If Nietzsche was right that art is what makes life bearable and that art deliberately contradicts reality, Zarathustra was certainly the product of Nietzsche's own frantic attempt to find personal survival. His abortive love-relationship with Lou Salomé left him depressed, almost suicidal. Nietzsche wrote the entire Part 1 in only a few days, in January 1883. Nevertheless, depression continued and was only fed by the news of Wagner's death in Venice. (See the discussion of Lou Salome to see how this grew out of Nietzsche's experiences.)
Zarathustra is a collection of prophetic teachings in poetic form. Since Christ died too early to achieve personal maturity or to create a mature religious movement, Nietzsche intentionally selected Zoroaster as an older, more mature, and worldly prophet, someone from whom we might prosper by following. (Z. Part 1, "On Free Death" (73)) Nietzsche himself needed a sage to follow. Schopenhauer had been abandoned in favor of Wagner and Wagner had been lost. Zarathustra became an ideal, a sage against whom Nietzsche could try himself.
In his retrospective book, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says of Zarathustra, "The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, "6000 feet beyond man and time."" (my emphasis) He later refers to the creative act, "Zarathustra himself as a type . . . he overtook me." Finally, he writes, "The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an un-heard of degree, to everything that one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent --- Zarathustra is a dancer --- how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the "most abysmal idea," nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence --- but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, "the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen." --- "Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes." --- But this is the concept of Dionysus once again." (EH (Kaufmann edition), 295-306) The reference to Dionysus is telling; in Nietzsche's next book, Beyond Good and Evil, in a chapter entitled "What Is Noble," Nietzsche wrote, "Of whom am I speaking to you? Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not even told you his name? . . . [It is] no less a one than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one and tempter god to whom I once offered, as you know, in all secrecy and reverence, my first-born [BT] --- as the last, it seems to me, who offered him a sacrifice: for I have found no one who understood what I was doing then." (BGE, 235) [Note: Kaufmann notes that the Dionysus of this reference has become something quite different to Nietzsche from the Dionysus of frenzy and intoxication of BT.]
There can be little doubt that the concept of the eternal recurrence of the same was regarded by Nietzsche as one of his most powerful creations. But did he ever express it exactly? And can we know exactly what it meant to him? Debates rage onward. Bernd Magnus, a local (UCR) Nietzsche scholar, has called the eternal recurrence "Nietzsche's Existential Imperative." Note even the dramatically measured way in which Nietzsche introduced the concept. At the end of Part 2, the concept is brought forward in "The Stillest Hour' but not mentioned by name; instead, it is brought forward with an atmosphere of foreboding. In the voice of his "awesome mistress" Zarathustra hears, "You know it, Zarathustra, but you do not say it!" And Zarathustra answers, "Yes, I know it, but I do not want to say it!" Indeed, the revelation of this idea becomes the reason for Zarathustra's retreat to his cave. "O Zarathustra, your fruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit."
While Part 2 was completed in June 1883, Part 3 waited until November of that year. However, the eternal recurrence is clearly the object of the whole piece. In the very first section, "The Wanderer," Zarathustra observes, "I stand before my final peak now and before that which has been saved up for me the longest. [Indeed, approximately two years] Alas, now I must face my hardest path!" Nor is Nietzsche long in coming to the point. In the very next section, "On the Vision and the Riddle" (#2), Nietzsche says, "Behold this gateway . . . it has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end." ". . . whatever can walk --- in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. . . must we not eternally return?" Immediately after this image, Nietzsche offers the riddle of the young shepherd into whose mouth a huge black snake has crawled and lodged itself. Zarathustra, seeing the shepherd's distress, cries out, "Bite its head off!" And the shepherd's laughter is radiant and inhuman.
So what does all of this mean? Here, and elsewhere in Part 3, Nietzsche makes it clear that eternal recurrence is no joy; it is, in fact, the source of greatest nausea. The eternal contradiction to which the gateway is the focal point is merely one of tense --- that which will be versus that which has been. The content is all the same. How can we face this? Doesn't the idea choke us in a horrible way? Nietzsche's resolution, it seems clear, is to assert ourselves with a positive force, to bite off its head. There seem to be two obvious points --- the great nausea and the necessity of strong personal action.
