Reading Zarathustra: Prologue
1
In the tenth year of a solitary residence in his cave in the mountain, Zarathustra’s story starts with his lack of tiredness that is simultaneously his transformation:
Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude and for ten years he did not tire of it. But at last his heart transformed, — one morning he arose with the dawn, stepped before the sun and spoke thus to it:…
The echoes of Plato’s cave (Republic VII) have been well remarked, and we shall have to comment on those in due time. But we must not lose the simple fact that Nietzsche begins this pivotal text with transformation and its relationship to one’s spirit becoming tired of its solitary contemplation of wisdom.
This tiredness, however, is not a frustrated exhaustion. We have no indication that there is a loss of energy — only a transformation of the direction of its energy, from internal to external. Nietzsche will treat this energy more formally as active and reactive powers in the Genealogy of Morals, but we must be careful not treat that later work as the answer-key to this one. The polemical GM is not the doer behind the prophetic deeds of Zarathustra.
We also see in this initial episode the importance for Nietzsche to think of transformation as fundamentally putting oneself in motion. This transformative motion will regularly be compared to things that seek stasis as a goal. While stasis can be beneficial — Zarathustra’s crucial moments of revelation will come out of a profound state of deep tiredness and rest — to seek rest as a goal runs counter to what Nietzsche wants us to take away from TSZ.
‘I am weary of my wisdom’
Zarathustra has retreated, at the age of 30, and lives in a cave on the mountain. He has been alone, and the connection to the anachoresis of the Egyptian monks of the fourth century should not be lost. His meditations on the competition among virtues and virtue’s centrality to the contemplative solitude of those early Christian monks will show up with great force especially in ‘Of Joys and Passions’.
He is now 40 and ‘weary of my wisdom’. What it means to be weary and tired and exhausted and worn out will be central to the motions that Zarathustra marshals. There will be other forms of weariness that are more nihilistic — death as a fear of life (‘The Despisers of the Body’, ‘The Preachers of Death’), the Gnostic desire to escape the earth (‘The Hinterworldly’). We will come to these in due time, but for the moment we find Zarathustra weary of his wisdom.
What does it mean to be weary of wisdom?
It seems that Zarathustra has become bored, and it is a boredom that is overfull rather than empty. This boredom has turned into a desire to return to the world bearing this wisdom.
Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey. I need hands that reach out.
I want to bestow and distribute until the wise among human beings have once again enjoyed their folly, and the poor once again their wealth.
At this point forward, untergehen (‘going under’) becomes the dominant metaphor of motion, but before we get to that, let’s understand how TSZ is making ‘wisdom’ a fundamental problem.
We should separate the content of Zarathustra’s wisdom from its form.
As content, wisdom reverses what the culture has taken as certain and stable truths. Zarathustra wants folly to again be possible (and enjoyed), and he wants the poor to enjoy their wealth.
However, the form will quickly become the problem: how Zarathustra wants to ‘bestow and distribute’ this wisdom will be through speeches delivered to crowds. This will lead to a spiritual exhaustion that begins his going under.
Bestow and Distribute
Zarathustra envisions himself as the wise man who has gathered truth in the solitude of his vita contemplativa. From that state of physical anachoresis — isolating oneself from actively engaging in the world — a spiritual truth is learned that he must ‘bestow and distribute’ from the wise man to the people.
Nietzsche is setting us up to see the failure of this mode of acquiring and conveying truth. We can read this wisdom that has grown weary in two ways.
On the one hand, Zarathustra’s wisdom has become tired of being isolated (‘like a bee that has gathered too much honey’), his wisdom now wants to re-enter the world (‘I need hands that reach out’).
On the other, we will see that this mode of delivering wisdom — clear statements of truth delivered by the contemplative intellectual — has become weary. This mode of truth-telling is in need of a replacement, although Zarathustra is not yet aware of this. This insight will be delivered to him at the end of the Prologue.
Untergehen, Untergang, Übergehen
‘Bestow and distribute’ must begin with motion away from the mountain. The intellectual must re-enter the world to bestow his truth. At this point, Nietzsche introduces untergehen as a crucial term in TSZ. Adrian Del Caro describes untergehen and Untergang in his note to the first use of untergehen in his translation for Cambridge UP:
German uses untergehen, literally ‘to go under’ for the expression the sun ‘goes down.’ Nietzsche throughout Zarathustra uses wordplay to signify that Zarathustra’s ‘going under’ is a ‘going over’ or transition, übergehen, from human to superhuman, from man to overman.
At this point, untergehen (‘to go down’) can simply mean that Zarathustra will physically descend from the mountain to rejoin humanity as a bestower of wisdom: ‘… I must go down [untergehen] as the human beings say, to whom I want to descend.’
Before Nietzsche finishes this initial section of the Prologue, he offers a strange image of motion that brings us into confrontation with metaphors of emptiness and fullness, which will be crucial to understanding the importance of experience, truth, and motion in TSZ. Speaking to the Sun, he says:
Bless the cup that wants to flow over, such that water flows golden from it and everywhere carries the reflection of your bliss!
Behold! This cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again.
— Thus began Zarathustra’s going under.
The flowing over is the bestowing and distributing of the wisdom of which the cup is overfull. Yet, the overflowing is a desire to be empty and thus ‘to become human again’.
Two modes of desire are operating simultaneously: ‘the cup wants to flow over’ and ‘This cup wants to become empty again’. Becoming empty is to become human. The act of bestowing and distributing wisdom to humanity will be an act of self-emptying. The too-much honey that the bee has gathered must be emptied. Only through this overflowing that is emptying can the contemplative intellectual becoming human again.
This is not a one-sided emptying that we might find in a typical mediative practice. This is not a self-emptying that seeks a nothingness. The overflow that empties the human cup both happen simultaneously. Later, at the end of the Prologue, we will have a more clear moment of emptying that is followed by a new filling up, but at this moment, the two motions are not separate. We cannot decide which drives the other.
This is the beginning of Zarathustra’s untergehen that is full and empty simultaneously. We cannot and will not know what this can mean unless we follow him through the rest of the narrative.
Like Mark’s Jesus who calls Simon and Andrew away from their fishing nets, they cannot know what Jesus means by ‘Come after me [duete opiso mou], and I will make you fishers of men’ (1:17). The truth will be understood only in the following.
