8
Hierarchical Anarchy
You higher men, what do you think? Am I a prophet? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams? A midnight bell?
A drop of dew? A whiff and scent of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it? Just now my world became perfect, midnight is also midday, –
Peace is also a joy, curses are also a blessing, night is also a sun, – be gone, or you will learn: a wise man is also a fool. (Z.IV.19.10)
Who is Zarathustra? It is a question that Zarathustra himself addresses to his higher men, and is, of course, a rhetorical one. For as his higher men serve constantly and painfully to remind him, he is all these things (and a good many others besides) and none. Indeed, in a Heraclitean world of ceaseless flux, the very question “Who is Zarathustra?” – with its implicit assumption of an immutable, durable, essential self – is essentially meaningless.287 Now wise man, now fool (Z.IV.19.10); now prophet and dreamer and midday sun, now madman and vigilant and midnight bell; now drunk and joyfully desirous of the eternal recurrence of life, now sober and cursed by the mere thought of the eternal return of woeful becoming; Zarathustra is the sum of his “parts”.
Zarathustra is indeed ‘a question mark, / a tired riddle’ (DD ‘Amid Birds of Prey’), but in the carnival of Part IV (chapters 11–19), the tired masks fall to reveal an exclamation mark hiding behind every question mark. In this carnival atmosphere of caricature and parody, of metaphor and meaning, of release and revelation, Zarathustra unburdens his soul, and the reader is afforded a comprehensive and interactive view of those multiple selves – previously seen only in isolation (Z.IV.2–9) – which jointly but not severally constitute the character called Zarathustra. Privy to this intensely personal drama of the soul,288 the reader does well to recall Nietzsche’s observations regarding the hierarchical politics of the soul: ‘whichever group of sensations is aroused, begins to speak, [and] issues commands most quickly within a soul, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values, and ultimately determines its table of goods. The values of a human being betray something of the construction of his soul and where it finds its conditions for life, its real need’ (BGE.268). The hierarchical anarchy raging in Zarathustra’s soul and the real and ineluctable needs thereby expressed will be closely scrutinized in the following three sections.
Last Rites: The Last Supper and The Ass Festival
The higher men’s univocal cry of distress that ‘greets’ Zarathustra upon his return to his cave is expressive of that group of sensations – ‘great longing, great disgust, great weariness, and […] the remnant of God’ (Z.IV.11) – commonly associated with despair. Even Zarathustra’s animals, innovative and indefatigable sick-nurses in the conscious realm, are impotent in this cavernous underworld of animal instincts and intractable emotions: ‘in the midst of this sad company stood Zarathustra’s eagle, ruffled and uneasy, for it had been expected to answer many questions to which its pride had no answer; the clever serpent, however, hung about its neck’ (ibid.). Despair, then, as the first and therefore the most will(-to-power)ful emotion to manifest itself within Zarathustra’s soul, determines both its hierarchy of values and its ‘table of goods’.
Accordingly, he who despairs and yet values life over death will place the highest value upon hope, and so it is that hope is the counter-affect which first begins to speak. Hope, of laughter, rest and security, is the first thing that Zarathustra in his welcoming speech offers his despairing higher men. Hope, of redemption from despair, is the expressed yearning of the king on the right: as specific representative of Zarathustra’s retrospectively validating nobility of the future and general spokesman for ‘all [those] who do not want to live unless they may learn to hope again – unless they may learn from you, O Zarathustra, the great hope’ (ibid.), the king on the right snatches greedily at Zarathustra’s wanton offer. And once again, hope, of the arrival of a ‘beautiful new race’ (ibid.) of Übermenschen, provokes Zarathustra to disabuse his crippled and crippling higher men of their redemptive hopes, and to muse instead over the coming of those ‘higher, stronger, more victorious, more joyful men’, to whom his ‘heritage and name belong’ (ibid.) and in whom his highest hope resides. Languishing under ‘drifting clouds […] damp melancholy [… and] howling autumn winds’ (Z.IV.16), that is, under the ‘morning rain-cloud’ (Z.IV.2) of Schopenhauerian pessimism,289 Zarathustra’s soul deems the countervailing properties of the ‘magnificent’ pine-tree – ‘tall, silent, hard, solitary, of the best and most flexible of woods, magnificent’ (Z.IV.11) – to represent its life-preserving values. With its ability to withstand and provide shelter from howling winds and weeping storms, the pine-tree is to the distressed higher men what übermenschliche ‘trees of life’ (ibid.) are to Zarathustra: a symbol of ‘highest hope’ (ibid.).
Finally, if life-threatening despair poses the greatest danger, and antidotal hope is thus accorded the highest valorization, then laughter, the most effective restorative known to man, together with the purveyors of laughter, will be transvalued as the greatest good. Indeed, the first thing that Zarathustra promises his melancholy guests is ‘someone to make you laugh again’ (ibid.), and it is with this promise in mind that Zarathustra places his hermits’ pets at his guests’ disposal. But given that his animals’ restorative powers had but a short time before proven impotent in face of the prouder and cleverer higher men, Zarathustra’s offer, while doubtless raising an ironic laugh or two, is little more than a bad joke.
But if in Part IV despair is the first emotion to be aroused, and hope, the one that begins to speak, Schopenhauerian pessimism is the emotion that ‘thrust[s itself] forward like one with no time to lose’ (Z.IV.12) and that issues commands most quickly within Zarathustra’s soul. Scornful of his host’s ‘idealist mendacity and softness of conscience’ (HH.II.Pref.3), of his utopian daydreams and patronizing drivel (while Zarathustra dreamed and the rest of his guests looked on in silent consternation, ‘the old soothsayer made signs with his hands and mien’ Z.IV.11), the ‘starving soothsayer’ demands wine. That insatiable pessimist, whom even Zarathustra’s animals despair of satisfying (normally such excellent suppliers of spiritual sustenance, especially honey, ‘they saw that all they had brought home during the day would not be enough to fill this one philosopher’ Z.IV.12), demands wine, for ‘that alone brings sudden recovery and improvised health!’ (ibid.).
Food, wine, and declamatory speeches – which, in the figurative language of Zarathustra, amount to the same thing – are, of course, the staple ingredients of any ‘Last Supper’ deserving of that name.290 It is the poor quality of the wine, however, that the soothsayer objects to and that leads him to suspect a miraculous turning of wine into water: ‘And though I hear water splashing here like speeches of wisdom, that is, abundantly and incessantly: I – want wine’ (ibid.). Like Zarathustra, the soothsayer wants vintage ‘wines of wisdom’ (Z.III.14), wines with the ‘gold-wine scent of ancient happiness’ (Z.IV.19.6). But, as we saw in ‘The Shadow’, one’s choice of wine, like one’s preferred “brand” of wisdom, is entirely a matter of taste, and the wine provided by the two kings – ‘a whole ass’s load’ (Z.IV.12, emphasis added) of admittedly very old wine, but which, given the kings’ predilection for visionary utopianism, will require laying down for at least another millennium or two – is unlikely to be to the soothsayer’s, or anybody else’s, taste. In the event, it is only Zarathustra – that ‘gloomy man’ and ‘dreamy fellow’ (ibid.) – who is intoxicated by what has long been his favourite tipple: the dreamy vision of ‘laughing lions’ (Z.IV.11) and laughing, dancing Übermenschen. Weary of sitting alone, ‘thirsty amidst drunken folk, and nightly lamenting: “Is it not more blessed to receive than to give?” ’ (Z.III.9), Zarathustra now sits alone, drunken amidst thirsty higher men who on this most significant of nights lament that it is apparently more blessed for the host to give than to receive. But appearances can be deceptive, and in the way that an animal or plant is host to a parasite, Zarathustra is a kind of sacrificial host: he gives to his disciples his body and his blood, but his body is broken and his blood is thin. Indeed, so liberal is Zarathustra with his sacrificial “wine of wisdom” (his spirited valedictory address involves no less than twenty toasts291 to his higher men – Z.IV. 13), and so sober do his parasitic disciples remain, that one cannot help but suspect fool-play, and perhaps recall his earlier remark that ‘it is strangest in a wise man if he is also clever and not an ass’ (Z.IV.12).
Zarathustra is, of course, clever, wise and an ass, but while the heady spirit of idealism keeps the ass in his cups, it is the wisdom of failure that dilutes Zarathustra’s speech ‘Of the Higher Man’ (Z.IV.13). Appealing to the divine in man, the asinine sage – with his brave and beautiful convictions (BGE.8) – calls for heroic courage, for antinomian individualism, and for Christ-like suffering (Z.IV.13.4–6 respectively). The truly wise man, on the other hand, addresses the beast in man and reminds him of his burden of natural and, in particular, genetic determinism (Z.IV.13.8 and 13.13 respectively): of the overweening will that must break upon the wheel of fate (Z.IV.13.10) and of the unclean and unsightly business of giving birth to one’s bastard child of proud and foolish wisdom (Z.IV.13.11 and 13.12). It remains, therefore, the beguiling task of the cunning, clever sage to offer if not a solution then at least a practicable response to the problem of the divided higher man: buffonic dissimulation (as prefigured in the parable of the ropedancer).
As everyone and no one, wise man and fool, the clever actor-sage reaches for his cap and bells and climbs the back stairway to the ‘gods’, for it is only from their distant perspective that one can ‘play and mock’ (Z.IV.13.14); it is only from the vantage point of ironic distance that one can laugh and dance beyond oneself (Z.IV.13.20) and beyond the tragic fate of all higher men being played out on the paltry stage below. From these godly heights, tragedy takes on the appearance of comedy, and just as Zarathustra had seen through the lion-skins worn by the famous philosophers (Z.II.8), so the ‘madcap’ (Z.IV.11) in the gallery, upon witnessing the histrionic heroics of the diminutive tragic actor below, will see more ass than lion. For although the asinine sage would like to weave his own destiny and play all the heroic parts, especially that of the lion, he must, like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nevertheless accept the part allotted to him by fate.
Taking their cue from Zarathustra, the higher men respond to their dramaturge’s high jinks and ‘theatrical rhetoric’ (CW.8) with playful mockery; and once again, a close look at the group of sensations aroused by Zarathustra’s speech will give a good indication as to the pecking order within the clever ass’s soul. Most instructive of all the responses, however, is the reaction of the speaker himself to his own windy discourse, significantly delivered ‘near the door of his cave’ (Z.IV.14.1) – the door of his cave symbolizing the boundary between the unconscious (cave292 and resident higher men) and conscious (Zarathustra’s eagle and serpent) realms. Finding his own hot air unbearably oppressive (an attack of ‘after-dinner nausea’ perhaps?)293 and having, in the true spirit of ‘do as I say not as I do’, hurled his ‘laugher’s crown’ (Z.IV.13.20) to his bemused higher men, Zarathustra escapes into the fresh air with his final words still on his lips: ‘I have canonized laughter; you higher men, learn – to laugh’ (ibid.). But no sooner is he free of his cramping higher men than he requires the reassurance of his sick-nurses that sterile repression is healthier than the stale air of the sick-room (Z.IV.14.1). But if repression is the better part of the convalescent’s valour, insurrection is sickness’s best form of counter-attack, and chief among the insurgents within Zarathustra’s soul is the insidious old sorcerer. As representative of that melancholy spirit (Z.IV.14.2) which afflicts all the higher men in common and seizes Zarathustra’s soul every evening, especially at midnight (see Z.Prol.7; Z.I.3; Z.I.8; Z.II.9; Z.II.19; Z.III.1; Z.III.9; Z.III.15.2–3; Z.IV.2; Z.IV.14.2; Z.IV.15; and Z.IV.19), the old sorcerer is the first one to speak and to issue commands within Zarathustra’s soul. (Not forgetting, however, that it is the soothsayer who holds the highest order of rank within Zarathustra’s soul. As the personification of romantic pessimism – the diagnosed disease of which the other higher men are but symptoms – and the one sent by intellectual conscience to warn Zarathustra of the higher men’s imminent resurgence [Z.IV.2], the soothsayer is the soul’s ambassador to its tyrannical “master”.)
