The second section of the Prologue announces one of Nietzsche’s most famous lines and one of the central themes of Zarathustra, the idea that “God is dead.” Zarathustra takes this idea for granted, for after his encounter with the old saint he remarks to himself, “ ‘Could it then be possible? This old saint in his forest has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!’ ” (p. 9). Nietzsche does not have in mind any metaphysical claim about a Supreme Being here; he is referring instead to people’s belief in the Judeo-Christian God. His claim is that many people who think that they believe in God really do not believe. That is, their “belief” makes no difference in their lives, a fact that they betray through their actions and feelings. By comparison with medieval Europe, in which people based their sense of place in the world directly on their ideas about God and his relation to humanity, the modern world understands a person’s role in completely secular terms, whether or not an individual considers himself or herself a Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
At the same time, many of the corollaries to the West’s previous belief in a supernatural Almighty, which in The Gay Science Nietzsche calls “the shadows of God,” remain alive and well. For example, the views that our significance is compromised by the discovery that our planet is in an undistinguished part of the universe, and that nature is somehow deficient, and that our lives are without mooring unless they are lived under the watchful eye of Providence remain implicit in the modern person’s worldview, even if these are not conscious beliefs. Since they no longer have a real sense of the presence of God in human life, these background beliefs promote a sense that our lives are meaningless and that our values are without grounding. This is the condition that Nietzsche calls “nihilism.” Zarathustra’s role is to address modern humanity in this situation and to suggest possibilities that might lead us beyond the crisis of nihilism.
In Zarathustra’s speech to the circus audience, he gives us the single most famous image from Zarathustra, the idea of the Übermensch (“superman”). The Übermensch is often envisioned as a cartoonish character not unlike Conan the Barbarian, brute strength combined with an utter lack of sophistication or civilization. Combined with the fact that Nietzsche celebrates what he calls “the will to power” (a topic we consider below), the Übermensch would seem to suggest that Nietzsche has an unhealthy enthusiasm for unbridled, unrefined, naked power. But Nietzsche was among the most refined men of his generation. He had exquisite taste, and he had little but contempt for those who did not appreciate the finer things in life, such as music, art, and poetry. In fact, the Übermensch idea appears only briefly in Zarathustra (and nowhere else), with few mentions beyond the first part of the book. (The popularity of the image was greatly enhanced by the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who gave the “Superman” a role in one of his funniest plays, Man and Superman.) There is very little in Zarathustra or in any other of Nietzsche’s texts to support the importance given to the Übermensch in popular conceptions of Nietzsche and his philosophy. Once again, it is important to take a careful look at what Nietzsche actually wrote as opposed to snatching a quotation or an image from its context.
The idea of the Übermensch is not prophecy but a provocative image, characterized in a number of brief but powerful statements. Zarathustra announces in his first speech, “I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome.... What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just the same shall man be to the Übermensch: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment” (p. 9) and “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch” (p. 11). But as we mentioned in our summary of the Prologue, the scene of Zarathustra’s speech is ironic, his speech is thoroughly misunderstood, and the whole scene is quite embarrassing to him. The crowd hears him not as a prophet or a sage but mistakes him for a circus barker and takes the Übermensch not as an inspiring vision but as another circus performer.
What did Nietzsche have in mind? He had read and appropriated Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Thus Zarathustra’s image of the Übermensch might well be taken to suggest a further stage of evolution, beyond humanity. But Nietzsche makes very clear that such progress is anything but assured. We could live our lives in such a way that humanity progresses toward this higher stage, but Nietzsche seems to think that for most people this is highly implausible. More likely, we will collectively hasten human devolution. Thus Zarathustra juxtaposes his talk of the Übermensch with a much less flattering image of what humanity might become: “the last man.” The last man is the ultimate couch potato. He proclaims, “We have invented happiness” and blinks, wilfully ignoring anything that would interrupt his dull contentment. But whereas the Übermensch is a fantasy, Nietzsche rightly fears that the last man is all too real-humanity devoid of striving and creativity, reduced to a life of mere comfort and contentment. Zarathustra presents this image to the townspeople to horrify them. Instead, they welcome the world of the last man as utopia.