2
I have long suspected that Nietzsche’s denigration of Christianity was actually directed at its Gnostic incarnations. Section 2 of the Zarathustra’s Prologue is one of the strongest confirmations of my suspicion.
Gnostic Christianity
When Jesus appears claiming to the Messiah, he raises a fundamental problem with respect to historical continuity. If he is the Messiah promised by God, he is not at all what was expected — i.e., a political-religious-military leader that would lead Israel to glory.
For those who believed he was the promised Messiah, two historical paths are open.
Paul took the first path, which was far more difficult: Jesus was the Messiah and God was therefore introducing a new trajectory to history. Much of his letter to the Romans is an attempt to reconstruct post-Messianic history as continuous with God’s promise to Abraham.
Gnosticism took the second path, which was much easier: the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God revealed in ‘Jesus the Christ’ are not the same. The message of Jesus is that the creator God of Genesis was a flawed deity and that this world is broken. Those with privileged knowledge (the gnosis) of this other God will be saved by the gnosis.
The first path, that of Paul, seeks to put the world back together again. The second path is free to see this world as fundamentally fallen and therefore unworthy of our love and care. Nietzsche is taking aim at the Gnostic path in this section of the Prologue.
Anachoresis
After his descent from the mountain, Zarathustra is wandering through a forest where he encounters a ‘saint’. This saint recognizes a transformed Zarathustra. In this recognition, he sees what he believes to be a naïve version of himself. ‘Zarathustra has become a child’. The saint asks the transformed and ‘awakened’ Zarathustra, ‘What do you want now among the sleepers?’
We are to see in the saint the long-term effects of anachoresis that becomes a Gnostic’s denigration of the world. This anachoresis started as love for humanity, but it has turned into something that oscillates between indifference and contempt:
‘Why’, asked the saint, ‘did I go into the woods and the wilderness in the first place? Was it not because I loved mankind all too much?
Now I love God: human beings I do not love. Human beings are too imperfect a thing for me. Love for human beings would kill me.’
We have to understand the sequence that the saint spells out because it is crucial to Nietzsche’s differentiation of Zarathustra’s love from the saint’s love. To understand this sequence is to understand the heart of Nietzsche’s criticism of European nihilism.
The saint’s love of humanity came first, and it was ‘too much’. Then came his love of God when this love creates the realization that ‘humans are too imperfect a thing for me.’ More than this, the saint creates his love of God out of the ‘too much’ love of humanity. This ‘too much’ that seeks perfection overflows, and in doing so directs its energy away from humanity and to God and God alone. The saint can love only and exclusively God: this love cannot love God and the imperfect things of the Earth at the same time. It is a love that can never be unconditional and total because it requires negation and therefore anachoresis.
This is the trajectory of love that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is trying to redirect, and it is why this episode needs to come early in TSZ.
Death of God
The episode ends as Zarathustra leaves behind the saint in his isolation.
But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: ‘Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!’ —
What God has died? It is the God who demands a love that cannot love humanity at the same time. This God wants the anachoresis of the saint all for himself. They withdraw together. It is a mutual anachoresis that moves from a failed love of humanity to its denigration. It is an anachoresis that rejoices in the solitude as communing with God.
‘And what does the saint do in the woods?’ asked Zarathustra.
The saint answered: ‘I make songs and sing them, and when I make songs I laugh, weep and growl: thus I praise God.
With singing, weeping, laughing and growling I praise god who is my god. But tell me, what do you bring as a gift?’
Nietzsche does not give us a Zarathustra that is the opposite of this Gnostic saint. Zarathustra has withdrawn to the mountain, and he will laugh and weep and growl. Zarathustra will sing, and he will dance as he sings.
Zarathustra cannot be understood as a being opposed to the being of the saint.
Nietzsche gives us a Zarathustra who has redirected the energy of the saint. He has brought it back out into the world. The anachoresis of Zarathustra has gathered energy ‘like a bee that has gathered too much honey’ and must re-enter the world of humanity. Instead of offering gifts to God and God alone in the privacy and intimacy of monkish withdrawal, Zarathustra leaves the mountain of his solitude to ‘bring man a gift’.
We should also mark the similarity of the ‘too much’ of the saint’s original love of humanity with the ‘too much honey’ of Zarathustra’s wisdom that drives him out of his solitude. Are they the same? Possibly. But the force of what follows will show us how Zarathustra’s ‘too much honey’ opens the possibility of the ‘too much’ love of humanity that can quickly turn into a Gnostic’s denigrating love.
As we will see, Zarathustra’s wisdom will be misunderstood not only by the herd of der latzte Menschen (the Last Men or the Ultimate Men) but by himself.
Zarathustra will have to walk this Gnostic tightrope.
3
Truth as Accusation
Zarathustra’s first words to the crowd waiting for the tightrope walker’s performance announce a truth from the mouth of a teacher:
I teach you the overman [Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen]. Human being is something that must be overcome.
Zarathustra has re-entered the realm of humanity not only with a truth as his gift, but that gift is given immediately in the form of an accusation:
What have you done to overcome him?
All creatures so far created something beyond themselves; and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would rather go back to animals than overcome humans?
Zarathustra has made a claim about the nature of humanity, and this claim allows him to structure himself and his gift as an accusatory judgment.
We find here that Zarathustra is not so different from the Gnostic saint. His love is not yet a mode of love that can do without condemnation of the thing it purports to love. It is also a love that finds its expression in pronouncements of truth that accuse the listener of folly and illusion.
Evolution, Amor Fati
Zarathustra’s accusation emerges from the newness of Darwin’s evolutionary time (1859). The animals of nature are doomed to overcoming themselves because of the governing principle of Natural Selection. Yet Natural Selection equally dooms them to a life lived purely in the actions of survival. This is not the Darwinianism that Nietzsche found valuable.
Zarathustra’s accusation is that humanity has given up on its very nature as creatures that can overcome themselves: ‘you want to be the ebb of this great flood’.
To teach the Übermenschen is to make a call to ‘remain faithful to the earth’, which is to reorient the Gnostic energy of withdrawal and denigration back into the earthbound capacity for evolution.
Behold, I teach you the overman!
The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.
Zarathustra is calling for a new faith — ‘remain faithful to the earth’ — which is to love the fate we’ve been given — i.e., that we are creatures like all other creatures endowed with evolutionary capacity for overcoming our limitations, including our biological limitations. We are not mere creatures of Natural Selection though we have been endowed with the capacity to overcome our current selves.
