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On the remainder of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).
How can we keep our spirits up and avoid nihilism? After all (says Nietzsche), there’s no God or other transcendent purpose-giving entity to guarantee that life is worth living. There’s just our complex animality, with its cycles of desire, satiation, and more desire, with our in-built character and maybe the capacity to self-overcome, with our idiosyncrasies that yes, can be parlayed into living artistically but which tend to leave us as freakish even when we manage to rise above the herd.
A lot of this first half of the discussion is taken up by a return to the book 2 section “On Poets” and reflecting on why Nietzsche chooses to write in this style. Following Plato, he says that poets “lie too much,” but in the same section he counts himself a poet too. So what makes it more effective for Nietzsche to use allegory and jokes and shifting advice than to just write down a straightforwardly expository philosophy?
We move on to book 3, in which Zarathustra travels back from the world where he preached to his mountain cave, so we get a bit of a travelogue of his moodiness. Will he (and the world!) be overcome with the “spirit of gravity,” or will he, like his pet eagle, soar to the heights? What are we to make of these persistent metaphors? One pervasive theme in this book is the notion of eternal recurrence, which is the elaboration of the “solution” to nihilism presented at the end of book 2, i.e., coming to peace with the past. First, this is a scary prospect, because if everything recurs, then suffering recurs, pettiness recurs. But eventually he’s able to accept the idea, because moments of joy (of feeling your creative power) are what life is all about. They justify all the suffering and pettiness in between these moments, and “joy wants eternity.”
So, has Nietzsche violated his own passion against “otherworldliness” by emphasizing this cosmological picture, in which, yes, the world of our experience does occur (many times!) but is transmogrified by this transcendental structure (meaning that we don’t actually experience events as recurring)? Is eternal recurrence actually true, and would we even actually care if it were? In The Gay Science, his treatment of the topic was brief and hypothetical: a mind game where you imagine, before you perform an action, that it’ll recur infinitely many times… would you still want to do it? In the present work, he seems to be taking the notion more seriously, recounting through his tale of Zarathustra the real-life-changing effect that this idea was purported to have had on Nietzsche.
Eternal recurrence is introduced right near the beginning of book 3, and that book ends with a climax where the full implications of that idea are realized and accepted. In between, we get more commentary, including the longest section of the book, “On the Old and New Tablets,” which lays out ideas requisite for being able to create new values. You must recognize that current concepts of good and evil that seem so firm only seem that way because your soul (and culture) are in a wintry, frozen state. We must “become hard” and “be evil enough for [the] truth,” which is that these things are not fixed foundations for our lives, but works forever in progress: “There have been only illusions so far, not knowledge, about good and evil.” Killing and robbing we dismiss as totally evil, but “is there not in all life itself killing and robbing?” Our honor should not be rooted where we come from, but where we are going. We firstlings (the first ones to take seriously this challenge to traditional values) are sacrifices to future philosophy, because we’ll inevitably be harmed by those who take themselves to be already good (just like Socrates was killed by the Athenians he challenged).
We don’t talk much here about book 4, which Nietzsche did not originally intend to be the end, but just an interlude. It’s the most overtly comic, and displays a variety of “higher men” like a king, a retired pope, a magician, a voluntary beggar, the ugliest man, and one who calls himself a shadow, all of whom come to become Zarathustra’s new disciples, but they end up worshiping an ass who brays “Yeah-yuh!” (as in Exodus where the Israelites receive the ten commandments but then start worshiping a golden calf). These represent various ways that people can misinterpret Nietzsche’s teachings, only internalizing part of what he’s trying to convey. So, Nietzsche says, “say yes to life!,” and maybe you interpret that in a stupid way, saying yes to everything when Nietzsche has also stressed that there’s a lot of crap out there that you need to say “no” to. Maybe he says that “robbing and killing are parts of life” and you misinterpret that and go out to rob and kill.
The point is that wisdom is complex and fleeting. Were one to try to express it in simple, expository prose, it would inevitably escape, because every circumstance is different, things keep changing, people’s natures differ, and consequently, every piece of wise advice also needs wisdom to apply it properly.
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Buy the Walter Kaufmann translation
The secondary sources cited in this episode are Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist,
Nietzsche picture by Charles Valsechi.
To everything (turn, turn, turn). Makes me think of Kohelet.
Do you see a connection between Nietzsche’s ‘gravity’ and ‘eternal recurrence’ and the Greek myth of Sisyphus and/or a precursor to Camus ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’? Nietzsche always desiring to soar like an eagle and always failing back to earth, rolling the boulder up and having gravity pull it back.
Milan Kundera’s compelling comment on the E.R. in “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”:
‘Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once
and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance,
and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean
nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms
in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a
hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.
Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it
recurs again and again, in eternal return?
It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud
of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody
years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have
become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between
a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns,
chopping off French heads.
Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which
things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating
circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from
coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the
guillotine.
Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through
a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my
childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler’s
concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost
period in my life, a period that would never return?
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests
essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in
advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity
as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal
return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That
is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das
schwerste Gewicht).
“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation.
The “subject” is not something given, it is something added
and invented and projected behind what there is.- Finally, is it
necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even
this is invention, hypothesis. (Will To Power)
We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins,
at which we can see no further, e.g., the word “I,” the word “do,”
the word “suffer”:-these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge,
but not “truths.” (Will To Power)
Everywhere language sees a doer and a doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the “ego”, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of “being” follows, and is derivative of, the concept of “ego.” In the beginning there is that great calamity of error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity . Today we know that it is only a word. (Twilight of the Idols)
The “inner world” is full of phantoms … : the will is one of
them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not
explain anything either — it merely accompanies events;
it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error.
Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness some –
thing alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up
the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. …
What follows from this? There are no mental [geistigen]
causes at all. (Twilight of the Idols)
Men were thought of as ‘free’ so that they could become guilty; consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness. (Twilight of the Idols)