As Zarathustra’s arch-enemy of old, the sorcerer is familiar with all his opponent’s lame attempts at subterfuge. He knows, for instance, that the ‘new names’ (Z.III.14) – “higher men” or “free spirits” or “the truthful” or “the penitents of the spirit” or “the unfettered” or “the great yearners” (Z.IV.14.2) – bestowed by Zarathustra upon his afflicted soul are but flattering euphemisms for ‘the great disgust’ (ibid.) from which his soul suffers; he knows moreover that he who calls himself “Zarathustra” is but a sad fool masquerading behind ‘the beautiful mask of a saint’ (ibid.); and above all, he knows – it is what his ‘Song of Melancholy’ (Z.IV.14.3) harps on – that the prophet Zarathustra is an impostor, a fool and a poet who hides his nihilistic desires ‘behind a thousand masks’ (ibid.). Like the Marseillaise, the sorcerer’s ‘Song of Melancholy’ is a rousing call to arms and one to which only the conscientious man of spirit offers any resistance (Z.IV.15).
What the “conscientious objector” objects to is ugly truths. Consumed by his fear (‘man’s original and fundamental sensation’ ibid.) of ‘the beast within’, of the violent affects that stalk ‘the forests, caves, steep mountains, and labyrinths’ (ibid.) of every human soul, the conscientious man of spirit seeks refuge and false security in the poetic truths purveyed by Zarathustra, and in the half-truths retailed by scientific positivism. Zarathustra also is apparently no lover of ‘naked’ (Z.IV. 14.2) truth: hearing the conscientious man of spirit (Z.IV.15) turn one truth on its head (he named Zarathustra the only ‘tower’ of certainty in a ‘tottering’ world of uncertainty) and another (the prevalence of primal and instinctual fear) back on its feet, Zarathustra expeditiously turns the latter truth back on its head by naming courage rather than fear as ‘the whole pre-history of man’ (ibid.), and creates a plinth for the former upturned truth by emphatically naming himself, Zarathustra, as courage personified.
Hearing this, the higher men ‘burst into a great peal of laughter’, this most fabulous of “truths” being by far the funniest thing they have heard all day. ‘Even the sorcerer’, who is momentarily upstaged by Zarathustra’s black-humoured buffoonery, ‘laughed and said prudently: “Well then! He is gone, my evil spirit!”’ (Z.IV.15). His compassionate good humour stems from the knowledge that Zarathustra’s drollery is but an antic disposition put on to alleviate the melancholy malaise, and that comedy will once again collapse into tragedy once evening falls – for ‘tragedies […] have to do with precisely the incurable, inevitable, [and] inescapable in the fate and character of man’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 23). He knows, moreover, that Zarathustra’s love-hate relationship with his higher men is symptomatic of a man at odds with himself, of a man who ‘has loved himself as he has despised himself (Z.IV.7) and who ‘loves his enemies […] but for that takes revenge – on his friends!’ (Z.IV.15).
The higher men applaud their chief’s magnanimity and Zarathustra, moved and humbled by yet another instance of his soul’s compassionate understanding (cf. Z.III.14), ‘went round and mischievously and lovingly shook hands with his friends, like one who has to make amends and apologize to everyone for something’ (Z.IV.15). But no sooner is Zarathustra reconciled with his higher men than he is overcome with the shame of his ‘indulgence and suffering’, the two weaknesses (in the private if not in the public sphere) which have always been his ‘greatest danger’ (Z.III.9); and were it not for his shadow’s plaintive cry of restraint, he would certainly have escaped once again into the reassuring realm of his proud and deceptive consciousness.
Bereft of all hope and direction, Zarathustra’s shadow is desperate to keep at bay ‘the bitter business of our howling and cries of distress’ (Z.IV.16.1), if only by maintaining the pretence of gaiety. To this end, he snatches up the sorcerer’s harp – the Æolian harp of Zarathustra’s soul which is played upon most often by the ‘damp air’ of evening melancholy (ibid.) – and over its strings breathes ‘good, clear, oriental air’ (ibid.). Ostensibly about a sexually repressed European man who lusts after oriental desert maidens that dance seductively about him, the harp’s shadow-song echoes Zarathustra’s earlier reflections upon covetous chastity (‘These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch sensuality looks enviously out of all they do’ Z.I.13), and it is this secret voluptuousness of the ascetic (alluded to earlier by the conscientious man of spirit – Z.IV.15)294 that gestures towards the song’s metaphoric meaning. It is a metaphor for the ‘saints of the desert’ of solitude and for ‘the beast within’ that grows there (Z.IV.13) – hence the song’s opening and closing refrain: ‘Deserts grow: woe to him who conceals deserts’ (Z.IV.16.2). In other words, the song tells the story of the ascetic hermit who lusts after life but lacks the strength to live it; of Zarathustra, who represses his importunate affects, but nevertheless recognizes them as constitutive of life – ‘a subterranean life of struggle’ (GM.I.12).295
The shadow’s ruse is a resounding success: the ‘bright, light air’ (ibid.) of the orient has dispersed the melancholy rain-clouds and filled Zarathustra’s cave with ‘noise and laughter’ (Z.IV.17.1). Even Zarathustra, who strongly suspects that their vulgar, derisory laughter is at his own expense, seizes upon this rare moment of merriment to declare, albeit to himself (self-deception is, after all, far sweeter than self-mockery), the day a victory: ‘he gives way, he flees, the Spirit of Gravity, my old arch-enemy! How well shall this day end that began so ill and so heavily’ (ibid.). And herein lies the key not only to Zarathustra’s character but to his raison d’être: cheerfulness at any cost (see GS.Pref.4). The spirit of gravity or melancholy must be vanquished: just as Nietzsche had invented for himself “free spirits” (to whom he dedicated his ‘melancholy-valiant’ book Human, All Too Human) and the ‘brave companion and phantom’ called Zarathustra (the eponymous hero of his other melancholy-valiant book) ‘so as to remain among good things while surrounded by bad (sickness, solitude, alienation, apathy, inertia)’ (HH.I.Pref.2);296 so Zarathustra invents the Übermensch and its precursory higher men.
