts where the ideal is at home – where it has its secret dungeons and, as it were, its ultimate safety’ (EH ‘Human, All Too Human’ 1). Whether wearing motley (Z.Prol.6) or cutting a more sinister figure as ‘half dwarf, half mole’ (Z.III.2.1), Zarathustra’s intellectual conscience is the spirit that ‘cuts into life’ (Z.II.8); and Zarathustra, whether thrown by the buffoon (Z.Prol.6), weighed down by ‘the spirit of gravity’ (Z.III.2.1) or ‘torn piecemeal by some Minotaur of conscience’ (BGE.29), is forever being made to repent his restorative flights of fancy. It is this penitential relationship between Zarathustra and his ‘hangman-god’ (Z.IV.5.1) which the sorcerer cruelly parodies in his lament.

In this dithyrambic²⁰⁶ cri de coeur, not one of Zarathustra’s allegories of intellectual conscience escapes ‘the magical eye of the dramatist, who can read souls as easily as the most familiar writing’ (UM.IV.8). In the first stanza of the sorcerer’s poetic parody, we re-encounter no less than three transmogrifications: first, Zarathustra’s wintry guest (Z.III.6), who causes his host to shake with ‘unknown fevers’ and to shiver ‘with piercing icy-frost arrows’ (Z.IV.5.1); second, the soothsayer, whose ‘bad-tidings and ashen lightning flashes’ (Z.IV.2) strike Zarathustra down, and whose ‘mocking eye’ (Z.IV.5.1) stares at him from the dark abyss of tragic insight; and finally, the ‘crippled and crippling’ (Z.III.2.1) spirit of gravity, under whose weight Zarathustra contorts himself, ‘tortured by every eternal torment’ (Z.IV.5.1). The second stanza re-introduces Zarathustra’s ‘conscientious spirit’ (Z.IV.4) which, ‘with blunt arrows’ strikes deeper and deeper (Z.IV.5.1) into Zarathustra’s heart. The parasite that ‘grow[s] fat on [Zarathustra’s] sick, sore places’ (Z.III.12.19) worms its way into the third stanza and, with the aid of ‘the longest ladder [which] can descend the deepest’ (ibid.), into Zarathustra’s heart and his ‘most secret thoughts’ (Z.IV.5.1). Zarathustra’s conscientious spirit of inquiry ‘strikes’ again in the fourth stanza, spurred on by Zarathustra’s ‘cruellest spur’ (ibid.) – his inexorable will to honesty. Finally, in stanzas five, six and seven, in a devilish inversion of the Mephistophelean myth, the buffoon reappears to demand a philosopher-king’s ‘ransom’ (ibid.). Not content with Zarathustra’s soul, the buffoon returns to extract his pound of sovereign flesh. Since the true philosopher-king is a perfect synthesis of ‘creature and creator’ (BGE.225), of ‘self and ego’ (Z.I.4); and since, as Zarathustra claims, ‘there is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom’ (ibid.); the buffoon will not rest content until, so far as concerns Zarathustra, he has the full measure of both philosopher and king. Having all too easily cut down in the market square and held up for public contumely the philosopher’s soaring pride and cunning rhetoric, the buffoon is now hellbent on cutting into the private chambers of the regal self, the self which ‘rules and is also the ego’s ruler’ (ibid.). Only then will the raison d’être of Zarathustra’s creative partnership – that is, whether it is ‘hunger or superabundance that has here become creative’ (GS.V.370) – be fully exposed; only then will the buffoon’s ironic victory be complete.

