Thus Spoke Zarathustra (3 page)

This makes a brave sound, and the feeling that it expresses – that there are new worlds to be opened up – came to dominate more and more from the summer of 1881 onwards. ‘Ideas have arisen on my horizon the like of which I have never seen before…’, Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast on 14 August 1881. ‘I shall certainly have to live a few years more!…The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh – a couple of times I couldn’t leave my room for the ludicrous reason that my eyes were inflamed…. Each time I had been weeping too much on my walks the day before, not sentimental tears but tears of rejoicing; and as I wept I sang and talked nonsense, filled with a new vision…’

This is not an altogether new note, but the intensity is new and the ‘ideas’ alluded to are also new and new in this sense that they are direct attempts to go beyond the nihilist conclusions of the past five years without being obliged to retract any of them.

The fourth book of
The Gay Science
is a signpost pointing the way Nietzsche is going. Always under the influence of significant dates, he opens it with a passage written on New Year’s Day 1882:

For the New Year
. I am still living, I am still thinking: I have to go on living because I have to go on thinking.
Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum
. Today everyone is permitted to express his desire and dearest thoughts: so I too would like to say what I have desired of myself today and what thought was the first to cross my heart this year – what thought shall be the basis, guarantee and sweetness of all my future life! I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as the beautiful in them – thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful.
Amor fati:
may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May
looking away
be my only form of negation! And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer
(ein Ja -sagender)
! (276).

This challenge to everything nihilist in his nature is followed a little later by a call to action, battle and positive commitment phrased in one of his most famous coinages – perhaps actually the most famous phrase in all his works:

I greet all the signs that a more manly, warlike age is coming, which will, above all, bring valour again into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and assemble the force which that age will one day have need of – that age which will carry heroism into knowledge and
wage war
for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To that end many brave pioneers are needed now…: men who know how to be silent, solitary, resolute,…who have an innate disposition to seek in all things that which must be
overcome
in them: men to whom cheerfulness, patience, simplicity and contempt for the great vanities belong just as much as do generosity in victory and indulgence towards the little vanities of the defeated:…men with their own festivals, their own work-days, their own days of mourning, accustomed to and assured in command and equally ready to obey when necessary, equally proud in the one case as in the other, equally serving their own cause: men more imperilled, men more fruitful, happier men! For believe me! – the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to
live dangerously
! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge!…(283).

A new image of man, of what mankind might be, begins to appear:

Excelsior
! ‘You will never again pray, never again worship, never again repose in limitless trust – you deny it to yourself to remain halted before an ultimate wisdom, ultimate good, ultimate power, and there unharness your thoughts – you have no perpetual guardian and friend for your seven solitudes…there is no longer for you any rewarder and recompenser, no final corrector – there is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you – there is no longer any resting-place open to your heart where it has only to find and no longer to seek, you resist any kind of ultimate peace, you want the eternal recurrence of war and peace – man of renuncktion, will you renounce in all this? Who will give you the strength for it? No one has yet possessed this strength!’ – There is a lake which one day denied it to itself to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it formerly flowed away: since then this lake has risen higher and higher. Perhaps it is precisely that renunciation which will also lend us the strength by which the renunciation itself can be endured; perhaps man will rise higher and higher from that time when he no longer
flaws out
into a god. (285).

And the penultimate section of the book is a very curious suggestion for a formula of self- and life-affirmation:

The heaviest burden
. What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again – and you with it, you dust of dust!’ – Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: ‘do you want this again and again, times without number?’ would
lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have
no greater desire
than for this ultimate eternal sanction and sea!? (341).