But when all such utopian ploys fail him, Zarathustra alleviates his gloom with malicious self-parody and ironic laughter which together reach their acme297 in ‘the awakening’298 (Z.IV.17) Ass Festival. Zarathustra is, of course, the ass: it is he who bears the burden of his affective higher men and is their slave; his is the patience that stems from a heart that can never honestly deny its feelings; it is he who would rather praise and affirm his fictive world than openly deny life, for his is the ‘shrewdness that does not speak’ (ibid.); grey – connoting ambiguity, leadenness, and the ‘grey friars’ of the Franciscan order – is the ‘sober livery’299 (Leib-Farbe) in which he wraps his twilight virtue; redemption from despair is his ‘hidden wisdom’ (ibid.), hence the affirmation rather than the negation, laughter rather than melancholy, foolish illusion rather than tragic insight; his kingdom ‘beyond good and evil’ (ibid.) is no more than an innocent “conceit”; his indulgence and suffering indulges ‘beggars and kings’ and suffers these and other ‘little children’ to come unto him (ibid.); and finally, he will eat anything so long as it feeds his metaphysical hunger. In the (speculative) words of the conscientious man of spirit, Zarathustra has ‘become an ass through abundance and wisdom’ (Z.IV.18.1). And in partial acknowledgment of this, Zarathustra asks that all future celebrations in honour of the ass be commemorative of the tragic buffoon: ‘should you celebrate it again, this ass festival, do it for love of yourselves, do it also for love of me! And in remembrance of me!’ (Z.IV.18.3).300
In worshipping their asinine master, the higher men parody Zarathustra’s belief in ‘godly asininities’ (Z.IV.18.1), in laughing, dancing Übermenschen. The butt of their satire is Zarathustra’s piety: when called to account by their indignant host, the higher men defend their parodic piety with choice Zarathustran maxims especially chosen for their delightful ambiguity, for it is ‘the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide-and-seek beneath a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal, that leads and lures’ (CW.10) the higher men to Zarathustra in the first place. Appositely, it is the ugliest man (symbolizing Zarathustra’s bad conscience) who sums up the general attitude of the higher men towards their slavish god: ‘O Zarathustra, you obscure man […] you dangerous saint, you are a rogue’ (ibid.). And it is with characteristic roguery that Zarathustra responds to his bad conscience; for if the roguish higher men had, like Hamlet, thought to catch the bad conscience of their “king” with their satire play, that much greater rogue, Zarathustra, thwarts their plans by feigning naïveté and by treating their play as an innocent piece of buffoonery (Z.IV.18.2–3).
Bad conscience is janus-faced – for all ugly things love to disguise themselves (Z.IV.11) – and just as Zarathustra dissembles so as to conceal his painfully ‘awakening’ self-consciousness, so his ugliest man, in a staggering act of loyalty and compassion, implores his fellow higher men, ‘[f]or Zarathustra’s sake’, to feign ‘transformation and recovery’ by joining with him in a joyful (if unconvincing) affirmation of life’s eternal recurrence (Z.IV.19.1). This act of consecration represents the apotheosis of the prophet Zarathustra. But at the moment of canonization, the soul of the ‘dangerous saint’ departs – ‘his soul retreated and fled before him and was in remote distances’ (Z.IV.19.2) – leaving only the idol. This recalls the incident of Zarathustra’s flying shadow, seen by the sailors in Part II to be heading towards the volcano (Z.II.18), and the possibly related myth of Empedocles. Neither myth offers an explanation of its hero’s disappearance, only speculation. Did Empedocles throw himself into the crater of Etna in the hope that his sudden disappearance might make the people believe that he was a god,301 or was it an act of suicidal despair? Did Zarathustra, given his inability to teach by example (‘Zarathustra speaks to his pupils differently – than to himself Z.II.20), also feel that a sign, like the superlative sign of the cross (BGE.46), would be more potent and more persuasive than a fallible and all too often failed exemplar, or did he just lose faith altogether in his calling? In both myths, however, demon-despair seems the likelier motive for absence, and while the faithful naturally inclined towards the mystery of absence as divine presence (‘I would rather believe that Zarathustra had carried off the Devil’ Z.II.18), the rest of the people were closer to the mark when they opined that ‘the Devil had carried off Zarathustra’ (ibid.). For despite Zarathustra’s resolution to ‘keep [his shadow] under stricter control – otherwise it will ruin my reputation’ (ibid.), the flight of his soul towards the end of Part IV – suspended there ‘between two seas’302 (Z.IV.19.2): the turbulent inner sea of his all too human past (Z.IV.1) and the smooth, all too distant sea of ‘halcyon self-sufficiency’ (BGE.224) and übermenschliche perfection – would seem to suggest abdication following upon the death of hope.