In Zarathustra’s portrait of the last man, Nietzsche is taking on a formidable foe: the English philosophy of utilitarianism, which calls for the greatest good for the greatest number of people and defines “good” in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche cracks, “Man does not live for pleasure. Only the Englishman does.” The centrality of pleasure and happiness (the utilitarians did not carefully distinguish these) seems to Nietzsche both banal and psychologically false. Pleasure and pain go hand in hand, in his view, and to minimize one is to minimize the other. He also rejects utilitarianism’s doctrine that every person’s interests should be counted equally. Nietzsche’s conception of “the greater good” is anything but egalitarian. For him, the greater good is determined by and for the exceptional individual, “the higher man.” Thus the political appeal of Nietzsche’s fantasy of the Übermensch in the new militaristic Germany of the twentieth century.
After the tightrope walker’s accident, the jester who caused it threatens Zarathustra; he says, “ ‘Leave this town, O Zarathustra.... The good and just hate you, and call you their enemy and despiser; the believers in the true faith hate you, and call you a danger to the multitude’ ” (p. 16). This anticipates Zarathustra’s opposition to conventional morality and his assault on both the Judeo-Christian and the Platonic traditions. The morality that Nietzsche attacks is the Judeo-Christian and Platonic morality of absolute codes of right and wrong—a morality that treats good and evil as metaphysical abstractions. In opposition, Nietzsche contends that “good” and “evil” are always reflections of the interests and aspirations of historically situated groups of people, and that these notions have varied over time and even among groups within a single society. Moral values are, accordingly, “relative,” and they are also political tools employed by the powerful to maintain or establish control. Nietzsche described himself as an “immoralist” (and in one of his last books, even as “the Antichrist”), and he called for a radical “revaluation of values,” a deep questioning of the values of Christianity in particular. This was particularly shocking as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, with the usual panic and apocalyptic thinking that have typically marked the turn of centuries in Europe. The stage was set for such a “revaluation of values,” and Nietzsche’s philosophy was well-suited to the role.
Zarathustra can be read as a seminal text in this revaluation of basic values. Essential to this project is Nietzsche’s diagnosis of human motives, the hidden purposes behind our actions. These often differ from what the moral tradition has commended and what we ourselves are willing to acknowledge. Much of what we consider to be altruistic (and hence “good”) behavior is actually subtly selfish. Many acts judged harshly, on the other hand, have the same motives as those judged to be good. Underlying all of our actions, Nietzsche hypothesizes, is the “will to power,” the drive to express and enhance one’s vitality and to control one’s circumstances.
The expression “will to power” is exciting and se
ductive, and it caught on in the increasingly war-mongering years after Nietzsche’s death. Certainly Nietzsche means for this expression to draw attention to the role of sheer strength in the world, but he by no means restricts the idea to military power and political domination. Zarathustra describes the will to power as “the unexhausted procreating will of life” (p. 100), indicating that it is creative, not merely controlling, and that it represents self-mastery, not just power over others.
The will to power is also posed in opposition to the metaphysical Will or “will to existence” of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a philosopher whom Nietzsche very much admired but whose views he came to reject. Schopenhauer contended that the nature of reality, expressed in human beings and every other creature or entity, was Will, and that the Will in various creatures struggled with the Will in others; the result was suffering all around. Schopenhauer’s emphasis, however, was on the creature’s drive to maintain itself in existence, and he contended that ultimately we should overcome our tendency to struggle and suffer by recognizing that all of reality is driven by the same will. Thus Schopenhauer called for renunciation of the Will within us as the only route to release from suffering, an idea he inherited from Buddhism and its Four Noble Truths. Despite the seeming similarity of their language, Nietzsche’s will to power is an explicit rejection of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of renunciation. With the will to power, Nietzsche advocates an appreciation of life with all of its “overcomings” as it exists within us and outside us, in its exuberance and excess. Nietzsche acknowledges that life involves suffering, much of which stems from conflict; but, against Schopenhauer, he insists that we can make the most of suffering by our willing participation in the world. Far from pointless, as Schopenhauer argued, life is joyful and well worth the price of suffering.
In the popular imagination, however, the coinage “will to power” continued to have overtones of imperialistic ambition. After World War I, Nietzsche was reviled throughout Europe because he had become associated with German nationalism, and a few years later he was interpreted as a precocious spokesman for the Nazis. It did not help that his sister Elisabeth became part of a proto-Nazi group and then promoted her brother’s philosophy to the new Nazi party. (There is a famous photograph of Hitler nose to nose with a bust of Nietzsche, staged by Elisabeth.) But Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism, and he was no lover of German nationalism. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that his reputation started to be disentangled from the Nazi horror, and even then, Nietzsche’s antimoral and antireligious stance kept him marginalized even in academic and intellectual circles. Nevertheless, some of Nietzsche’s concerns (for example, his critique of modernity, his insistence on willing participation in the world, and “the death of God”) made him attractive to the existentialists of the mid-twentieth century (in particular, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger).