Unlike the other figures of intellectual conscience, the buffoon, with his light feet and hovering irony (clearly a foil for the crippled spirit of gravity with his ‘heavy feet and sultry heart’ Z.IV.13.16), actively displays a positive dimension²⁰⁷ (albeit one which emanates from a negative principle). Whereas the other figures exhibit the negative aspect of the spirit that cuts into life or, as in the case of those who are ‘virtuous beyond [their] own strength’ (Z.IV.13.13), cuts life down, the buffoon symbolizes the process of Bildung, from the acute pain of discipline (Zucht) to the nostalgic ache of growth (Züchtung). ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering’, writes Nietzsche, is the discipline which ‘alone has created all the enhancements of man hitherto’ (BGE.225). On this showing, suffering is the spur to self-knowledge and subsequently to the creative activity of self-development. But cultivating one’s garden, as it were, requires more than horticultural expertise for, while pruning finds its human analogue in ‘the discipline of suffering’, memory is wholly resistant to the cultural process and thus altogether indifferent to man’s bold claims of improvement (BGE.179); ‘not far below’²⁰⁸ man’s veneer of culture resides the pain of lost innocence and the disillusionment that such loss brings. In an endeavour to deal with this pain, Zarathustra, having denied himself both Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s particular brands of anæsthetizing idealism, seeks in ironic buffoonery a more honest but evidently less effective form of redemption. As the tragicomic voice of Dionysian insight and subsequently of ironic reflexivity, the buffoon is the closest Zarathustra ever gets to a practical and practicable ‘Dionysian theodicy’.²⁰⁹

As a potentially redemptive figure, the buffoon represents Zarathustra’s most authentically positive projection. Hovering precariously above the tightrope stretched between beast and god, the buffoon demonstrates how, with a good conscience, one can deal with the ‘tension of the soul in unhappiness’ (BGE.225). By means of ironic suspension above the rack of human suffering, above the tension between self-doubt and self-aggrandisement, between man’s will to honesty and his will to illusion, between intellectual conscience and bad conscience, between shame and pride, pride and shame, the Zarathustra of Part IV is able to save himself from falling off the human tightrope. And so an ironic Zarathustra relentlessly mocks the violent vacillations of this ‘most solitary’ (Z.IV.5.1) and most divided of men, a man at once scientific and religious whose ‘solitary and agitated mind’ seeks to drown the voice of bad conscience in a surge of divine madness, in the vain hope that ‘epilepsies [… will become] indistinguishable from epiphanies’:²¹⁰ ‘Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden light and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, let me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: that I may only come to believe in myself!’ (D.14). For when intellectual conscience – striving towards self-legislation, self-creation and self-determination – fails to become instinct, let alone ‘the dominating instinct’ (GM.II.2), it turns against itself and becomes the self-flagellating scourge of bad conscience. Half-corpse, half-fool, Zarathustra is a man who, ‘[f]reezing to death on the ice of knowledge’ (Z.III.6), is at one moment (stanza 1) ‘Stretched out, shuddering / Like a half-dead man’ and begging for the ‘hot hands’ of love (Z.IV.5.1), and at another (stanza 5) standing ‘on all the stilts of [his] pride’ (DD ‘Amid Birds of Prey’); or, inversely, now “playing” the fool on his precarious stilts and now tumbling into the abyss, ‘All footing lost’²¹¹ (Z.Prol.6 and Z.III.13); or, having finally (stanza 8) been spared by his ‘cruellest enemy’ (Z.IV.5.1), intellectual conscience, perversely beseeching his return (stanza 9) together ‘with all your torments’ (ibid.). In short, the soul of Zarathustra, ‘convulsed with fire and icy fevers’ (HH.I.141), with wild wisdom and savage self-loathing, is seen to be indistinguishable from the hungry soul of the so-called saint. And with this disclosure, the buffoon’s victory is complete.