While Nietzsche clearly saw the eternal recurrence as the new focus of his thinking, the majority of Zarathustra is devoted to a wide variety of issues and carries on directly from his preceding work, The Gay Science. Indeed, Zarathustra's Prologue repeats the last aphorism of The Gay Science; and when Zarathustra comes down from his mountain to teach among men, it is the death of god, from The Gay Science, that he wants to teach. Zarathustra's experience among men is, of course, indicative of Nietzsche's own frustrations and mirrors the book's subtitle, "A Book for All and None," that is, of universal importance but with little likelihood of an understanding readership. As the Prologue indicates, not only are men unprepared to fathom Nietzsche's message but it is genuinely dangerous to continue to teach among them. Part 4, while completed in January 1884, was not published for almost a decade, it was considered so blasphemous. At the same time, Part 4 departed from the style of the previous parts -- the style of a sage's pronouncements -- and ventured off into a humorous style of storytelling.
The message that god is dead and, indeed, that we have killed god does not differ from its earlier introduction; however, it does lead to a new area of thinking that can be called the "revaluation of all values." Part 1, #15, "On the Thousand and One Goals," is essential to the introduction of this idea. Nietzsche continues his anthropological perspective in viewing humans themselves as the creators of all values. "Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. . . Only man placed values in things to preserve himself." The message is clearly that the loss of values that had been hung upon the image of god is clearly correctable within the sphere of human "revaluation." But Nietzsche also suggests that the laying down of values, historically, comes out of a people's "will to power" and that uncovering a people's values is a path to discovering their "self overcomings." "A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power."
Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, introduced here, is often misunderstood by confusion with other comments regarding noblemen, warriors, and violence. It is important, in this context, to remember that it is always used in connection with the idea of self overcoming and that it always occurs within the life of the mind. Thus, nobility and warlike spirit (temperament, etc.) are always elevated in connection with one's exercise of personal discipline. When we look deeply into ourselves, we must be hard and we must be demanding; furthermore, we should look for that in which we are weak (in which we take the easy paths) and overcome those by demanding more. Life is not merely to be "survived;" we cannot survive life anyway. Hence, life is to be lived with high demands and expectations!
It is for this purpose that Nietzsche has already set the stage in Part 1, #1, "On the Three Metamorphoses." "The spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child." The camel has great strength and endurance. It fills itself up with water and makes way out across the desert, for days on end. Like the camel, the spirit must venture into its own desert. The lion, on the other hand, has great courage and will. We live under the command "Thou shalt;" and it takes the courage of the lion to wrestle freedom away from this. "The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to duty --- for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To assume the right to new values --- that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much." But for the actual creation of new values, the child is needed. "The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes." For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred "Yes" is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world."
To what are this self overcoming and this will to power aimed, one might ask. Nietzsche has also framed this concept in his image of the "übermensch," or "overman." In this vision, man is a temporary creature, a "crossing over." Just as an individual must overcome himself, man himself must be overcome. The overman is not man as we know him; it is a new being, perhaps, unthinkably beyond us and living with new values in the spirit of Yes-saying to life.
Most of Zarathustra is literature, of course, a fictional portrayal of an ideal teacher. Zarathustra is not himself the achievement of the overman, but he is on his way and his life demonstrates the seriousness and the scope of the battle before us. Zarathustra, like Nietzsche, has no friends among men; he has just his animals, especially his eagle and his snake. Much of what he achieves must be hammered out in isolation. He is a climber of mountainous heights; yet he understands the need to go down into the deepest places (perhaps in anticipation of later psychoanalytic ideas). Zarathustra is worldly in his perception and understanding of life and world, but he is not corrupted by the world. There is an ever-present contrast with Christ who, as Nietzsche observes, died too early, before he had matured and achieved any real wisdom about man and the world. This contrast, treading thin on the blasphemous, ends in Part 4 with a Zarathustrian "last supper" and crowning of an ass as god.
Nietzsche never saw Zarathustra composed as we do in a single work; he only saw the first three parts published separately as they emerged from his pen. Yet, in this literary outpouring, he had brought together the whole of his thinking that had been set in motion through The Gay Science --- man precariously suspended between the herd and the overman, for now captive of Christian values that are No-saying to life, and girding himself up to overcome all of this by a singular exertion of his will to power. And on top of all this, like the jewel of the whole creation was Nietzsche's gateway, the Moment. Why must all of this happen? Why should we move and take these risks? Nietzsche would have us look seriously, deeply, and realistically. What we will see is the Great Nausea, the horrifying specter of all of this passing through moments into eternity. If we are not to die of nausea, we must bite through it and literally thrust ourselves into a new world where we can greet eternity with a Yes that loves life.
copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman