Reading Zarathustra: The Speeches of Zarathustra
On the Bestowing Virtue
Let’s start the commentary on ‘The Speeches of Zarathustra’ at the end. At the end of Book I, we find Zarathustra completely disavowing everything that he has elaborated up to this point.
‘Indeed, I counsel you to go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you.’ (59) [1]
This is a strange disavowal from someone who has spent a great deal of time delivering monologues to his ‘disciples’. Why would he tell his disciples to not only leave him, but to ‘be ashamed of him’?
What exacly is Zarathustra disavowing?
First, teaching: ‘One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only. And why would you not want to pluck at my wreath?’
Second, believers: ‘You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra! You are my believers, but what matter all believers!’
Third, reverence for the teacher: ‘You revere me, but what if your reverence falls down some day? Beware that you are not killed by a statue!’
Fourth, disciples and followers: ‘Alone I go now, my disciples! You also should go now, and alone! Thus I want it.’
The reversals and complications of the figure of Jesus should be unmistakable in this final section of the first part. In fact, Peter’s denial is undone at the same time that Zarathustra reverses Jesus’ admonition ‘For whoever wants to save his life [psychēn, ψυχὴν] will lose it; whoever loses his life [psychēn, ψυχὴν] because of me and because of the gospel will save it’ (Mark 8:35):
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you. (59)
We shall have to return to exactly how Nietzsche is intervening into Christian temporality with these two reversals, but for the moment I would like to focus on the requirement that the disciples deny the teacher.
This active denial should be juxtaposed with the earlier line of not turning Zarathustra into a statue. Belief, reverence, teaching, friendship — in a word ‘disciples’ — must be embraced. Zarathustra remains the one who teaches the doctrine of the Übermensch, and he has gathered disciples as the audience for his speeches. But one must deny one’s own discipleship if one is to become an Übermensch.
This is the rhythm of transformation that revalues existing values:
Indeed, with different eyes, my brothers, will I seek my lost ones; with a different love will I love you then.
And one day again you shall become my friends and children of a single hope; then I shall be with you a third time, to celebrate the great noon with you.
And that is the great noon, where human beings stand at the midpoint of their course between animal and overman and celebrate their way to evening as their highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning. (59)
Rhythms and cycles of discipleship and denial: the cycling of morning-noon-evening: love of enemies becomes new forms of friendship… This is not Boethius’ Wheel of Fortune in the Consolation of Philosophy that turns its mundane sameness independent of human action.
This wheel teaches consolation, acceptance, and resignation.
This wheel teaches an experience of impermanence that still wishes for permanence.
This wheel establishes a fundamental truth of the world that there is no permanent justice. There is only Fortune, which is fickle, impervious to merit, and devoid of any concern for justice.
I still holds onto the wish that the world is not built this way.
This wheel teaches ressentiment and nihilism.
When I hear a ‘Buddhist’ define the fundamental teaching of the Buddha as ‘impermanence’, it is usually stated as resignation, and it triggers a sadness. It is the ‘consolation of lady philosophy’ that sees Fortune as fickle and the world as unjust.
Impermanence is a belief that still wishes for permanence.
Impermanence is a denial that cannot release itself from being a denial.
Thus, to start with impermanence is to start with No-saying as the path to ressentiment. Thus impermanence leaves a nihilistic gap in the self that this type of Buddhist will try to justify as the consolation and goal of ‘no-self’.
This is the impermanence of the tightrope walker who has become the mere performer of a skill. It is an impermanence that drains energy and the will to power from the ‘no-self’ subject because in the denying of permanence it denies the very possibility of meaning: ‘Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a jester can spell its doom’ (Prologue 7, page 12).
But the meaning that is being denied is permanent meaning. In other words, the Buddhist who starts and ends with impermanence holds onto meaning as something that should be permanent and then denies this permanence. They never get to the point of being able to imaging and experience meaning untethered from the desire for permanence.
Even though Nietzsche will tell us that Zarathustra is the teacher of impermanence, Eternal Recurrence is not a doctrine solely of impermanence. With Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche utterly rejected this vision of time and meaning. He does not, however, reject the cyclical nature of existence. Nor does he reject the possibility of meaning in the world. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does not start from impermanence because he does not want to start with denial — this would be No-saying and the path to ressentiment.