In April 1882 began the one wholly serious sexual involvement of Nietzsche’s life: his brief and humiliating affair with Lou Salomé. This is not the place to go into the details of that affair; I discuss it here at all only because it has some bearing on the ‘man in solitude’ aspect of
Zarathustra
and because it is part of the general state of crisis in which Nietzsche existed during the eighteen months from the summer of 1881 to the beginning of 1883. Only two points need to be made. Firstly, Nietzsche thought that the solitude in which he had been living since his enforced retirement from Basel University at Easter 1879 and which had been weighing more and more heavily upon him was about to come to an end. In a letter to Lou Salomé (2 July 1882) he says that the previous day ‘it seemed as if it must be my birthday:
you
sent me your assent [i.e. to come and stay with him for three weeks], the best present anyone could have given me…Teubner [a printer] sent the first three proof-sheets of the
Gey Science
, and in addition to all this the last part of the manuscript of the
Gay Science
was completed, and therewith the work of six years (1876 to 1882), my entire “free-thought”!’

This means that when he wrote this letter he had just made a fair copy of the following passage, which closes
The Gay Science
in its original version:

Incipit tragoedia
. When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned – and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: ‘Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine! You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey, without me, my eagle and my serpent; but we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it. Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too
much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it; I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have again become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth. To that end, I must descend into the depths: as you do at evening, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too, superabundant star! – like you, I must
go down
— as men, to whom I want to descend, call it. So bless me then, tranquil eye, that can behold without envy even an excessive happiness! Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflexion of your joy over all the world! Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again.’ – Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going. (342).

The sense of this passage is repeated in other words at the end of the above-quoted letter: ‘I don’t want to be lonely any more; I want to learn to be human again. Alas, in
this
field I have almost everything still to learn!’

Undoubtedly Nietzsche at this point identified himself with another ‘teacher’ who came down out of solitude around his fortieth year.

The second point is that, after he was abandoned during the following October by Lou Salomé and had to realize that his hope of marrying her was definitely not going to be fulfilled, he fell into an abyss of despair. I am not underrating the emotional effect which such a disappointment might normally be expected to produce, but its effect on Nietzsche was certainly very violent indeed, especially considering that his disposition was usually a cheerful one. It should be recalled that he had been recurrently ill since 1871 – almost certainly a consequence of a syphilitic infection contracted when a student – and the inability of these attacks to depress him or do more than delay his work is a witness to the resilience of his temperament. His failure with Lou, however, threw him for a time completely off balance – how far off balance can be gauged, for example, from this letter to Franz Overbeck, posted on Christmas Day 1882:

I have suffered from the disgraceful and anguishing recollections of this past summer as from a kind of madness…. They involve a conflict of contrary emotions which I am not equal to.…If only I could sleep! But the strongest sleeping-draughts help as little
as do the six to eight hour walks I take. If I cannot find the magic formula to turn all this – muck to
gold
, I am lost…. I now mistrust everybody: I sense in everything I hear contempt towards me.…Sometimes I think of renting a small room in Basel, visiting you now and then and attending lectures. Sometimes I think of doing the opposite: of driving my solitude and resignation to the ultimate limit and –

The ground of this violent reaction was, as other letters but especially
Zarathustra
show, the realization he was back in solitude and that he was going to stay there.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that by the turn of the year 1882–83 there had been assembled in Nietzsche the material for an explosion of some sort – or rather, as we shall discover, an
eruption
. Intellectually, emotionally and physically he was all but exhausted; but the ‘ideas’ of the summer of 1881 as they had received tentative expression in the fourth book of
The Gay Science
are preliminary rumblings which indicate what is coming. In January – ‘as a result of ten absolutely fresh and cheerful January days’ – the tension broke, inhibition gave way, and the first part of
Zarathustra
came furiously out.

‘Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration?’ he asked in
Ecce Homo, apropos
of
Zarathustra
.

If not, I will describe it. – If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes
viable
, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed – I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one’s steps now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag;…a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded, as a
necessary
colour within such a superfluity of light;…Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of
absoluteness, of power, of divinity. The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression. It really does seem, to allude to an expression of Zarathustra’s, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors…This is
my
experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could say to me ‘it is mine also’.

Zarathustra again emerges from his ten-year solitude, but now the mankind to whom he wants to address himself rejects him and he turns from it; subsequently he deserts even the chosen few who have remained with him and goes back into solitude. His message to mankind is:

I teach you the Superman
. Man is something that should be overcome.

And:

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman
shall be
the meaning of the earth.