Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2 page)

1

T
HE
first thing a reader of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
will notice, even before he/she notices what is being said, is the manner of saying it: or rather, the
excess
of manner. The book’s worst fault is excess. That this is the most forgivable of faults doesn’t change the fact that it
is
a fault. As it happens, excess is the one fault no one could impute to Nietzsche’s subsequent works: there concision, brevity, directness of statement are present to a degree not even approximated by any other German philosopher (and hardly equalled by any writer of any kind). It is clear that the rhetorical-oratorical is something Nietzsche was impelled to, gave way to and thus
got rid of
in
Zarathustra
: the eruption of words, metaphors, figures and word-play suggests an eruption of feeling. It will be our job here to try to discover why this eruption became necessary, and why just at this time (i.e. January I883), and thus to understand better what this great odd book is really about.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra
is (to anticipate out conclusion somewhat) the resolution of a long-sustained intellectual crisis. Let the word ‘intellectual’ not mislead: unlike most people, even most philosophers, Nietzsche lived with his intellectual problems as with realities, he experienced a similar emotional commitment to them as other men experience to their wife and children. It is this, indeed, which is the badge of his uniqueness and the key to understanding him. He makes clear what he means by intellectual problems in these few posthumously-published notes:

As soon as you feel yourself
against me
you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the
same passion
!

I want to awaken the greatest mistrust of myself: I speak only of things I have
experienced
and do not offer only events in the head.

One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.

I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.

In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

His forbears were Lutherans. Many were in the Lutheran church: his father and both grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather was a Superintendent, the Lutheran equivalent of a bishop. As a boy he was, as befitted a pastor’s son, intensely pious, but he lost his faith during his late teens and abandoned the study of theology. He replaced religious belief with freelance philosophizing, upon which he brought to bear the intensity of involvement he had withdrawn from religion. The path away from the family parsonage was the path of scepticism. Schopenhaueran metaphysics and Wagnerian music were detours,
ersatz
religion. In the summer of 1876, in his thirty-second year, he returned to the sceptical path and started on the series of aphoristic books which constitute probably the most thorough course in scepticism produced in the nineteenth century.
Human, All Too Human
appeared in 1878,
Assorted Opinions and Maxims
in 1879,
The Wanderer and his Shadow
in 1880; in June 1881 he published
Dawn
, These books embody reflexions on a very wide range of subjects, but the controlling tendency of his thought during all these five years is nonetheless unmistakable: it is to break down all the concepts and qualities in which mankind takes pride and pleasure
into a few simple qualities in which no one takes pride of pleasure and to see in the latter the origin of the former; likewise to undermine morality by exposing its non-moral basis and rationality by exposing its irrational basis; likewise to abolish the ‘higher’ world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world; in brief, the controlling tendency of his thought is
nihilist
. The cheerful tone, the stylistic beauty, the coolness of the performance cannot conceal that what is taking place is destruction. The fact was, in any event, obvious to Nietzsche himself; and of all his problems this became the greatest, the most pressing, the one with which his ‘passion’ was most engaged. He had come close to a total devaluation of humanity and because he could as yet see no way of halting this movement he took the only course open to him: he pushed it on to its limit.

The earlier parts of his next book,
The Gay Science
, were intended for
Dawn
; they were excluded partly because he thought that book had grown sufficiently bulky, but also, I would say, because of the enhanced vehemence of what he was now thinking and writing. The nihilism of his position is now stated frankly:

The four errors
, Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional, so that now this, now that human drive and state took first place and was, as a consequence of this evaluation, ennobled. If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness and ‘human dignity’. (115).

He looks more squarely in the face and discusses more urgently the question whether ‘truth’ is in any way discoverable or whether mankind is not
necessitated to
error:

Life no argument
. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live – with the postulation of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without
these articles of faith nobody could now endure to live! But that does not yet mean they ate something proved and demonstrated. Life is no argument; among the conditions of life could be error. (121).

He reaches what seems to be the final term in this line of argument:

Ultimate scepticism
. What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? – They are the
irrefutable
errors of mankind. (265).

His conception of the world as meaningless and chaotic is rounded off. That God is dead is announced in a famous passage:

The madman
. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: ‘I am looking for God! I am looking for God!’ -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? – thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you.
We have killed him
— you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? – gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives – who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent?
Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed – and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.’…(125).

Not only is there no God, there is no other ordering principle either:

Let us beware
! Let us beware of thinking the world is a living being. Whither should it spread itself? What should it nourish itself with? How could it grow and multiply? We know indeed more or less what the organic is: and shall we reinterpret the unspeakably derivative, late, rare, chance phenomena which we perceive only on the surface of the earth into the essential, universal, eternal, as they do who call the universe an organism? I find that disgusting. Let us likewise beware of believing the universe is a machine; it is certainly not constructed so as to perform some operation, we do it far too great honour with the word ‘machine’. Let us beware of presupposing that something so orderly as the cyclical motions of our planetary neighbours are the general and universal case; even a glance at the Milky Way gives rise to doubt whether there may not there exist far more crude and contradictory motions, likewise stars with eternally straight trajectories, and the like. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the apparent permanence which is conditional upon it is in its turn made possible by the exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total nature of the world is, on the other hand, to all eternity chaos, not in the sense that necessity is lacking but in that order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other human aesthetic notions we may have are lacking. Judged from the viewpoint of our reason, the unsuccessful cases are far and away the rule, the exceptions are not the secret objective, and the whole contraption repeats its theme, which can never be called a melody, over and over again to eternity – and ultimately even the term ‘unsuccessful case’ is already a humanization which contains a reproof. But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgements! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation
or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress…. Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species…. (109).

These passages and very many more like them are included in the first three of the four books which constitute the original edition of
The Gay Science
: they seem to me to mark the end of the road on which Nietzsche set out when he left his forefathers’ faith and went off alone. I do not see how he or anyone could go further in this direction. If he had not found some other direction he would at this time – the second half of 1881 – have reached his end station: and it is his knowledge that this is so that constitutes the intellectual crisis of which
Zarathtutra
is the resolution.

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We must now take a look at another aspect of Nietzsche’s authorship. So far as modern Europe is concerned he was very much a pioneer in the demolition of ancient habits of mind and moral prejudices, and he was moreover very little read during his active life: so that to a great degree he had to be his own commentator and critic. There is an element in his work which derives directly from this fact. You will often hear not one voice but two: one asserts, the other objects and qualifies. Or one draws a sombre, the other a happy conclusion from the same premisses. Now one important duty of the second voice is to intimate, at strategic points in the books, that all the demolition going on
may
be only the essential preliminary and prerequisite for new construction; and none of these passages is more eloquent or revealing than that which stands at the end
of Dawn
:

We aeronauts of the spirit
! All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance – it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face – and they will even be thankful for this
miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was
not
an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one
could
fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop…; it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me!
Other birds will fly farther
! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! – And whither then would we go? Would we
cross
the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto
gone down?
Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too,
steering westward, hoped to reach an India
– but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers? Or? – (575).