He does not even start from being and becoming. The overman demonstrates neither Being nor Becoming. Those are not terms that would make sense because they impose a binary that only allows an oscillation between the two poles — the walking of a tightrope that gets stuck in between the fixed towers.
He starts from transformation, which is not the impermanence of the knee-jerk Buddhist that I have been describing. We need to treat transformation as transformation and not as a desire for permanent tightrope walking. Nor is transformation is reducible to change, which easily becomes the passive riding on Lady Philosophy’s Wheel of Fortune.
I wish to unpack this because Nietzsche is driving us toward a different mode of experience as he works through Zarathustra’s struggles with teaching and becoming an overman.
To begin this unpacking, I need to descend into Entarung, degeneration.
Entarung
Just before Zarathustra is about to aggressively send his disciples away from him, he draws a distinction between two kinds of selfishness. Both kinds are a gathering of power in the soul: ‘You compel all things to and into yourselves…’ (56)
The first kind, the preferable kind of great health, is driven by ‘a bestowing love’. This compelling of ‘all things to and into yourselves’ flows them back out again ‘so that they may gush back from your well as the gifts of your love’ (56).
The second kind is Entarung, which is translated as degeneration by the major English translators: Kaufmann, Hollingdale, and Del Caro. This degeneration results from a selfishness that gets bottled up in the self as the ‘I’ that only experiences itself as ego — not as a physiologically informed body woven into the world. This degeneration of the self to the ego cuts itself off from the body and thus from the world. It seeks an exit from the world: ‘But a horror to us is this degenerating sense which speaks: “Everything for me”’ (56).
This is the problem of the saint whom we met in Prologue 2, but it is also many of the other characters we meet in the Speeches — the hinter worldly, the teachers of virtue, the despisers of the body, the boy of ‘On the Tree on the Mountainside’. These souls are strong in the sense that they ‘compel all things to and into yourselves’, but they only wish for their own virtue as their own possession. Each demonstrates the different traps set by this composition of truth, teaching, virtue, love, and the self.
It is too easy to say that this selfishness must return to the world, although this is crucial to Zarathustra’s advocacy of overcoming. It cannot remain bottled up, though from time to time withdrawal may be the right strategy. ‘Tell me, my brothers: what do we regard as bad and worst? Is it not degeneration? — And we always diagnose degeneration where the bestowing soul is absent’ (56).
Great health must be a ‘bestowing love’. Zarathustra will complicate, immediately, what love is and what it means to bestow this love. We have already seen the failure of clearly articulated truths: ‘Behold, I teach you the overman!’ utterly fails to land with the herd of Last Men. We have already seen that this is one of the deaths that God must suffer: the death of the God who speaks clearly and is thus destined to be misunderstood.
We can also see this as another form of the tightrope that Zarathustra wishes to walk between No-saying and Yes-saying. How to keep this great health from ossifying into a self that gathers all things only to itself? We’ve already seen how the tightrope walker is a problematic figure who ends up being a mere entertainer for the herd.
Walking the tightrope is not an answer. It does not bestow love. It provides entertainment in the form of a performer who will eventually be scapegoated by the herd.
Parables
How can the overman speak effectively is equally a part of the problem of ‘the bestowing virtue’.
Zarathustra will speak in parables:
Parables are all names of good and evil: they do not express, they only hint. A fool who wants to know of them!
Pay attention, my brothers, to every hour where your spirit wants to speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue. (57)
What is a parable? It is not a clearly articulated truth: ‘they only hint’. It does not speak clearly because it may not be understood clearly by the speaker. It contains truth but not a codified doctrine. It must be grappled with by the listener as well as the speaker. Its truth unfolds over the course of time because it must be grappled with. That truth may change as it moves.
Mark says exactly this about parables. When Jesus answers his disciples’ question about why he speaks in parables, he says, ‘so that seeing they might not perceive, and hearing they might not understand’ (4:12). Clear communication only leads to misunderstanding, which easily leads to degeneration of the spirit of the speaker. Even Jesus, who has been told very clearly by God at the moment of his baptism, ‘You are my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased’ (1:11), finds himself in doubt about his mission: ‘take this cup from my hand’ (14:36) and ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (15:34). Are these the actual words of Jesus? Did the historical Jesus believe that he was the chosen Messiah, and did he too misunderstand what God meant by the Messiah and the kind of redemption that would be revealed?
Did God too change His mind or was He misunderstood?
Rest
Degeneration is, therefore, intimately connected to this composition of truth and virtue as clear statements that can be delivered to others by a teacher.