Death: The Nightwanderer’s Song303
In the penultimate chapter of Zarathustra, the suicidal despair of its hero is dramatized in the stage(d)-death of the prophet. Like the death-throes of so many tragic heroes and heroines, Zarathustra’s is a long, drawn-out, theatrical affair, a confessional soliloquy typically aware of its audience. ‘I would rather die, die, than tell you what my midnight heart is now thinking’ (Z.IV.19.4), confesses Zarathustra, whilst the dramatic death knell tolling the midnight hour resonates his secret despair.304 ‘The usual romantic finale is sounded – break, breakdown, return and collapse before an old faith, before the old god’ (AS.7). With each mournful cadence, the ‘old, heavy, heavy booming bell’ (Z.II.15.2) tolls the tragic fate
Of all the lost adventurers my peers, –
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.305
Like the quixotic knights of old, Zarathustra’s bold and impatient heart, in its ‘unconditional search for the true’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 13), suffers shipwreck on the sea of life. His ‘untamed wisdom’ (Z.II.8) had hoped to ravish and tame wanton and coquettish life (Z.III.15.1), but life does not conform to the conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction: inconstancy will not be wed to constancy, nor realism to idealism. Were it not for his wild wisdom, Zarathustra might have consummated his torrid affair with life; but just as spiritual cares have a tendency to neglect the needs of the body, so visionary idealism has a tendency to neglect the needs of the age.
The prophet is lost to his age because of his visionary absorption:306 ‘The Übermensch lies close to my heart, he is my first and only concern – and not man: not the neighbour, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best’ (Z.IV.13.3). But to sacrifice Mensch to the Übermensch and a palpable present to an implausible future is nihilism, while destruction without creation and judgment without mercy is vengeful nihilism. With his divining-rod of ressentiment, Zarathustra metes out ‘punishment and justice’ (Z.II.7), but he who seeks revenge upon life will never be able to ‘will it thus!’ (Z.II.20). One must be reconciled with life before one can will its eternal recurrence, for while there are ‘higher things beyond reconciliation’ (ibid.), reconciliation remains the means to these higher ends; but in loving the furthest more than the nearest and the ideal better than the best, Zarathustra has betrayed life and so lost her. In overreaching man he has failed to overcome man; unable to overcome his time and the “signs” of his time within himself, Zarathustra has willed himself beyond time. Consequently, now that he must part with life and leave the world and his proselytizing work undone, Zarathustra bewails his loss of time: ‘Woe is me! Where has time gone? Did I not sink into deep wells? […] Now I am dead. It is gone’ (Z.IV.19.4).
At the hour of spiritual death, the soothsayer’s pessimistic prophecy – ‘In vain was all our work, our wine has become poison’ (Z.II.19) – weighs heavy upon the prophet’s heart. Cranking up the stage-effects, Zarathustra dramatizes the confession of failure that his heart cannot utter: the moon (Z.IV.19.4), symbolizing cyclic time;307 the spider (ibid.), symbolizing destiny;308 and the lugubrious ‘midnight-bell’ (Z.IV.19.3), tolling the death of hope; together proclaim the ‘eternal “too late″’ of failed higher men (BGE.269). And as the spider spins its web of destiny around Zarathustra, the wise sage might well ponder the paradox of free will and determinism: To what extent is self-determination an impossible ideal? Who, indeed, can master his own predetermined world and in so doing will it thus eternally (Z.IV.19.4)? To the song of life’s eternal recurrence (Z.III.15.3), Zarathustra had taught his soul to ‘dance upon [and] dance across’ (Z.III.12.2) the graves of his youth (Z.II.11), ‘but a leg is not a wing’ (Z.IV.19.5) nor a dirge a gavotte. And whereas in ‘the Funeral Song’ of Part II Zarathustra still cherished the hope that his ‘will’ to self-overcoming would destroy the graves of his youthful dreams and drag his soul away from its pious graveyard vigil (Z.II.11), now, at the hour of his death, such sweet wines of “wisdom” taste like bitter dregs to his jaded palate (Z.IV.19.5). Broken by the greater will to power of his irrepressible higher men, Zarathustra’s ‘will’ finally submits to the victory of the past and the present, and to history’s inevitable determination of the future. Having failed to destroy the graves of his youth and thereby effect his own resurrection (Z.II.11), he now yields to his higher men’s will to ‘redeem the graves [and] awaken the corpses!’ (Z.IV.19.5).
But even as Zarathustra yields to the demands of his higher men and, by implication, of authenticity, the ‘worm’ of bad conscience, grown fat on the ascetic ideal, continues to ‘burrow’ in his heart (ibid.). Bad conscience is ‘the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena’ (GM.II.18), and if Zarathustra feels compunction and remorse because a practicable moral injunction – ‘Do not ask anything improbable of yourselves’ (Z.IV.13.13) – has (not surprisingly) triumphed over an impossible moral ideal – ‘Man is something that should be overcome’ (Z.Prol.3) – this is due to ‘a very high degree of vanity’ instinct in the voluptuous ascetic: ‘man experiences a veritable voluptuousness in violating himself by means of excessive demands and in then deifying this tyrannical imperious something in his soul’ (HH.I.137). This vanity is, in turn, to be found in the mother of bad conscience: intellectual conscience. Out of the tenacious black roots of vanity intellectual conscience blossoms: ‘That we are afraid of our own thoughts, concepts, words, but that we also honour ourselves in them and involuntarily attribute to them the power to applaud, scorn, praise and rebuke us, that we thus traffic with them as with free intelligent persons, with independent powers, as equals with equals’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 26), explains why Zarathustra would rather traffic with ‘higher, stronger, more victorious, more joyful men’ than with his so-called higher men (Z.IV.11). Because vanity dislikes the distorted reflection of a fool’s mirror, Zarathustra would rather be anybody but himself (Z.IV.19.9).