According to Nietzsche’s typology of the “saintly” soul, this ritual torment of crime and punishment, of voluptuous self-indulgence and ascetic self-denial, is the perverse pastime of bored “saints” and hermits. To parody this rousing ritual, however, is the sublime recreation of an ironic ‘saint of immoralism.’²¹² The same rules, however, hold for both games: whether self-indulgence is reflexive or non-reflexive, the penitential flagellation – ‘he scourges his self-idolization with self-contempt and cruelty’ (HH.I.142) – follows with equal force and equal necessity. ‘Every such orgy of feeling has to be paid for afterwards, that goes without saying – it makes the sick sicker: and that is why this kind of remedy for pain is, by modern standards, “guilty”’ (GM.III.20). Viewed in this light, the buffoon’s victory is pyrrhic: cutting too deeply into Zarathustra’s ‘sick, sore places’ and thereby reopening the ‘festering wounds’ of memory (EH ‘Why I am so wise’ 6), the buffoon looses his footing, and hovering irony plunges into bitter reflection. Failing ‘to redeem the past and to re-create’ – through his ruthless, retrospective caricature – ‘every “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”’ (Z.II.20), Zarathustra resorts to repression. Not fool enough to retain his ironic distance nor corpse enough to admit defeat, Zarathustra ‘took his stick and began to beat the wailing man with all his might’ (Z.IV.5.2). It is the powerful will, the dominating instinct, of bad conscience that wields Zarathustra’s splenetic stick of revenge, and the same ‘imprisoned will’ that, fettered to time and thus unable to ‘will backwards’ (Z.II.20), so meticulously guides Zarathustra’s stick of ressentiment around the ragged contours of his decadent shadow (Z.IV.2 and Z.IV passim).

In Parts I and II, Zarathustra had sought redemption from his ‘romantic pessimism’ in ‘wrathful’ counteraction (HH.II.Pref.4): he had ‘take[n] sides against everything sick in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all of modern “humaneness”’ (CW. Pref). He had railed against the (Wagnerian) ‘poet’s spirit’ which is ‘the peacock of peacocks and a sea of vanity!’ (Z.II.17); against the (Schopenhauerian) ‘spirit of revenge’ which emanates from the belief that ‘No deed can be annihilated’ (Z.II.20); and against ‘the compassionate […] who cannot surmount their pity’ (Z.II.3). But this ‘special’ kind of ‘self-discipline’ (CW.Pref) is self-defeating. Greater than the sum of his parts, man does not conform to the laws of bookkeeping: off-setting one affect with another is to settle accounts but always with recollective remainder. Like ‘the pale criminal’, Zarathustra ‘was equal to his deed when he did it: but he could not endure its image after it was done’ (Z.I.6). Repression will never cure Zarathustra of his decadent diseases because memory ensures the ultimate impotence of cold reason in its struggle against ardent passion. He may claim to have ‘grown weary’ of the ‘poet’s spirit [that] wants spectators’ at any cost (Z.II.17), but his easy seduction by the sorcerer’s poetic spirit, and the alacrity with which he runs to the old ‘counterfeiter’s’ (Z.IV.5.2) side, belies the weariness to which he lays claim. He may prefer to be compassionate ‘from a distance’ (Z.II.3), but, at the sight of the sorcerer’s apparent suffering, his compassion is driven inexorably towards its pitiful object (Z.IV.5.1). Finally, he may wish to believe that the causal connection between deed and guilt, pride and shame, intellectual conscience and bad conscience, is not a necessary one (Z.II.20), but it is his ‘spirit of revenge’, hardened by bad conscience, that metaphorically beats ‘his actor’s genius’ (CW.8; Z.IV.5.2), and thus his penitential breast, into temporary submission.