It seeks an end of time as a state of permanent rest. It turns teachers into statues, and it turns truth into rest. It seeks to resolve all becoming into being as a state of pure stasis and ‘sleep’.
We see this early in the Speeches when Zarathustra speaks of the Teachers of Virtue:
The meaning of his wisdom is: wake in order to sleep well. And truly, if life had no meaning and if I had to choose nonsense, then to me too this would be the worthiest nonsense I would choose.
Now I understand clearly what was once sought before all else when teachers of virtue were sought. Good sleep was sought and poppy-blossomed virtues to boot!
For all these highly praised wise men and teachers, wisdom was the sleep without dreams: they knew no better meaning of life. (19)
Zarathustra then declares, ‘But their time is up.’ This sleep is the degeneration of the great health that seeks its own virtue in a restful acquisition of the truth.
This is the kind of Buddhism that begins and ends with impermanence and lands it as a permanent embrace of ‘no self’. Its enlighenment ‘wakes in order to sleep well’.
This is also modern Stoicism that seeks ataraxia.
Zarathustra seeks a different kind of truth: one that can only be experienced as revelation — ‘Between dawn and dawn a new truth has come to me’ — and bestowed without recourse to doctrinal statements.
This kind of truth is transformative. It will turn friends into enemies and vice versa. It will ask for denial from its disciples so that teachers don’t become statues. It will, above all, never let love ossify into a single thing: ‘with a different love will I love you then’ (59).
This brings us to one of the central truths of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: the relationship of ‘the companion’.
Companions
To understand companions, we must return to the end of the Prologue when Zarathustra has received his revelation:
It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones — not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want.
Instead I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves — wherever I want.
It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions! Zarathustra should not become the shepherd and dog of a herd! (Prologue 9)
As we’ve seen, this need for companions turns into the creation and disavowal of disciples. This trajectory through the Speeches must be seen not as the trajectory of a correction — for that would mean revealing a doctrinal truth. Rather, Book I can be read as a long meditation on what it means to be a companion.
The companion is not reducible to friends, enemies, or neighbors. None of these terms captures and concentrates its meaning. Companionship precedes these relationships because it precedes ossified definitions. It is a mode of togetherness that is committed to continuous transformation through the preservation of great health in each other. ‘Instead I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves’. When Zarathustra appends ‘wherever I want’ to the end of this phrase, he is indicating that companionship is not without leadership, but this leadership should never ossify into a permanent state of teaching. Let us repeat: ‘You revere me, but what if your reverence falls down someday? Beware that you are not killed by a statue!’ (59).
The leader does not seek a permanent state of his own being as he bestower of a new gnosis. Nietzsche has been at pains in all of Book I to show problematic forms of leadership that gather permanent disciples around ossified truths.
When those disciples prove unworthy — as they always do — various paths to Gnosticism are available:
The teachers of virtue who seek a final resting place of the soul in spiritual sleep. There is no great health in their souls: ‘At peace with God and neighbor, thus good sleep demands. And at peace too with the neighbor’s devil! Otherwise he will be at your house at night’ (18). [2]
The hinterworldly who have become spiritually tired and abandoned the earth to seek their reward and salvation in a realm beyond the Earth. ‘Weariness that wants its ultimate with one great leap, with a death leap; a poor unknowing weariness that no longer even wants to will: that created all gods and hinterworlds’ (21).
The saint who has withdrawn from humanity’s imperfection and taken God with him. ‘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’ (4).
The boy sitting at the foot of the tree on the mountain who is trapped in the purely vertical orientation of the soul and is cut off from companionship. ‘I no longer trust myself since aspiring to the heights, and no one trusts me anymore — how did this happen?’ (29).
The preachers of death who want to bring a permanent end to all suffering. ‘There are the consumptives of the soul: scarcely are they born when they begin to die and long for the teachings of weariness and resignation’ (31).
Each of these represents a trap that the gnostic orientation to truth, teaching, virtue, love, and redemption can lead to. It ossifies companionship and cuts off its power of orienting oneself to great health. They also represent the traps that N0-saying can lead to when it abandons Yes-saying and feels good about N0-saying as self-justification.
These traps represent a repetitive dynamic — an unhealthy Eternal Recurrence of the Same — that oscillates between heroes and scapegoats. Nietzsche may have been the first to formulate this dynamic with rigor. He certainly beat René Girard to it.