This faith, the amor fati of GS 276 (‘For the New Year’), must be embraced.
Death of God
For this faith to take hold — for the Übermensch to become a new possibility of redemption — the Gnostic God must die.
This God, who demands sacrifices and a love directed back to only His glory, is incompatible with loving the earth and our evolutionary fate.
Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowels of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth.
The new faith that Zarathustra calls for is not the eradication of ‘sacrilege’. (Hollingdale translates ‘sin’ in this passage.) Zarathustra wants to preserve something of ‘the sacred’ as we’ll see in ‘The Three Metamorphoses’. But he wants to do so without the new sacred being a replay of the Gnostic love of God that arises from the denigration the earth.
We are at the heart of Nietzsche’s confrontation with European nihilism. We have killed God, but we stand ready to replace Him with new forms of gnosis that appear true because we have committed the murder and stand proudly for this deed because of a new gnosis.
Yet all that the deed does is introduce new forms of a Gnostic’s contempt.
Yet we cannot do without contempt. We must cultivate contempt if we are to lift the weight of culture off our shoulders, but this contempt always risks two things: 1) falling into an abyss of nihilism because we cannot imagine ourselves without this weight, or 2) arising out of a new gnosis.
Zarathustra will continue to walk this Gnostic tightrope.
The Sea and the Will to Power
Nietzsche makes a pivotal transition at this point. He moves from calling for a new faith in evolution and earthly existence to experience as the new ground of human meaning making.
Contempt (Verachtung) will be the fulcrum of the pivot. It is not a straightforward concept.
To bring about this pivot, Zarathustra addresses the outmoded dualism of soul and body. The body is the object of the Gnostic’s denigration because it is part of the earth that this love requires to be despised.
Once the soul gazed contemptuously at the body, and then such contempt was the highest thing: it wanted the body gaunt, ghastly, starved. Thus it intended to escape the body and the earth. (My emphasis)
The result of this contempt for the body is that the soul itself has become impoverished: ‘Is your soul not poverty and filth and pitiful contentment?’ Elsewhere, Nietzsche will call this decadence, and it will be equated with a weakening of this dilutive capacity of the will to power: ‘Wherever the will to power in any form whatsoever declines, there is also a physiological regression every time, décadence’ (Anti-Christ, aphorism 17).
How are we to overcome this impoverished soul that feeds on the willful contempt of the body and its energies? Zarathustra again turns to untergehen (down-going):
Truly, mankind is a polluted stream. One has to be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming unclean.
Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under. (My emphasis)
As with most of Nietzsche’s concepts, we cannot treat them in isolation. We must experience them as relational. In this case, contempt and to ‘go under’ (untergehen) and Übermensch are all working together.
To go under (untergehen) is to descend into the weight of culture that is the polluted stream. To understand this capacity for untergehen, we need to understand the power of the sea in this metaphor. The sea dilutes the pollution of the stream not because the sea is a symmetrical opposing power to the stream. If it were a symmetrical power, the sea would simply marshal a new and definitive contempt for culture. Equal forms of contempt would simply square off against each other in a zero-sum game of competing gnoses.
Rather, the sea dilutes the stream because it gives the stream no home in which to land and retain its power or its identity. This takes a tremendous amount of energy — that is the energy of the soul. Eventually in Nietzsche’s thought, this diluting power of the sea will become the ‘will to power’.
We are beginning to understand how the necessary and repetitive N0-saying power of the Übermensch can stave off becoming ressentiment. The metaphor of the sea gets us part of the way there.
Only One Christian
We find one of Nietzsche’s greatest appreciations of this dilutive power in the Jesus of Anti-Christ for whom ‘Culture is unknown to him even through hearsay…’
he has no need to fight it — he does not deny it . . . The same goes for the state, for the whole civic order and society, for work, for war — he never had reason to deny ‘the world’, he never had an inkling of the ecclesiastical concept ‘world’ . . . Denial is the one thing entirely impossible for him. (Anti-Christ, aphorism 32)
Why is ‘Denial the one thing entirely impossible for him’? Because the weight of culture never landed on Jesus the Christ. Because it did not land — like the polluted stream that flows into the sea — he does not need to take up denial as an opposing, symmetrical power to ‘the world’ and its institutions — the state, civil society, work, war.
Jesus the Christ, for Nietzsche, was a model of the will to power that is the sea’s power to dilute the polluted stream of Culture. Nietzsche continues:
Likewise dialectics are lacking, the notion is lacking that a faith, a ‘truth’, could be proved through reasons ( — his proofs are inner ‘lights’, inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, nothing but ‘proofs of strength’ — ). Such a doctrine cannot contradict either, it does not grasp that there are or can be other doctrines, it does not know in the least how to imagine a contradictory judgment . . . Where it encounters one, it will mourn about ‘blindness’ with sincere sympathy — for it sees the ‘light’ — but will raise no objection . . . (Anti-Christ, aphorism 32)
The power of this Christ is a power that does not meet objection with objection or judgement with judgment — i.e., denials and dialectics. Nietzsche’s Jesus is different than us because we do not have this power as an original condition. We are in the polluted stream, and we are in danger of losing this dilutive mode of the will to power. This is why Jesus serves as a nearly impossible example — ‘at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross’ (AC 39).
Our ability to imitate this messianic power requires a flowing backwards to a redemptive power that we can only access after the pollution of the stream has already inhabited us. Zarathustra will outline this movement in ‘The Three Metamorphoses’. We must become the child only after passing through the transitions from camel to lion and lion to child.
Contempt, Übermensch, Down-Going
We cannot be purely Christ-like. The Übermensch is not Jesus the Christ because we are already polluted with the weight of culture. Yet the power of the sea — the will to power — is still possible. The Übermensch is still an experiential possibility: ‘he is the sea, in him your great contempt can go under’.
To become an Übermensch requires us to descend into this contempt — the necessity of No-saying. To experience this contempt, however, we need to bear in mind the dilutive power of the sea and the example of the Christ who does not meet denial with denial and judgment with judgment in a zero-sum game of opposing symmetrical truths.
If we are not opposing symmetrical truths, how are we to marshal the power of the sea as the will-to-power of the Übermenschen?
We must attend to Zarathustra’s contempt.