‘Joy is deeper than heart’s agony’ (Z.IV.19.8) and even the most abysmal Dionysian despair can be transfigured by the beauty of Apollonian illusion. In the dead of the deadliest night of the soul, the ‘artist of decadence’ (CW.5) wills ‘the lie of the grand style’ (CW.1) with which to usher out his grand ‘counterfeit[er] of transcendence and the beyond’ (CW. Postscript): Zarathustra exits to the sound of the poet’s ‘sweet lyre’ (Z.IV.19.6), an instrument closely related to the penitent’s melancholy harp. Zarathustra would rather the world remember him as a divine prophet: ‘rich, solitary, a treasure pit, a gold chamber’ (Z.IV.19.7), than as a tragic buffoon: ‘a midnight lyre, a croaking bell that no one understands but which must speak’ because that is the only way it knows of dispelling its midnight thoughts and nightmare visions (Z.IV.19.8).309 Above all, though, Zarathustra wants to live to see his divine prophecy come to pass, because ‘all that is unripe […] all that suffers wants to live that it may grow ripe and lusty and desirous / desirous for the far, the higher, the brighter. “I want heirs”, thus speaks all that suffers, “I want children, I do not want myself”’ (Z.IV.19.9). And as the reader will recall, it was the prophet who, just before ‘The Last Supper’, begged his higher men – as a token of their love and a sort of quid pro quo – to humour him with talk of his ‘children’.310 News of the impending arrival of this ‘beautiful new race’ of Übermenschen – his ‘highest hope’ – is the succulent and strengthening Viaticum requested by the prophet (Z.IV.11) in return for the so-called ‘succulent and strengthening discourse’ (Z.IV.17.1) which he will lavish, albeit in vain, on his lovingly indulgent disciples.
As is the case with most last confessions, however, hope has the final word. But even in his last and (given the frankness of his confession) finest hour, the prophet has the ‘good taste’ (see BGE.5) to warn his disciples of his final act of perfidy: a confession of faith in the ideal and thus a breach of good faith. Bidding his higher men hence, ‘or you will learn: a wise man is also a fool’ (Z.IV.19.10), the prophetic fool expediently offers up his final libation to joyful life and its eternal recurrence. With this Pascalian wager, made in the unthinkable event of life’s eternal recurrence, this walking shadow and poor player, having strutted and fretted his last hour upon the stage, finally takes his leave.
Resurrection: The Sign
On the morning after this dark night of the soul, Zarathustra ‘sprang up from his bed, girded his loins, and emerged from his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerges from behind dark mountains’ (Z.IV.20). With the passing of the midnight hour and the return of a new dawn, the soul is resurrected311 and hope springs eternal. Rising with the dawn, and with the renewed optimism vouchsafed to him by his proud and prudent consciousness (‘My animals are awake, for I am awake’ Z.IV.20), Zarathustra is struck once again (see Z.Prol.1) by his affinity with the sun. Pondering thus the divine mystery of natural supernaturalism, he challenges once more the supremacy of the Transcendent in an attempt to naturalize the supernatural: ‘Great star […] what would all your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine’ (Z.IV.20).312 Whatever the sun is taken to represent, whether intuitive knowledge, enlightenment, or the supreme cosmic power,313 the defiant tone of Zarathustra’s address is unmistakable.
Absent from this act of hubris (the starting point of many a tragedy, including Zarathustra), when the soul ‘shudder[s] with godlike desires’ (Z.II.13), are Zarathustra’s higher men, and in their absence resides ‘the secret of the soul: only when the hero has left the soul does there approach it in dreams – the superhero’ (ibid.). For the hero, however great, is still possessed of a ‘violent will’ (ibid.), and it is precisely this violent will to power that spurs the struggling heroic soul on to inglorious acts of heroism: the soothsayer to absolute renunciation, the two kings to self-imposed exile, the conscientious man of spirit to a dogged pursuit of “knowledge”, the sorcerer to a pretence of greatness, the last pope to criticism of his God, the ugliest man to avenge himself on the witness, the voluntary beggar to throw away great riches, and the shadow to follow Zarathustra into forbidden and forbidding lands. Fundamentally reactive, these heroic acts lack the grace and beauty (ibid.) of those spontaneous übermenschliche deeds which, we are told, overflow from a soul that is naturally free from all antagonistic compulsion. The heroic human being is at bottom a man of ressentiment, a man ‘whose strength lies in forgetting himself (UM.III.4); and one recalls how Zarathustra’s two attempted acts of heroism in Part III fail as a result of self-recollection. In ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’, Zarathustra pits his affirmative spirit against his spirit of gravity in an endurance test involving the thought of eternal recurrence; but while his shrewd spirit of gravity endures by means of subtle misconstruction, his affirmative spirit falters on his ‘own thoughts and ulterior motives (Hintergedanken)’ (Z.III.2.2).314 Similarly, in ‘The Convalescent’, Zarathustra rashly summons up this most abysmal of thoughts only to reel back in horror and disgust at the sight of it (Z.III.13).
Zarathustra is wont to forget himself when intellectual conscience inspires vanity and moral idealism or when his proud and clever animals occupy the affective space recently vacated by his higher men. Accordingly, now that his higher men are asleep and thus appear to have ‘left’ his soul, Zarathustra can once again look optimistically towards his proselytizing ‘work’ (Werk)315 and his teaching of the superheroic: of the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence of all things, and the apocalyptic noontide. When, however, Zarathustra does think of himself (particularly his higher men) and of the Herculean task that lies ahead of him, ‘he measures the distance between himself and his lofty goal and seems to see behind and beneath him only an insignificant heap of dross’ (UM.III.4). But this resentment towards the past is, as Zarathustra knows, simply the will to power of the spirit of revenge, and the distance which Zarathustra would have us believe exists between himself and his higher men is merely an imagined distance born out of self-denial rather than self-transcendence, out of affinity rather than difference: ‘It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and identity’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 251).
Before the prophet can turn to his work, he must first await the sign that the rightful recipients of his teaching are approaching, for (unlike Schopenhauer) Zarathustra does not have ‘the courage to be himself […] to stand alone and not first wait on heralds and higher signs’ (UM.III.5). As it is written, such visionary signs only appear in epiphanic dreams, and so it happens with Zarathustra. The sign that his hour has come, the hour of his “divine” descent – the sign, that is, of ‘the laughing lion with the flock of doves’ (Z.III.12.1).316 – comes to Zarathustra in a trance-like state which ‘lasted a long time, or a short time: for properly speaking, there is no time on earth for such things’ (Z.IV.20). The laughing lion represents the imaginary light-hearted free spirit who has freed himself from the sacrificial suffering and heavy-hearted alienation of the penitential “free” spirit in the same way that the ‘burden-bearing and reverential spirit’ of the camel metamorphoses into the self-determining spirit of the lion (Z.I.1). This spiritual transformation of one who has liberated himself from the ‘morality of custom’ (GM.II.2) and the decadence of modernity, but not without a ‘bad conscience for the extraordinary in his task [of self-determination]’ (GS.186); this transformation into one who is not only proudly aware of ‘the extraordinary privilege of responsibility [to himself]’ (GM.II.2), but who joyfully undertakes to make instinctual such powers of self-determination, is symbolized by the flock of doves. For until Zarathustra can exemplify his teaching, he is destined to remain either unheard or misunderstood.