Heroes and Scapegoats
Book II will take up the fundamental problem of how to redeem humanity from the desire for revenge. Book I remains preliminary to that. Its fundamental problem, as we’ve already seen in the prologue, is the problem of the teacher as the hero. Throughout ‘The Speeches of Zarathustra’ of Book I, we will find Zarathustra undoing the desire for heroes. It will be a critique of glory and the problems of how the state and the economy is set up to oscillate between victims and heroes.
The State
‘On the New Idol’, which is the State, Zarathustra weaves his way from the State as the platform for heroes, but this platform equally requires the population to weaken itself so that it needs the hero:
It [the State] wants to gather heroes and honorable men around itself, this new idol! Gladly it suns itself in the sunshine of your good conscience — the cold monster!
…
State I call it, where all the drinkers of poison, the good and the bad; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad; state, where the slow suicide of everyone is called — ‘life’. (35)
‘On the New Idol’ is followed immediately by ‘On the Flies of the Marketplace’. Here Nietzsche is paralleling his critique of the State with an equally trenchant critique of the market-driven economy.
The one speech leads into the other through the figure of transitions. ‘On the New Idol’ ends with a transitional statement:
There, where the state ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and irreplaceable melody.
There, where the state ends — look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman? — (36)
Lest we be tempted to see the market-driven economy as the bridge, Nietzsche immediately turns to his critique of this option using a parallel structure of transition — i.e., where one thing ends and another begins:
Where solitude ends, there begins the marketplace; and where the marketplace begins, there begins too the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies. (36)
We must be careful with establishing the absolute value of solitude as an end point. We already saw in section 2 of the Prologue Zarathustra’s encounter with the Gnostic saint. He has withdrawn, and in his withdrawal he has taken God with him. His love for God has become incompatible with a love and companionship of humanity.
This is the love that Zarathustra wishes to transform so that it can reorient to the earth and its inhabitants. This is the love of a God who is dead. We should not read it as a univocally joyous declaration.
The Marketplace
In ‘On the Flies 0f the Marketplace’ we find one of Zarathustra’s earliest statements about the problem of revenge:
Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee where raw, strong air blows!
Flee into your solitude! You have lived too long near the small and the pitiful. Flee their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge. (37)
The solution is not ‘to raise your arm against them anymore! They are innumerable, and it is not your lot to be a shoo-fly’ (38). To be a shoo-fly and to ‘raise your arm against them’ would mean perpetuating the cycle of revenge. This cycle is too baked into how experience has been divided up into an oscillation between heroes and victims.
The modern instantiation of this would be taking to social media to try and combat the cesspool of communication that is happening there. You’re not going to solve that problem by embracing the medium as its shoo-fly.
Again, however, the solution is not permanent solitude. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does not seek permanent solutions, nor does he seek permanent in-betweens. He seeks transformation and ‘overcoming’. This is very different than the permanence of the in-between that we saw with the tightrope walker. To try to embrace the in-between as the solitude of a permanent balancing act is simply to become an entertainer of the herd. One cannot be a creator of new values as a performer, which is the substance of ‘On the Flies of the Marketplace’: ‘The w0rld revolves around the inventors of new values: — it revolves invisibly. But the people and fame revolve around actors: thus is the course of the world’. This becomes a clear statement against the economy of the hero:
Spirit the actor has, but little conscience of spirit. He always believes in whatever makes people believe most strongly — believe in him!
Tomorrow he will have a new belief and the day after tomorrow an even newer one. He has hasty senses, like the people, and a fickle ability to scent. (37)
The echoes of the tightrope walker should be clear — ‘you have made danger your vocation, but now you perish of your vocation’. The actor who sets forward to differentiate himself from the crowd must have ‘spirit’, but this is easily attenuated because it is part of an economy that reproduces entertainment as the setting up and knocking down of heroes.
The cycle is driven by the crowd’s need for scapegoats: ‘they want blood from you in all innocence, their bloodless souls demand blood — and they sting away in all innocence’. They do so because, at bottom, ‘their narrow souls think: “All great existence is guilty”’(38).
Here we have Nietzsche capturing René Girard’s cycle of mimetic desire and scapegoating several decades in advance. The crowd believes in its own innocence, yet its innocence fuels a cycle of revenge that sets up heroes only to knock them down.