Again, we have Nietzsche’s Zarathustra redirecting the Gnostic energy of contempt that leads to decadence. This redirection of contempt moves back into the experience of living as creatures among all created things — ‘remaining faithful to the earth’ — to create a new trajectory of evolutionary energy:
Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
What is the greatest thing that you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.
Contempt — yes, it is negation, but it is negation as the ability to suspend the received valuation of all that we value, even what we think is happiness and reason and justice and pity and virtue. This contempt must move with affirmation for it to be the transvaluation of values and not ressentiment.
This negation cannot start with contempt as denigration. Rather, this contempt starts as contempt for the sheer weight of these concepts on our experience. This power of contempt — the dilutive power of the sea — seeks not the abolition of reason, justice, happiness, pity. It seeks the power to dilute the weight of their pollution that govern our experience. The stream remains water mixed with the water of the sea, and in the mixing, the weight of the pollution dissipates, thus losing its meaning as pollution.
How does this dilutive will to power operate?
For this contempt to be a dilutive power, it must start with questions that may not have definitive answers. This contempt marshals questions that, in their repetition, dilute the weight of their received truths without destroying the importance of the categories themselves. They are simply emptied of received meaning so as to be experienced anew.
We should be able to see at this point in our reading of the Prologue why the tightrope over the nihilistic abyss is so critical for Zarathustra. We can only address our inherited Gnostic contempt with contempt. But if the latter contempt takes the same form as the inherited contempt, we are doomed to repetition of the same.
What Matters?
As Zarathustra proceeds, he changes the entire trajectory of the history of philosophy. One by one he questions each of the precious virtues and categories of Western philosophy from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle forward: happiness, reason, virtue, justice, and pity. With each he asks, ‘What matters?’ instead of ‘What is?’ and proceeds to call our inheritance ‘poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment’.
Zarathustra’s goal, in this repetition, is to break the common sense hold of these moral categories so that they can be experienced as open questions. More than this, the relationship of experience, existence, and virtues must be reimagined:
What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.
The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself!’
Zarathustra is not asking for an Eternal Recurrence of the Western Philosophical tradition as the pure repetition of the same. This canon would have us ask again and again ‘What is happiness?’ as a precursor to being truly happy. In other words, we must achieve the definitive answer before we can be happy. It is to make of prior happiness an illusion that only the philosopher can help us overcome. Experience, in this configuration of the philosophical question, is always a mistake that must be corrected and clarified by the answering of ‘What is?’ questions that set us straight.
To ask ‘What matters my happiness?’ is the descent into the virtue of happiness that makes our experience of it justification enough for its existence. To turn that experiential descent into Aristotle’s question of ‘What is happiness?’ as a precursor to being happy is to play the Gnostic game. The question can only be answered outside of living and experiencing happiness. We withdraw from the world of experience in order to ground experience on a definition of happiness — a definition that can only be discovered in the abstraction of vita contemplativa. The philosopher emerges from the anachoresis possessing the truth (in a clear propositional statement) and ready to ‘bestow and distribute’ it in the form of elenchus (Socrates), dialogs (Plato) and lectures (Aristotle).
This structure of truth and experience as gnosis envisions human experience as illusion and distraction that must be corrected and focused on ‘What is?’
More than this, to qualify as true, the answers must be definitive, exclusive, eternal, and therefore retrospective. There can be only one answer to ‘What is happiness?’ just as there can be only one answer to all the rest of the virtues. We must keep pushing to achieve the true (and retrospective) gnosis otherwise our experience will remain delusional.
This approach to truth is always retrospective and therefore a decadent going backward according to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Philosophy looks backward to what has always been true and thus, for Zarathustra, cannot be a bridge. If this were Zarathustra’s approach, he would merely be opposing one set of answers with another — a game of denial, dialectics, and zero-sum truth claims. Instead, he asks ‘What matters?’ not ‘What is?’ In this replacement, he is moving the Western philosophical tradition off its Socratic inheritance. If he were simply playing the Eternally Recurring game over again using the same rules, then experience would be trapped in a game of illusion and truth.
By asking ‘What matters?’ instead of ‘What is?’ Zarathustra gives primacy to existence and experience. Our virtues arise from experience. Zarathustra will drive this point home later in ‘On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain’.
Laughter and Madness
We must pause in the confidence of our reading at this moment to attend to the reaction of the herd to Zarathustra’s first speech. All of this will come crumbling down when we do so.
The crowd to whom Zarathustra preaches does not counter with ‘What is?’ objections to his ‘What matters?’ questions. They are not competing intellectuals in the tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Rather, Zarathustra is faced with laughter and derision like the madman of GS 125. It is not that the crowd wants to know what happiness, reason, justice, virtue, and pity really are. Nor do they assert their own answers to these vexing questions.
They simply don’t care:
When Zarathustra had spoken thus someone from the crowd cried out:
‘We have heard enough already about the tightrope walker, now let us see him too!’ And all the people laughed at Zarathustra.
This is not the laughter of the saint that is accompanied by weeping and growling with, for, and toward God. That laughter still has a nobility in it — the nobility of anachoresis in its initial energy that seeks withdrawal as serious contemplation.
This laughter is the laughter of Last Men who see spiritual seriousness and the deep need for transformation as madness. This seriousness still exists for the saint, and we will see this seriousness again when Zarathustra happens across the boy of ‘On the Tree on the Mountainside’. The Last Men only want entertainment, which has substituted a new seriousness for the old.
Thus, the very structure of thought and teaching must change for it to escape entertainment. But Zarathustra has not yet had this revelation, which will come at the end of the Prologue.
At this moment in the Prologue, Zarathustra has left us hanging over the abyss. The ‘What matters?’ questions end Prologue 3, but they are preceded by the metaphor of the sea as the power of the Übermensch to negate the weight of culture. If we were to stop our reading here, we would be left with a will to power that is only pure negation and dilution of all values. The revaluation of values would not be possible because all streams would be absorbed and all pollution would dissipate.
We need the speech of Prologue 4 that begins to construct the tightrope as a bridge over the abyss. We have only begun, through our new mode of contempt, to go under. We have not yet enabled the going under to be a crossing over.
4
Tightropes
We must descend now into the image of the tightrope, which is central to Nietzsche’s text. This is not a straightforward metaphor. It is the central metaphor of what it means for humanity to become its own ‘bridge and not a purpose’. It problematizes being and becoming by problematizing overcoming as a kind of motion without teleological purpose.