When ‘put to the test’, Zarathustra proves himself to be a ‘penitent of the spirit [… that is, a] poet and sorcerer who finally turns his spirit against himself (Z.IV.5.2). His poetic spirit has turned penitent (Z.II.17) and his conscientious spirit has mutated into the spirit of revenge (Z.II.20): Zarathustra has ‘reaped disgust as [his] single truth’ (Z.IV.5.2). The violence with which the ‘wise Zarathustra’ strikes the decadent artist testifies to the ‘hard’-hitting truths of the latter’s savage caricature, and with every blow, the depth of his ‘bad knowledge’ and the tyranny of his ‘bad conscience’ strikes home more and more forcefully (ibid.). Whereas in Part II Zarathustra’s intellectual conscience had been spared by the serpentine arts of bad conscience, in Part IV it suffers at the hands of the latter the severest of beatings. A more naïve Zarathustra had been unaware of his animals’ vast sphere of influence, of how his bad conscience had changed even its own skin so as not to frighten to death his intellectual conscience (‘You would even mask your disease if you showed yourself naked to your physician’ ibid) and thereby enabled an affronted intellectual conscience to retain enough pride²¹³ and good conscience for redemptive flights of fancy (‘A terror came over me when I saw these best of men naked: then I grew wings to soar away into distant futures’ Z.II.21). By Part IV, however, Zarathustra has seen through the preservative arts of his eagle and serpent, but still lacks the strength to dispense with them completely. His wings have been clipped by the spirit of irony, and that which once soared is now leapt over by the art of transcendental buffoonery: his Schopenhauerian pessimism (Z.IV.2) wears the (thorny) ‘rose-wreath crown’ of (ironic) laughter (Z.IV.13.18); the ass of his wisdom (Z.IV.3) is mounted by a (Pretender) philosopher-king whose ‘lame foot’ of ressentiment will, when alighting from the seat of irony, ‘stumble’ upon the rock of bad conscience (Z.IV.13.10); his ‘wild wisdom’ is cured by the ‘leech of conscience’ (Z.IV.4), but at the risk of killing the patient; and finally, the spell of Wagnerian illusion (Z.IV.5.2) is broken, but only by the vengeance of disillusion.

At the moment of truth, however, when bad conscience drops its mythical (but deciduous) fig-leaves and intellectual conscience blushes beneath the rod of ressentiment (‘To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience submits’ BGE.158), Zarathustra has ‘no lie and no cunning left – [he is] disenchanted with [him]self’ (Z.IV.5.2). He had sought mythical higher men but found only his own higher men. They in turn had sought a mythical Zarathustra but found only themselves: the soothsayer had sought ‘one made giddy by happiness’ but found only romantic pessimism (Z.IV.2); the two kings had sought ‘the highest man’ but found only the hero-worship of one who dreams of the highest man (Z.IV.3); the conscientious man of spirit had emulated ‘the great leech of conscience’ but discovered only bad conscience; and now the sorcerer seeks ‘one who is genuine, right, simple, unambiguous, a man of all honesty, a repository of wisdom, a saint of knowledge, a great man’, but finds instead one who is false, complex, ambiguous, and disingenuous; a penitential saint of bad knowledge and thus a repository of wildly prudent wisdom. In short, a man of ressentiment.

Ressentiment is the mainspring of redemption, and whether or not Zarathustra avenges romantic pessimism with repression, or vice versa, he will never manage to free himself from the shackles of residual rancour and bad conscience. In seeking redemption from himself through ‘art and philosophy’ – that is, through the agency of cunning and pride – the ironic saint knows that he is in fact seeking ‘revenge against life itself’ (NCW ‘We Antipodes’). It is this bad knowledge that gnaws at Zarathustra’s intellectual conscience. ‘A mighty striving conscious of repeated failure makes one bad’ (UM.IV.2), and at the moment of unendurable self-knowledge, when failure weighs heavily upon the heart and ressentiment eclipses every best endeavour, intellectual conscience submits to the metaphysical needs of bad conscience. Consequently, when the sorcerer conjures up the noble Zarathustra of mythical origin, the decadent Zarathustra of romantic origin closes his eyes²¹⁴ and surrenders to the enchanting fiction of the great man “Zarathustra”.