Scapegoats and Neighbors
Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the heroes-victims-scapegoats cycle draws in the notion of ‘the neighbor’. Zarathustra will take this up directly in a later speech ‘On Love of the Neighbor’. At this moment, we have a preview of that speech, and its focus is on living in the proximity of this economy of heroes and scapegoats.
Yes my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors, for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you and would like much to suck your blood.
Your neighbors will always be poisonous flies; that which is great in you — that itself must make them more poisonous and evermore fly-like. (39)
Zarathustra repeats his earlier admonition at this point: ‘Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where raw, strong air blows! It is not your lot to be a shoo-fly. —’ (39).
As Zarathustra will repeat later, the problem of the neighbor is a problem of proximity. But proximity to what? It is the hollowing out of the great health that marks the strong souls. Living within this toxicity is a slow erosion of that physiological strength: ‘You are no stone, but already you have come hollow from many drops. You will shatter and burst still from many drops’ (38).
This is how the toxic culture of the Last Man works: it hollows one out through its slow drip of the never-ending cycle of setting up heroes and knocking them down. This cycle guarantees the perpetual victimhood of the crowd that will always need scapegoats and thus always need to see it self as victimized.
Living within it creates a Catch-22 for the soul of great health. We can try to be a hero, but we will be so only to the extent that the crowd allows us to be an actor, entertainer, and performer. Our creativity that attempts to create new values will not find fertile ground.
The question present itself: is anachoresis — withdrawal into solitude — our only option? Yes and no.
Yes: Zarathustra advocates withdrawal into solitude as a way to escape this toxicity.
No: As we saw with the saint in Prologue 2, this withdrawal easily becomes a form of passive nihilism — i.e., a Gnostic denigration of the world and its inhabitants.
Zarathustra will continue in the speeches of Book I to address all the traps that this toxic culture sets: ‘On the Teachers of Virtue’, ‘On the Hinterworldly’, ‘On the Despisers of the Body’, et cetera. In each speech we find Zarathustra confronting the dead-ends of the cycle that offer themselves as exists.
To summarize: the speeches of Book I present us with the difficulty of envisioning overcoming and redemption that doesn’t end up reproducing the cycle of heroes-victims-scapegoats that is the toxic slow drip of a decadent culture. This culture has become so toxic that its economy — how it works — may not be able to support the Übermensch. It has no concept of its own overcoming because it can only experience its Eternally Recurring economy of sublimated revenge: heroes are set up to be scapegoats; and the crowd must perpetually reinvent itself as a victim that needs ever-new scapegoats.
The desire for ‘microaggressions’ is our new mode of perpetually reinventing ourselves as a crowd of victims.
This is our modern degeneration.
Lifting the Weight of Culture
We have arrived at the central concern of Nietzsche’s work, at least for the purposes of Time as Practice: how to lift the weight of a toxic culture to make overcoming that culture possible? This requires strong N0-saying, but therein lies the danger: how does No-saying not swamp ‘the immense unlimited yes- and amen-saying’? This problem is, I believe, the heart of Zarathustra. It was the fundamental problem that Nietzsche sought to overcome — how to take all the moral baggage that has been foisted upon those of great health and lift it just enough to break its unhealthy cycles and find new capacities for moral experience.
How is this weight to be lifted?
It cannot start with impermanence as the N0-saying denial of permanence.
It must be a deep engagement with how that weight is created and loaded onto ourselves in the first place. The lift comes from a descent into how our experience is created by the piling on of this weight.
We have to start with the body because it is the bearer of this weight. We must start with how each of us has been made to carry the weight of our own ‘I’.
We have arrived at Eternal Recurrence.
On the Despisers of the Body
Midway through his speech ‘On the Hinterworldy’, Zarathustra begins a transition to an alternate mode of experience that will separate the self from the ego. The self will become the reorientation to the body and thus a reorientation to the Earth. This orientation will be captured in his repeated use of ‘blood’.
Near the end of that speech, Zarathustra connects the sickness of the hinterworldly experience back to and earlier speech, ‘On the Preachers of Death’:
Indeed, not in hinterworlds and redeeming blood drops, but instead they too believe most in the body, and their own body is to them their thing in itself.