The first thing that we will need to notice is that Prologue 3 ends with our attention on the tightrope walker for whom the crowd has become impatient: ‘But the tightrope walker, believing that these words concerned him, got down to his work.’
The tightrope walker hears Zarathustra in a way that the crowd of Last Men do not and cannot. He does not laugh but ‘got down to his work’. The problem is that the seriousness of his work has become purely entertainment without the capacity for transformation. The tightrope walker intentionally hangs out in between the towers. To be permanently in-between is the meaning and purpose of his entertainment.
We shall return to this problem of desiring the permanence of the in-between, but let us first take notice that this section begins with a famous line:
Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman — a rope over an abyss.
Walking along the rope is a danger, but it is also the image of mankind’s bridge that is the Übermenschen. The rope cannot become a thing. It cannot become the permanent state. When it does become a thing, it becomes entertainment.
Equally problematic, however, is the rope being strung between a current state and a telos. If we are to understand the rope as a clear path to the other tower, then we are in danger of making the overman’s bridge into the answer to a new ‘What is?’ question. What is the ‘purpose’ to which we are headed? Who can provide the answer and under what circumstances will they discover it? And when they do discover it, how will this overman ‘bestow and distribute’ this truth as a gift?
The In-Between
The problem of the tightrope is twofold. On the one hand, it risks going backward that we have already seen in Prologue 3: ‘All creatures so far created something beyond themselves; and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?’
On the other hand, tightrope walking risks becoming mere entertainment for the herd of Last Men. The tightrope walker, when he ‘got down to his work’, simply finds himself hanging out in the middle neither trying to go backward or to move forward. This in-between state creates a dangerous fragility — so fragile that ‘Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a jester can spell its doom’.
Crossing Over and Going Under
The force of this part of Zarathustra’s Prologue is the relationship between love and untergehen (down-going). We cannot separate these concepts from the metaphor of the tightrope that is dominating this portion of the Prologue.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still.
What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.
We saw in Prologue 3 how contempt becomes a tightrope walk. We can only begin to lift the weight of the Gnostic contempt for the earth and its people by meeting it with contempt. But this new contempt is a will to power similar to that of the sea absorbing a polluted stream. This new contempt dilutes the pollution because it does not provide a stable and predictable environment where the stream can remain the stream.
Yet the stream’s water is still there, but it is no longer a stream. The elements of the pollution are still there, but they are diluted in such a way that their weight no longer matters. The sea is a dilutive power that enables remixing. It is destructive of that which flows into it, but that is not all that it is.
This is the great contempt that Zarathustra seeks. It negates without that negation merely replicating Gnostic contempt as emerging from a secret gnosis granted by God. Yet, as we saw in our commentary on Prologue 3, the sea contains its own danger for the transvaluation of values. If the sea remains merely the power to negate the cultural given, then it becomes a going under that does not cross over. Again, we see another moment in the work of Nietzsche where concepts cannot stand alone but must be read with and against each other.
Love and Down-Going
In Prologue 4, love and down-going become the new configuration of this great contempt that dilutes the weight of the culturally given. Just as down-going and crossing-over cannot be separated lest the experience of the Übermensch’s will to power becomes diluted into a will to pure nothingness, so too must all of this be joined to love in order for down-going to be a crossing-over.
I love those who do not know how to live unless by going under, for they are the ones who cross over.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore.
Zarathustra goes on for several more paragraphs beginning ‘I love the one who…’. Throughout the repetition, we find the connection between down-going and love that creates the bridge.
What is this love that Zarathustra insists on? Again, it is not the answer to a ‘What is?’ question of the contemplative philosopher. This love can only be expressed at this moment in Zarathustra’s journey as a repetition of paradoxical statements. In most of the repetitions, love leads to going-under by an intense engagement with something that ‘the one who loves’ embraces with passion:
I love the one who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to going under and an arrow of longing.
I love the one who does not hold back a single drop of spirits for himself, but wants instead to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides as a spirit over the bridge.
I love the one who makes of his virtue his desire and his doom: thus for the sake of his virtue he wants t love on and to live no more.
I love the one who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a hook on which his doom may hang.
Zarathustra loves those who love intensely because this love has the capacity to expose limits and to force a crossing 0ver out of the intensity of this love.
This is not a formula. This is not an ethical code or set of obligations. It is lightning. It is dynamite:
Behold, I am a herald of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called overman. —
Thus ends Zarathustra’s speech to the herd.
It falls flat.
Thus begins the intensification of Zarathustra’s own down-going.
It is quite possible that everything he has said so far is wrong.
5
Zarathustra pauses at this moment to take stock of the reaction of the crowd to this speech thus far. He decides on a different rhetorical strategy:
They have something of which they are proud. And what do they call that which makes them proud? Education they call it, it distinguishes them from goatherds.
For that reason they hate to hear the word ‘contempt’ applied to them. So I shall address their pride instead.
Zarathustra, at this moment, still conceived of his message as his gift to the people. The Übermensch is first and foremost the content of a spoken message that Zarathustra wishes to ‘bestow and distribute’ through preaching.
He wishes to be the Übermensch by speaking of the Übermensch. This is the gnosis that he believes that he has discovered in his anachoresis and he has set out to deliver.
By the end of his speech, which will spectacularly fail, he will realize the source of his failure as this anachoresis:
Too long apparently have I lived in the mountains, too much I listened to brooks and trees: now I speak to them as to goatherds.
The withdrawal to the mountain has been ‘too long’ and has shaped Zarathustra’s vision of himself as a redeemer. His redemption is tied to rhetorical strategies. He believes that redemption can come in the form of delivering a definitive message about the advent of der letzte Menschen, the Last Men. Appealing to their pride, he declares the coming of the Last Man as a warning.
This time, instead of falling flat as did the part of the speech on contempt, it rouses the energy of the crowd.
And here ended the first speech of Zarathustra, which is also called ‘The Prologue’, for at this point he was interrupted by the yelling and merriment of the crowd. ‘Give us this last human being, oh Zarathustra’ — thus they cried — ‘make us into these last human beings! Then we will make you the gift of the overman!’ All the people jubilated and clicked their tongues. But Zarathustra grew sad and said to his heart:
‘They do not understand me. I am not the mouth for these ears.’