With the awakening of the higher men and their appearance at the door of Zarathustra’s cave, however, the gay laughter of the lion suddenly turns into a furious roaring. In other (non-metaphoric) words, as Zarathustra’s decadent character(istic)s begin to filter back into consciousness, the promise of future emancipation, of genuine free will (in Nietzsche’s sense of spontaneous self-mastery – see GM.II.2), appears less like self-realization than self-delusion.317 Far from experiencing the ‘immense and proud composure’ of self-mastery (BGE.284), Zarathustra feels hostility towards his higher men, ‘hostility towards those influences, habits, laws, institutions in which he cannot recognize his goal’ (UM.III.6). As the mystical moment of easy affirmation gives way to negation and ressentiment, the spell is broken and the vision vanishes. Zarathustra returns to his soulful solitude and to the realization that as long as he feels pity (Mit-leid) for, and so ‘suffers with’, his higher men (contra EH ‘Why I am so wise’ 8),318 he will never succeed in liberating himself from himself for the creation of a new self. This recognition of failure and tragic destiny is the hellish despair out of which Zarathustra repeatedly constructs his redemptive heaven (see GM.III.10).
‘The Sign’ ends with the same powerful image with which it began: ‘[Zarathustra] left his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains’. This image is a sign to the reader: a sign that ‘A hundred times he threw himself back into life with short-breathed hope and put all spectres behind him. But that he almost always did so with immoderation, was a sign (Anzeichen) that he believed neither deeply nor firmly in this hope but was only intoxicating himself with it’ (UM.IV.3). Above all, it is a sign that Zarathustra is one of those ‘ambitious artists who like to pose as ascetics and priests, but who are at bottom only tragic buffoons’ (GM.III.26).
287. To remark that Zarathustra ‘takes on so many forms, it seems nearly impossible to say what he really is “in himself’” (Leonard Robbins, ‘Zarathustra and the Magician or, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: Some Difficulties in the Concept of the Overman’, Man and World 9 [June 1976] p. 180) is simply to beg the question.
288. See Introduction (p. 4) where allusion is made to the private publication and allegorical masking of Part IV.
289. It is no coincidence that it is the pessimistic soothsayer who first directs Zarathustra’s attention to the howling cries of distress rising from the abysmal depths of his manifold soul.
290. On the basis of his view that ‘Nietzsche’s comic correction of the one-sided spirituality of Christian parables reaches its peak in Zarathustra’s parody of the Last Supper’, Cantor urges a literal reading of this section (see Paul Cantor, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: The Use and Abuse of Metaphor’, in David S Miall (ed.), Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives, [Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982], p. 83). But, aside from the sheer unexpectedness (noted by Cantor) of Zarathustra’s purported shift from a figurative mode of speech to a literal one, Cantor’s literal interpretation is, on his own earlier admission, necessarily speculative: ‘What is distinctive […] about Nietzsche’s style is that one is never quite sure whether to take his language literally or metaphorically […] Nietzsche deliberately blurs the distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of his terms. By allowing his language to hover between the literal and figurative, he keeps his readers off-balance, and prevents them from ever comfortably settling into any dogmatic interpretation of his thought’ (p. 81).
291. Zarathustra’s speech entitled ‘Of the Higher Man’ is divided into 20 sections.
292. In ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Nietzsche speaks of ‘the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart’ (UM.III.3).
293. This is a deliberate misappropriation of BGE.282.
294. ‘… those who with their praise of chastity secretly invite voluptuousness!’
295. For a radically different reading of the shadow’s song see C A Miller, ‘Nietzsche’s “Daughters of the Desert”: A Reconsideration’, Nietzsche-Studien 2 (1973), 157–195.
296. Cf. ‘Set good little perfect things around you, you higher men! Things whose golden ripeness heals the heart. Perfect things teach hope’ (Z.IV.13.15).
297. The subsidiary and archaic meaning of ‘acme’ is of particular relevance here: ‘the crisis of a disease’ (SOED).
298. In the sense of ‘unconsciousness raising’.
299. Cf. ‘Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray / Had in her sober Liverie all things clad’, Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, ll. 598–9.
300. Cf. Luke 22.19.
301. Sayffert, p. 212.
302. This phrase is mysteriously absent from Hollingdale’s translation.
303. ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’. ‘Nachtwandler’ also means ‘sleepwalker’, but the song sung by Zarathustra is about sleeplessness and the terrible clarity of one’s midnight-thoughts and, as it were, midnight-wanderings. In ‘The Night-Wanderer’s Song’ the stress falls heavily on ‘night’ and what it stands for: ‘pre-natal darkness preceding rebirth or initiation and illumination, but […] also chaos; death; madness; disintegration’ (Cooper, p. 112). For the nocturnal Zarathustra, night signifies all these things.
304. This desire for secrecy – ‘a tendency which is then dualistically reversed in terms of a habit of confession’ – is, according to Miller, a typical sign of ‘romantic duality’ (p. 46).
305. Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, ll. 195–198.
306. See Kierkegaard’s distinction between the visionary prophet who ‘goes hand in hand with his age, and from this standpoint envisages that which shall come’, and the ironist who ‘has advanced beyond the reach of his age and opened a front against it’ (p. 278).