But to them it is a sickly thing, and gladly they would jump out of their skin. Hence they listen to the preachers of death and they preach of hinterworlds themselves. (‘On the Hinterworldly’, 22)
Zarathustra is elaborating the experiential cycle that leads to the denigration of the body as the denigration of the world. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche will write of the need for ‘the acetic priest’ whose great strength drives ressentiment deeper and deeper into the souls of his flock. We are getting a preview of that dynamic in this brief glimpse into the reinforcing relationship between the hinterworldly and the preachers of death.
As always for Nietzsche, experience is a cycle of reactions to physiological stimuli. We have been conditioned to think of our reactions as ‘interpretations’ of the stimuli. We see essentialized emotions — anger, resentment, sadness, pride, pity — as permanent human realities embedded in our physiology.
We should be clear about the operation of these cycles. They are not Eternal Recurrences of the same. Not every stimulus is experienced as wholly new and disconnected from what has come before. Our reactions accumulate and begin to determine our next reactions. This is how a ‘psychological type’ forms. Aristotle may have been the first to systematically capture this ‘habituation’ (ethos). It is the substance of The Nicomachean Ethics. In any case, this accumulation of reactions is how the weight of culture is created in ourselves.
We have to understand the temporality Nietzsche is formulating. This weight accumulates as time moves forward, but we tend to view it retrospectively as an essence or as a ‘gradual’ path of evolution. We talk about people who are ‘emotional’ or ‘melancholy’ or ‘angry’. We may have some sense that these are constructs of a personality over time, but these constructs tend to take on the weight of an identity. This weight often prevents us from recognizing the choice at the heart of the cycle: ‘With every new question, do I want this once more and a thousand times more’ (GS 341).
Nietzsche wants us to see accumulating cycles of stimulus-reaction, not emotions. This is an early step to breaking the degeneration of the current cycles that condition our psychologies. This breaking is not, however, a bringing of the cycle to an end. That desire for the restful end state is the problem that is driving the decadence of our current cycles.
The Wheel of Motive
This degenerative cycle contains within it the potential for its own overcoming. To despise the body is simultaneously to respect it — to believe that it should be something other than the prison of the soul. ‘But the awakened, the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just another word for something on the body’ (‘On the Despisers of the Body’, 23).
Zarathustra is out to overcome the cycle that would have us see our ‘I’ as the expression of a self that is always only ego. This ego is assumed to be the origins of our actions. Actions are assumed to be the expression of intention — of an ego that pre-exists the action. In the later speech ‘On the Pale Criminal’, Zarathustra will elaborate the cycle that creates the experience of deeds emerging from the intention of a doer: ‘But thought is one thing, and deed another, and the image of a deed yet another. The wheel of motive does not roll between them’ (26).
The ‘wheel of motive’ is another aspect of the degenerative cycle that Zarathustra wishes to overcome. This wheel is assumed to be the eternally recurring ego whose deeds are expressions of its inherent psychology. But this psychology is the effect created by red judges, the preachers of death, and the ascetic priests who drive this decadent composition of the cycle.
To put it with respect to a composition of time: the ‘wheel of motive’ is the retrospective smoothness that we impose on time and on ourselves as expressions of a psychology. It hides the contingency of Eternal Recurrence by ascribing our actions to prior drives, emotions, and motives. The more we allow it to turn its wheel of sameness without question, the more it actually becomes a deterministic power. The future becomes an expression of the past, not because the future is subject to a hard determinism of inherent motives (e.g., natural laws), but because we make it so — we refuse to intervene in the cycle of Eternal Recurrence because we believe that the present and future is already written in the ‘wheel of motive.’
We see this all the time in our self-help culture: ‘That’s just the way I am.’ This becomes a self-fulfilling wheel of motive that degenerates the transformative power of great health.
Another Madness
There is another way to conceive of the cycle of Eternal Recurrence.
Listen, you judges! There is still another madness, and it is before the deed. Oh, you did not crawl deeply enough into this soul!’ (26)
This new descent — this new going under into ‘another madness’ — is the descent into our egos and our selves that each of us must undertake. It is the descent that seeks to understand how this cycle has played out in our own selves.
It is, therefore, a descent into the weight of history as the conditioning of our own reactions to our own physiological responses to the world. In order for this descent to occur, Zarathustra has to make the cycle visible — he has to make it into something that we can interrupt.
He has to make it into Eternal Recurrence, which risks a form of madness. It will either crush you or transform you (GS 341).
Self, Ego, Madness
Zarathustra separates the self from the ego, and he aligns the self with the blood of the body — i.e., with the Eternally Recurring capacity and need for action. When we separate the self from the ego and dive into the physiology of our actions, we confront the weight of culture as a ‘piling on’ and as an ‘accident’ that happens to us. ‘Still we struggle step by step with the giant called accident, and over all humanity thus far nonsense has ruled, the sense-less’ (58).
‘The giant called accident’ cannot be adequately thought without Eternal Recurrence as the very structure of our experience.
Eternal Recurrence is Nietzsche’s name for the eternal repetition of the now that is composed of deeds. We are compelled by the recurring now to act. We are doomed to act, even if that action results in sick souls and the attenuation of great health. The consequences of our actions accumulate so as to become a kind of debt that we will live with. This is why Nietzsche will introduce the thought of Eternal Recurrence as ‘the greatest weight’ in GS 341.
We should be clear in our understanding here because it is the heart of Nietzsche’s thought.
As the now Eternally Recurs, the weight of past actions accumulates in our selves. We condition ourselves to behave in repetitive ways, which becomes the weight. Thus we become a psychological type — a hinterworldly, a preacher of death, an ascetic priest, a teacher of virtue, a red judge, a gnostic saint, a ‘psychological type of the Redeemer’ (Anti-Christ), a man of ressentiment — Nietzsche’s work is full of these types. Even Zarathustra is a psychological type that emerges from the constant need for No-saying that risks the loss of Yes-saying. ‘The psychological problem with the Zarathustra-type is how someone who says No to everything to an inordinate degree, does No to everything to which hitherto everyone said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit’ (Ecce Homo).
These types are not original psychologies that humanity is born with. They are culturally specific conditionings of Eternal Recurrence. Any conditioning that ossifies the cycle into an essence is decadence. This ossification is most obvious in moralities that privilege some form of rest. This represents the desire to lift the greatest weight by stopping the cycle. But this desire itself becomes an enormous weight because the cycle cannot stop.
This effectively becomes the denial of our power of action in the now. It seeks knowledge in permanent and stable virtues that never change:
Let your virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if you must speak of it, then do not be ashamed to stammer about it.
Then speak and stammer: ‘This is my good, I love this, thus I like it entirely, thus alone do I want the good.
I do not want it as a divine law, I do not want it as human statute and requirements. It shall be no signpost for me to over earths and paradises.” (‘On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain’, 24)
We will come back shortly to the personal nature of virtue that Zarathustra speaks of here. But for the moment, let’s recognize that we cannot do away with virtues. We have to do away with their reification and ossification — i.e., bringing them to rest in eternal, unchanging truths as propositional certainties. They must remain ‘too high for the familiarity of names’.
We do this by accepting the greatest weight of Eternal Recurrence. This happens when we realize that these virtues are our own creations and, therefore, are subject to the permanent-impermanence of Eternal Recurrence. We can activate them in new ways because they are not fixed entities.
More than this, however, is at issue. When we think of virtues as fixed entities, we want to define them in order to enact them. Our knowledge of them theoretically precedes their use.
Yet, within the cycle, there remains power to overcome the cycle.
But even these sweet and shadowy poisons they took from the body and the earth!
They wanted to escape their misery and the stars were too distant for them. So they sighed ‘Oh if only there were heavenly paths on which to sneak into another being and happiness!” — Then they invented their schemes and bloody little drinks! (‘On the Hinterworldly, 21).
The gnostic god created by the hinterworldly and reinforced by the red judges and the priests is a product of great bodily strength. The ego still contains within it this power of creation. It has, however, been turned to decadent ends. ‘And this most honest being, this ego — it speaks of love and it still wants the body, even when it poetizes and fantasizes and flutters with broken wings’ (21).
We can begin to see here Nietzsche’s solution to the overcoming of the decadent movements of the cycle of Eternal Recurrence: it must start with each of us as individuals.
Why? Because the weight of culture lands directly into our selves and conditions our experience. For this reason alone, the overman must be a personal exercise to understand how the weight of culture has landed on each one of us individually. ‘Physician, help yourself: thus also you help your sick. Let that be his best help, that he sees with his own eyes the one who heals himself’ (58).
It cannot start with the denigration of others.
Footnotes
[1] As in my previous post on Reading Zarathustra, I will use the Adrian Del Caro translation from Cambridge University Press.
[2] It seems that Nietzsche is taking aim at the Stoic practice of the daily examination, which we find in the third book of Seneca’s de Ira.