153. Hollingdale misleadingly translates ‘Wahrsager’ as ‘prophet’.

154. See ‘The Parable of the Ropedancer’.

155. Lord Byron, Manfred, I.i.10–11. This ‘immortal verse’ is cited by Nietzsche in HH.I.109.

156. Cf. ‘Misunderstood sufferers. – Magnificent natures suffer very differently from what their admirers imagine: they suffer most keenly from the ignoble and petty agitations of some evil moments – briefly, from their doubts about their own magnificence – but not from the sacrifice and martyrdom which their task demands from them’ (GS.251).

157. ‘In traffic with man a benevolent dissimulation is often necessary, as though we do not see through the motives of their actions.’

158. Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy, 1. 203.

159. This sentence is an intentional misappropriation of GS.V.346.

160. This adjective is overlooked in Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s joint translation.

161. Ananda Coomeraswamy, paraphrasing the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita in his book, The Dance of Shiva (London: Peter Owen, 1958), p. 144.

162. As prophesied by Horace (Epode 16, 41 et seq.).

163. The idea of the Isles of the Blest ‘perhaps reflected the tales of mariners who had reached islands off the West coast of Africa’ (emphasis added). See The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, compiled by Paul Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 224.

164. Nietzsche himself felt a certain affinity to Empedocles: ‘My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe’ (KSA.11.134).

165. The ‘shadow’ will be dealt with at length in the final section of Chapter 7.

166. Paul Harvey, p. 224.

167. Contra Nietzsche, Scheler differentiates between agape and “altruism” and, with elegance and persuasiveness, argues that whereas the latter is symptomatic of ressentiment, the former springs from ‘a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fulness of one’s own life and existence’. See Max Scheler, ‘Ressentiment’, in Solomon (ed.), pp. 249–51.

168. Cf. ‘Appearance of heroism. – To throw oneself into the midst of the enemy can be a sign of cowardice’ (D.299); and ‘Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to exterminate their sensuous drives because the latter are raging beasts of prey’ (D.331).

169. Shakespeare, Richard II, I.iii.274.

170. ‘The ass arrived, beautiful and most brave’.

171. In the words of Blake: ‘As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences’. (All Religions are One).

172. Wissenschaft, in the broadest sense of the word.

173. I use this Platonic term to differentiate between those who rule in the realm of thought (philosopher-kings) and those who rule in the realm of politics (kings). The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive.

174. ‘A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!’ (Musarion edition, Vol. XVI, p. 318). Cited in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 354.

175. ‘On the knowledge acquired through suffering – […] He who suffers intensely looks out at things with a terrible coldness […] he himself lies there before himself stripped of all colour and plumage. If until then he has been living in some perilous world of fantasy, this supreme sobering-up through pain is the means of extricating him from it: and perhaps the only means. (It is possible that this is what happened to the founder of Christianity on the cross: for the bitterest of all exclamations “My God, why hast thou forsaken me!” contains, in its ultimate significance, evidence of a general disappointment and enlightenment over the delusion of his life; at the moment of supreme agony he acquired an insight into himself of the kind told by the poet of the poor dying Don Quixote.)’ (D.114).

176. Zarathustra views Jesus’ false convictions in the same way as he views his own youthful follies: ‘[Jesus] died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching had he lived to my age! He was noble enough to recant! / But he was still immature’ (Z.1.21).

177. Nietzsche means here those who sacrifice themselves to themselves and not to others and the values of others.

178. In Greek mythology, the ass is sacred to Dionysus and Typhon as a brutish aspect (Cooper, p. 16).

179. Blake, The Everlasting Gospel, Supplementary Passages.

180. Cooper, p. 16.

181. ‘The noble soul has reverence before itself’ (BGE.287).

182. For a refutation of the indebtedness of socialist and democratic principles to Christianity, see Scheler, pp. 255–6.

183. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk 1, Ch VII.

184. For example, a commitment to humane and enlightened policies in government.

185. For example, a ruthless and savage pride in military glory.

186. As White (p. 55) stresses: ‘Nietzsche explicitly identifies Napoleon as incarnating the problem of the noble ideal, not its solution’.

187. As in (Nietzsche’s perception of) the case of Wagner: ‘The theatre is a form of demolatry in matters of taste; the theatre is a revolt of the masses, a plebiscite against good taste’ (CW. Postscript).

188. ‘What was the sound of Jesus’ breath? / He laid His hand on Moses’ Law: / The Ancient Heavens, in Silent Awe / Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole, / All away began to roll / […] “Good & Evil are no more! / “Sinai’s trumpets, cease to roar! / “Cease, finger of God, to write! / “The Heavens are not clean in thy Sight.’ (Blake, The Everlasting Gospel, (e), 11.10–24.

189. ‘… the happiness which the madman enjoys from his idée fixe proves [nothing] with regard to its rationality’ (HH.I.161).

190. Of the two kings, the sedate ‘king on the left’ merely acts as a sounding-board for the loquacious and irascible ‘king on the right’.

191. See footnote 174.

192. ‘And kings shall still lead the ass of my wisdom’.

193. The forest commonly symbolizes the realm of the psyche; it is ‘a place of testing and initiation, of unknown perils and darkness’ (Cooper, p. 71). To bury something in the forest is therefore a metaphor for repression.

194. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H J Paton (London: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 61–2.

195. Cf. Hume: ‘Truths which are pernicious to society, if any such there be, will yield to errors which are salutary and advantageous’ (Principles of Morals, Section IX, Part II:228).

196. Or what Quine describes as a ‘blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science’. See Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 20.

197. Does this, perhaps, explain the impulse behind Nietzsche’s so-called “positivistic period”?

198. ‘All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses’.

199. ‘I cast my net into [the poets’] sea and hoped to catch good fish; but I always pulled out an old god’s head. (Z.II.17).

200. Byron Manfred, I.i.10–12.

201. See final paragraph of this section.

202. klug: CW.9 and CW. Postscript; Klugheit: CW.9 and CW.10.

203. ‘Seen from close to and without love, Wagner’s life has, to recall an idea of Schopenhauer’s, much of the comedy about it, and markedly grotesque comedy at that’.

204. ‘Even among those who only pursue their own moral purification, among hermits and monks, there are to be found [the] savage and disease ridden, men hollowed out and consumed by failure’.

205. In his superlative essay on Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner, Furtwängler argues that ‘right to the end of his days Nietzsche remained the Wagnerian that he had been from the beginning. Nor could it be otherwise. Whatever else may evolve in the course of one’s life, one can do nothing to change one’s fundamental relationship to art, embedded, as it is, in the depths of our subconscious.’ (‘The Case of Wagner’ in Furtwängler on Music, ed. and trans. by Ronald Taylor (London: Scolar Press, 1991), p. 78.

206. A slightly, but significantly, modified version of the sorcerer’s lament was to appear three years later in the guise of a Dionysus-Dithyramb entitled ‘Lament of Ariadne’. For an inspired and profoundly religious account of this renaming, see Karl Reinhardt, ‘Nietzsche’s Lament of Ariadne’, trans. Gunther Heilbrunn, Interpretation 6 (October 1977), 204–24.

207. See chapters 1 and 2.

208. See opening sentence of this section.

209. Georges Goedert, ‘The Dionysian Theodicy,’ trans. Robert M Helm, in O’Flaherty, Sellner and Helm (eds.), Studies in Nietzsche and the Judæo-Christian Tradition, (London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 319–34.

210. Miller, p. 140.

211. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus: ‘swollen with ill-found booty, / From castled height Pride tumbles to the pit, / All footing lost’, ll. 873–881 (first antistrophe of the second stasimon).

212. Thomas Mann, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events’ in Solomon (ed.), p. 365.

213. Coiled around the eagle’s neck (Z.Prol.10), the serpent can be seen as a kind of amulet – the eagle, of course, having long been a protected species.

214. See footnote 201.