307. ‘Whether male or female the moon is universally symbolic of the rhythm of cyclic time; universal becoming’ (Cooper, p. 106).
308. ‘The Great Mother, in her terrible aspect as weaver of destiny, is sometimes depicted as a huge spider. All moon goddesses are spinners and weavers of Fate’ (Ibid., p. 156).
309. Preaching is to Zarathustra what writing is to his author, namely, an involuntary cathartic exercise: ‘A: […] I am annoyed by or ashamed of my writing; writing for me is a necessity – to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me. B: But why, then, do you write? – A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: I have hitherto found no other way of getting rid of my thoughts. – B: And why do you want to get rid of them? – A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I must. – B: Enough! Enough!’
310. ‘As a man calls for wine before he fights, / I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, / Ere fitly I could hope to play my part’. Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, ll. 86–88.
311. This resurrection of Zarathustra’s soul is not to be confused with White’s understanding of the same (pp. 63–104). In a chapter entitled ‘The Resurrection of Zarathustra’s Soul’, White contends: (a) that what is affirmed in the eternal recurrence ‘is not a circular course of history, not a cosmic repetition, but rather the resurrection of the Nietzschean soul […] here and now repeatedly, a re-creation of the soul and by the soul, on an earth that has regained the “innocence of becoming″’ (p. 73); (b) that Nietzsche’s affirmative teachings are to be found in Zarathustra’s doctrine of eternal recurrence; and (c) that the latter doctrine ‘emerges most fully […] within the sections recounting Zarathustra’s interactions with his soul’ (p. 74). While agreeing with (b), I would counter (a) with the observation that, even if one finds White’s redescription of eternal recurrence to be acceptable (which I do not – see NB), Zarathustra cannot re-create his soul by his soul, simply because the time when the earth will have regained the “innocence of becoming” lies in a distant and utopian future; and (c) by noting that the most explicit conversation (interaction) which Zarathustra has with his soul (Z.III.14) is not only unremittingly negative, but gestures towards the “eternal recurrence” of herd values within Zarathustra’s unregenerate soul – a form of eternal recurrence quite distinct from Nietzsche’s doctrine but clearly dramatized in Part IV of Zarathustra.
NB. White’s interpretation of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, so clearly at variance with the doctrine as presented in Nietzsche’s works (first, by Nietzsche in GS.341 [and later corroborated in EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 3: ‘the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things’]; then, by Zarathustra in Z.III.2; and finally, by Zarathustra’s animals in Z.III.13), rests on his belief that ‘eternal recurrence’ may have more than one meaning. Distracted by this ‘multivocity’ (p. 159, note to p. 71), White is unable to recognize a clear consonance, both literal and conceptual, between the ‘moment’, the ‘spider’, and the ‘moonlight’ in GS.341 and the gateway ‘Moment’, the ‘spider’, and the ‘moonlight’ in Z.III.2, and so remains baffled by the ‘vision’ and the ‘riddle’ of Z.III.2. He is further led to reject any correspondence between the two preceding descriptions of eternal recurrence and the (albeit sanitized) version set forth in Z.III.13 on the grounds that Zarathustra’s animals, while clearly his animals, ‘are also animals’ (p. 92) – a somewhat naïve statement given Zarathustra’s love of symbols.
312. These words echo the following lines from Byron’s Manfred: ‘Thou material God! / And representative of the Unknown – / Who chose thee for his shadow! Thou chief star! […] Our inborn spirits have a tint of thee’ (III.ii.14–22), and further recall the so-called blasphemies of the Christian mystics, eg. Gott lebt nicht ohne mich (1.8) from Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinischer Wandersmann: ‘I know that God cannot live without me / If I become nothing he must of necessity give up the ghost’ (Ich weiß daß ohne mich GOtt nicht ein Nun kan leben / Werd’ ich zu nichts Er muß von Noth den Geist aufgeben).
313. Cooper, p. 162
314. Hintergedanke is translated as ‘ulterior motive’ (The Collins German Dictionary). This definition is far stronger and far more revealing about Zarathustra’s state of mind than Hollingdale’s ‘reservations’.
315. In Nietzsche’s Case (pp. 173–88 and note 2 on pp. 273–4), much is made of Nietzsche’s use of the word Werk as opposed to Arbeit in ‘The Sign’. It is argued that, by conflating Nietzsche and Zarathustra (a conflation which is deemed to be justified by Nietzsche’s ‘remarkable’ use of the German word Werk for ‘work’), Zarathustra’s ‘Werk’ can be taken to refer to Nietzsche’s literary work. This is certainly plausible, but to propose further that Zarathustra’s ‘Werk’ be regarded as his literary work, is to violate the fictional unity of Zarathustra’s character. Zarathustra is pre-eminently a fictional work and any analysis of its fictive hero must primarily be undertaken within these narrative parameters. According to these latter, Zarathustra appears as a prophet whose pedagogic role is, as far as the reader can tell, a peripatetic and oral one; at no point in the story does Zarathustra engage in literary production of any kind. And while it might be argued that Nietzsche often lets the Zarathustran mask slip, he is never so bad a poet as to let it slip altogether.
316. The dove traditionally symbolizes the soul and/or its transmutation (Cooper, p. 54), and in the light of Zarathustra’s belief in the multiplicity of the soul it is fitting that ‘the sign’ of transmutation which appears to him is not of a single dove but of a flock of doves.
317. On the strength of Bakhtin’s (Rabelais and His World) observation that the parodic prophecy was a regular part of carnival festivity, Shapiro decrees that: ‘Rather than looking for mysteries in Zarathustra’s signs we should see them as parodically countering the prophecy of nihilism’ (p. 122, emphasis added). I would argue, however, that Zarathustra’s prophetic ‘sign’ is a sign of profound inner need which could more plausibly be seen as exemplifying the nihilistic prophecy; exemplifying, that is, the ‘counterfeiting of transcendence and the beyond’ (CW. Postscript).
318. Fink (p. 118) makes the same point.