We have here another vision of the death of God. The God who demands withdrawal and glorifying love also dispenses a secret knowledge (gnosis) to the solitary penitent. If and when this penitent decides to return to the world as the bearer of this gnosis as his gift, he can only conceive of that gift as a verbalized truth — i.e., the speaking of the gnosis — delivered to the herd in need of redemption.
The redeemer who gives the gnosis must take the form of this God: just as God gave him the gift of the gnosis, so does he in turn ‘bestow and distribute’ this gift to the people. This is equally an economy of glory: just as the redemptive God expects glory in return for the gnosis, so too does the human redeemer expect that same glory from his listeners. This is the eternally recurring structure of redemption-through-gnosis that we see dying in the Prologue.
How does this death occur?
If Nietzsche had thought of the death of God as only a fading away and a draining of spiritual energy, he would have left us with the end of the second part of Zarathustra’s speech. He would have left us with the herd’s reaction of indifference at the end of section 3: ‘“We have heard enough already about the tightrope walker, now let us see him too!” And all the people laughed at Zarathustra.’
Nietzsche does not end Zarathustra’s speech with this reaction. He ends it with glory: ‘Give us this last human being, oh Zarathustra’ — thus they cried — ‘make us into these last human beings! Then we will make you the gift of the overman!’
The glorifying power of the crowd has not died just at the glorifying power of the saint in the woods has not died. The herd of Last Men can still bestow glory, but it is bestowed as a misunderstanding.
This is the God that must die: the God whose message is destined to be misunderstood.
Each of the Gospels was written to correct a misunderstanding: the promised Messiah has been delivered, but instead of decisive victory, he died as a criminal on a cross. Our earliest Gospel (Mark) begins with exactly this pronouncement: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. When he emerges from the water of his baptism, the voice of God speaks directly and clearly to him: ‘And a voice came out of the heavens, “You are my Son, the beloved, of whom I am well pleased”’ (Mark 1:11).
This God, in the repetition of the misunderstandings we find throughout the Old and New Testament, singles out individuals as the vehicles for his message. ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Jesus asks of Saul on his way to Damascus to round up followers of ‘the Way’ (Acts 9:1-6). This is the frustration of a misunderstood God — a God who is destined to be misunderstood because He delivers redeeming truths to his creation in the form of words that seek to deliver clear truths — i.e., a gnosis.
The beauty and force of this final part of Zarathustra’s speech is the utter destruction of this version of redemption as the bestowal and distribution of a gnosis. It is a strange, and possibly intentional, reversal of Jesus’ fulfillment of the law through its overcoming. Zarathustra’s attempt at redemption is destroyed by being fulfilled when the crowd returns to him glory out of misunderstanding.
My soul is calm and bright as the morning mountains. But they believe I am cold, that I jeer, that I deal in terrible jests.
And now they look at me and laugh, and in laughing they hate me too. There is ice in their laughter.
The misunderstandings have exhausted this God’s gnostic power. This exhaustion is His death and the advent of the Last Man.
6 and 7
The crowd now turns its glorifying attention away from Zarathustra because the tightrope walker has begun his act. Glory is fickle.
Like the crowd below, our attention must be on the tightrope walker as an allegorical extension of Zarathustra’s pronouncement that ‘Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman.’ We are about to get our first demonstration of what the tightrope could mean in Nietzsche’s thought.
This scene also pulls forward two other moments from what has come before.
Work and Entertainment
First, the scene begins with the echo of the tightrope walker going to work: ‘For in the meantime the tightrope walker had begun his work…’ The last line of section 3 ended with reference to the tightrope walker’s work: ‘But the tightrope walker, believing that these words concerned him, got down to his work.’ The role of work is crucial to Nietzsche’s understanding of the Last Man. In his diagnosis and communication of the Übermensch to the herd, he equates work with non-strenuous entertainment: ‘One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one sees to it that the entertainment is not a strain.’ Even working for excessive wealth is not a motivation. At most, it prevents the burden of poverty: ‘One no longer becomes poor and rich: both are too burdensome. Who wants to rule anymore? Who wants to obey anymore? Both are too burdensome.’
Here we have one of the crucial features of the Last Man: the unwillingness to bear burdens. The Last Man cannot be a camel, and therefore will not become a lion.
Crossing Over
Second, the scene echoes the movement Zarathustra lays out for how one would cross the tightrope strung between animal and Übermensch from section 4: ‘A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still.’ To be on the tightrope is to embrace danger, but the Übermensch seeks perpetual and purposeful motion even if that motion is not always uniform and smooth: crossing, on-the-way, looking back, shuddering and standing still are all part of this motion. As always with Nietzsche, the emphasis is on the directional flow of energy. Active and reactive powers will become prominent concepts in the Genealogy, and Deleuze’s resurrection of Nietzsche will elevate those concepts in his reading.
At this moment in the story, however, these concepts are not present. All we have is the movement from the metaphorical tightrope ‘fastened between animal and Übermensch’ and the literal tightrope that is where the tightrope walker goes to work as an entertainer.
Tightrope as Being
With those two echoes established — work as non-burdensome entertainment and the need to cross over — we can look at what Zarathustra says to the dying tightrope walker, who has fallen to his death at Zarathustra’s feet:
‘You made your vocation out of danger, and there is nothing contemptible about that. Now you perish of your vocation, and for that I will bury you with my own hands.’
The tightrope walker starts by embracing a dangerous venturing onto the tightrope, but in the repetition of the dangerous step, his danger became ossified as a vocation.
This sequence is crucial to understanding Nietzsche’s vision of psychology as an effect, not an original cause. Momentary actions and reactions, when repeated often enough, become ingrained habits — i.e., a psychology. This is how the ‘man of ressentiment’ of the Genealogy arises. The repetition of ressentiment over and over as the conditioned reaction to events become habits and, eventually, a subject.
The consequence that will become clearer as we proceed in our reading is that Nietzsche’s worldview does not see things; it sees motions. Things — like psychologized subjects and their vocation and emotions — arise from the interaction of forces. These forces do not have original content that gives them prior meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose come later if motions become habituated and regularized. Thus, the man of ressentiment is nothing other than the habituation of reactive energies that settle into the self and become its habituated psychology.
This is worth dwelling on for a moment. Let’s look at one of the crucial sections of ressentiment from the Genealogy. In this passage, we see that ‘noble souls’ are not immune from ressentiment. What they do with it is what matters.
For the ressentiment of the noble human being, when it does appear in him, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and it therefore does not poison: on the other hand it does not appear at all in countless cases, whereas it is unavoidable in all who are weak and impotent. Not being able to take seriously for any length of time one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of plastic, reconstructive, healing and even forgetting-inducing power. [1; translation modified]
We need to understand how time and motion work in this passage because it will help us understand the nuances involved in Nietzsche’s use of the figure of the tightrope in Zarathustra.
We can start with Nietzsche’s use of ‘poison’ as a purely temporal term. Ressentiment does not poison the noble soul because it is not allowed to linger when (and if) it occurs. If it does arise, ressentiment dissipates rather quickly not because the noble soul is impotent, but because it is powerful. It is a strong and full of energies that dissipate, reconstruct, heal, and actively forget.
The noble soul can be seen has having aspects of the sea that dissipates the polluted stream that we saw earlier in Zarathustra’s speech.
The tightrope walker does not have this power. He has become a mere entertainer for the herd of Last Men. Yet, the tightrope walker, like the saint of section 2, has retained something of the Übermensch. These characters clearly are not Last Men. They are two of many that we will meet who have nobility within their souls but the repetitive activation of that nobility has lead to its perversion: the saint is stuck in the words worshiping a God that requires all love to be directed to His glory; the tightrope walker has made danger his vocation and become fragile because of it. ‘Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning; a jester can spell its doom.’
The fact of walking a tightrope is not the problem here. It is dangerous, ‘and there is nothing contemptible in that.’ The problem is that the tightrope has become the tightrope walker’s being — his vocation — just as a permanent anachoresis has become the vocation and being of the saint.
Both characters have ceased to walk the tightrope. The saint because he has sought Being in the gnostic love of God; the tightrope walker because he sought Being by turning the danger of tightrope walking into the vocation of an entertainer. He has become a static in-between that entertains. He is not the overman because he lacks the motivation to cross over. The tightrope walker resembles the shuddering and hesitation, but it has turned it into professional entertainment.
Yet, in both cases, we have once-noble souls whose nobility has atrophied because they no longer seek limits and the overcoming of limits. While they are not Last Men, they are not capable of transforming themselves or the herd. They no longer push the limits of Being because they seek the restful equilibrium of Being as a permanent endpoint.
Teaching Being
Zarathustra, at this moment, is himself stuck in the problem of Being. He still imagines himself within the framework of a teacher. This teacher still desires the speech that transforms by revealing a secret truth — a gnosis. It is a gnosis that wants to bestow Being as the truth of existence:
I want to teach humans the meaning of their being, which is the overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being’.
But I am still far away from them, and I do not make sense to their senses. For mankind I am still a midpoint between a fool and a corpse.
The overman remains fundamental content that Zarathustra wishes to deliver as a teaching of Being. He has not yet come to the realization that this mode of the overman must itself be overcome.
He is still at ‘a midpoint between a food and a corpse’.
8, 9 and 10
Rest, Down-Going, Overcoming
There are at least two instances in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where Zarathustra has a moment of deep tiredness that yields a revelation. Both occur as the sun is straight overhead.
The first moment of deep tiredness and revelation comes at the end of the Prologue after Zarathustra, carrying the dead tightrope walker, has left behind the herd of Last Men watching the show.
Then he laid the dead man into a hollow tree — for he wanted to protect him from the wolves — and he laid himself down head first at the tree, upon the earth and the moss. And soon he fell asleep, weary in body but with a calm soul.
Zarathustra’s body is weary but his soul is calm. Hollingdale’s translation will call his soul ‘at rest’. Nietzsche is insistent on this restfulness and where it comes from: it is squeezed out of the intensity of the Prologue and Zarathustra’s failure as a conventional teacher of the doctrine of the Übermensch. ‘But I am still far away from them, and I do not make sense to their senses.’
Like the camel, which we will see in a moment, Zarathustra has become exhausted by the weight of the burden he carries: the physical burden of carrying the dead tightrope walker, but also the soul’s burden of bearing the weight of humanity’s redemption.
In the midst of his soul’s tiredness, Zarathustra achieves an emptiness that allows ‘a new truth’ to dawn on him as a pure revelation:
Long Zarathustra slept and not only the dawn passed over his face but the morning as well. At last, however, he opened his eyes: amazed Zarathustra looked into the woods and the silence, amazed he looked into himself. Then he stood up quickly, like a seafarer who all at once sees land, and he rejoiced, for he saw a new truth.
For readers of Nietzsche, the echoes of GS 382 should be clear. Zarathustra is having the experience of great health. For convenience, I’ll copy the passage from 382 that I’ve already cited at the outset of this commentary. We should recall that in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche will reproduced nearly all of 382 to explain how Zarathustra is the ‘type’ that embodies this great health:
And now, after we’ve been underway for a long time in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, more courageously perhaps than is prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and damaged but, as mentioned, healthier than one would like to give us credit for, dangerously healthy, healthy again and again — now it seems as though, as a reward for this, we have a yet undiscovered land before us, whose boundaries no one has yet surveyed, something beyond all previous lands and corners of the ideal, a world so superabundant in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible and divine, that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess are beside themselves — oh, that nothing is capable of sating us anymore!
What is this truth that arrives within this profound tiredness, without the slightest bit of effort? It is not a truth that can be preached as Zarathustra had tried at first. Such a truth would be codified and teachable. It would have been a set of definitive commandments and obligations engraved in tablets or written on papyrus. Its delivery would have been from the clear voice of God.
That is not the new truth that is revealed to Zarathustra. What is revealed is simply this: that a form of truth that can be preached is no longer the right mode of truth for the present times. The power of the sea and the ability to navigate it without knowing exactly where one is going is the experience of this great health— only that it is ‘beyond all previous lands and corners of the ideal’.
The great health that seeks a beyond is the new truth. Nietzsche is at pains to find a way to represent this new truth without it falling back into a new gnosis. Thus, the redirection of energy out of the soul at rest will be a break not only with a past truth as definitive content, but a break with the way in which truth is supposed to be experienced — i.e., as doctrines, codes, and laws that can be preached to a crowd who must listen and be transformed by the delivery of truth from a privileged speaker.
Saul’s Conversion
Let’s pause for a moment to dwell on paradigmatic moments of revelation and conversion that bear a tremendous weight on Western culture. Nietzsche is clear that Zarathustra’s revelation is very different than that of Saul on the way to Damascus to round up followers of ‘the Way’.
Saul is not tired. He is energized and ‘still breathing threats against the disciples of the Lord’ in his pursuit of the Law. His revelation and conversion requires this energy to be knocked out of him suddenly and violently by a blinding light and a clear voice. Saul receives definitive clarity in this moment of revelation: ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do’ (Acts 9:5-6). By end of this first of three tellings of Saul’s conversion in Acts, we have him delivering a definitive truth: ‘Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving [symbibázō, ‘to grasp a truth by intertwining ideas needed to "get on board," i.e. come to the necessary judgment’] that this was the Christos’ (Strong’s Concordance).
Because of the historical consciousness of Christianity, Saul’s conversion must be the conversion to a definitive truth that Jesus was, in fact, the longed for Messiah. Because this truth is definitive and because it requires a complete change of meaning for Saul’s life, it had to be suddenly and violently revealed. Conversion here is a change of direction that starts with a revealed truth and comes with a clearly articulated task: convert as many Gentiles as possible in the time that remains before the eschaton.
It should be clear that this is not at all like Zarathustra’s revelation and conversion.
Revelation, Conversion, Disciples
At this moment of profound tiredness in Zarathustra, this mode of experiencing ‘great health’ is the God that is dead. This is Zarathustra’s revelation that comes to him from no Being and without the clarity of a voice. It arrives only as ‘It dawned on me’. This dawn arrives after the death of God has been presented as an obvious fact: ‘Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!’ (Prologue 2).
Yet a new truth has been revealed. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is clear on this point: ‘Between dawn and dawn a new truth came to me.’ What is this truth if it is not the commandment of a clear voice? What is the revelation of a new truth that comes after God has been declared (obviously) dead?
Nietzsche is playing with patterns of revelation and conversion because he wants truth and values to survive a world without God.
What are these patterns?
Like Siddhartha Gautama becoming the Buddha, the revelation comes as an insight that will famously struggle to avoid becoming a teachable doctrine while still retaining its truth value. This revelation as insight is much closer to what Nietzsche is describing as Zarathustra’s experience.
Like the Jesus of the Gospels, the revelation requires followers. ‘Come after me [duete opisō mou], and I will make you fishers of men’ (Mark 1:17). Like this initial call of Jesus to his first disciplines, the call is without definitive and codified content. What it means to be ‘fishers of men’ cannot be understood at this moment of the call. It can only be understood later (metanoia) and only in the act of following and being open to what will be revealed.
Like Mark’s Jesus, Zarathustra’s calling is simply a luring away of others (who can hear the call) from the familiar with only a vague promise about something that is yet to be understood. ‘But I need living companions who will follow me… To lure men away from the herd — that is why I have come’ (Prologue 9).
Unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, however, no apostolic lineage is sought by Zarathustra. He does not wish to leave behind a definitive truth that can be passed down through the ages as codified doctrine. At every turn, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra avoids permanent statements about truths, never more clearly than in the final words of his Prologue: ‘And if one day my wisdom should desert me — ah, it loves to fly away! — then may my pride too fly with my folly!’
Like Saul becoming Paul, a mission is revealed that requires the missionary to move through space and time in a perpetual transit. Unlike Saul (and Mary in Luke’s Gospel), Zarathustra’s mission must begin without a voice telling him exactly what he is to do. ‘What should I do, Lord?’ The Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go to Damascus; there you will be told concerning all the things that have been appointed for you to do’ (Acts 22:10).
Saul’s God is still the God of the Hebrews: the one who suddenly comes delivering clear instruction to his prophets who, in turn, deliver the message to the people. In the case of Saul, however, God says through the voice of his Son that he has been misunderstood: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ (Acts 9:4).
This misunderstood God — the God who has traditionally spoken truths to his prophets who pass them onto the people who will likely misunderstand what is said — is one of the deaths of God. It is the death of a mode of communicating and experiencing truth as definitive statements with clear obligations and laws issued by an unquestioned authority.
All that we know at this point is that the revelation will be both destructive and creative: ‘Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? Him who smashes their tablet of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker — but he is the creator.’
We are now at the heart of Nietzsche’s moral challenge that runs throughout his work: how does the necessity of relentless No-saying as the destruction of a toxic culture remain Yes-saying so one can avoid becoming a ‘man of ressentiment’?
We will pick this up in the continuation of this commentary when I turn to ‘Zarathustra’s Speeches’. But for the moment, let’s land this commentary at a concrete reversal of the relationship between wisdom and pride.
Wisdom and Pride
The Prologue ends by turning back to its beginning — Zarathustra’s meeting of the saint in the woods and the return of the animal companions of his anachoresis on the mountain:
‘I found it more dangerous among human beings than among animals; Zarathustra walks dangerous paths. May my animals guide me!’
When Zarathustra said this he recalled the words of the saint in the woods, sighed and spoke thus to his heart:
‘May I be wiser! May I be wise from the ground up like my snake!
But I ask the impossible, and so I ask instead of my pride that it always walk with my wisdom!
And if someday my wisdom abandons me — oh it loves to fly away! — may my pride then fly away with my folly!’
— Thus began Zarathustra’s going under.
What are the words of the saint that Zarathustra recalls? It must be the words that call Zarathustra away from sojourning among the humans and to re-embrace his anachoresis. When Zarathustra rejects this advice, the saint implores him to bear himself among humanity as the camel who bears their burdens.
‘Give them nothing,’ said the saint. ‘Rather take something off them and help them carry it — that will do them the most good, if only it does you good!’
Zarathustra does not reject this wisdom of the saint. Rather, he rejects its alliance with pride. The saint has found his gnosis and thus his pride in serving God away from humanity. But Zarathustra is on the way to a rejection of gnosis as the basis of pride. He will live the great health that sees ‘wisdom’ and ‘pride’ as fleeting companions. ‘And if someday my wisdom abandons me — oh it loves to fly away! — may my pride then fly away with my folly!’
Footnotes
[1] The Genealogy of Morality, I.10, Adrian Del Caro trans., Stanford University Press, 2014, page 231.