In the latter part of the twentieth century, history caught up with Nietzsche. By that time, the legacy of two world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, fascism, Stalinism, and a new appreciation for relativity, in science as well as in culture, made Nietzsche, who stressed the modern crisis in values, the darling of the avant garde and a figure of importance for intellectuals and academics everywhere. Nietzsche’s reception in intellectual history parallels the course of Zarathustra’s mission in the Prologue. What is initially offered to the world at large is misunderstood, and Zarathustra must content himself with the search for like-minded individuals. This gives us a more sympathetic sense of the book’s subtitle; Nietzsche offers his book to whoever cares to read it, but he doubts that he will find any contemporary readers receptive to it. Thus Zarathustra’s speeches include Nietzsche’s “untimely” complaints about the folly of his time and the directions he saw his contemporaries taking. But in Nietzsche’s philosophy, critiques of human foolishness and warnings about the horrors of the future are always tempered by an abstract hope and a concrete love of life. This is the tone that is set in Zarathustra. Like the New Testament, which it both imitates and mocks, it is ultimately a book of hope, enthusiasm, and good cheer.
This good cheer is evident, in part, in Nietzsche’s brilliant, buoyant, and enthusiastic writing style. He is often said to be among the very best writers of German prose, comparable to the great poet Goethe (who is in turn often compared with Shakespeare). But his style also raises philosophical concerns. Philosophers tend to be tediously literal, but Nietzsche was a flamboyant rhetorician who rarely shied away from even the most outrageous overstatements and accusations. As a consequence, he seems to invite all sorts of wild interpretations that go far beyond what he could have literally intended. Nevertheless, it is evident that he was willing to be misunderstood if that was the price of attracting our attention. The pseudobiblical style of Zarathustra is but one example of this. Another is his sometimes vehement attack on the Judeo-Christian worldview, despite the fact that he himself was very much a product of it. This attack is a provocation to “self-overcoming,” making a revolutionary change in our lives and the way we see the world.
Reading Zarathustra, it is clear that Nietzsche intends to shock and provoke us because it is only by being shocked and provoked that we will feel compelled to undertake a serious and critical self-examination. What is not so clear is exactly how we should take the many outrageous things Zarathustra seems to say. But part of the problem is that quotations are so often snatched out of context from Nietzsche’s texts. For instance, he often wrote in a hypothetical way (“What if...”), suggesting a thought-experiment or an ironic expression. He sometimes puts words in the mouth of one or another fictional character, not clearly expressing his own opinion at all. The overall fictional context of Zarathustra makes the question “What is Nietzsche saying to us?” particularly complicated. One notorious example is the oft-quoted line “ ‘You go to women? Do not forget the whip!’ ” (p. 59). This line is often attributed to Nietzsche, as if he offered this as advice, demonstrating his extreme misogyny. However, the line is quoted by Zarathustra as the comment of a little old woman with whom he has been speaking. The meaning and seriousness of the comment is thus deeply in question. It certainly does not follow that Nietzsche is an unenlightened woman-hater. In fact, just before he wrote Zarathustra, his most intimate soul mate was the young Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of the most liberated women in Europe at the time.
So, too, there are serious questions about how we should take Zarathustra’s (and Nietzsche’s) denunciations of the sentiment of pity (Mitleid—literally, “suffering with,” also translated as “compassion” and “empathy”). Historically, these are part of his attack on Christianity, on Schopenhauer (who insisted that compassion was the basis of all morality), and, by implication, on Buddhism. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s comments are prone to misunderstanding. Nietzsche and his Zarathustra frequently claim that pity is useless and hypocritical, a claim that leads readers to believe that Nietzsche was misanthropic, devoid of concern for other people. And Nietzsche does seem at times even to make fun of weakness and poverty. But we know both from his letters and from the reports of those who knew him that Nietzsche was an extremely compassionate and sensitive man. So how should we understand the extreme things he says?
Nietzsche’s condemnation of pity is a discomforting example of his diagnosis of the underlying motives behind human morals. A person who pities, Nietzsche suggests, is relishing his or her own superior position with respect to the person pitied. Far from being altruistic, the pitying person is hypocritically gaining a psychological advantage through another person’s misfortune. Being pitied, on the other hand, is psychologically debilitating; it makes the person pitied feel his or her weakness and inferiority by comparison to the supposed benefactor; and it encourages the person to doubt his or her ability to cope with the difficulties at hand. Regarding the “compassion” that the moral tradition promotes, Nietzsche contends that tough love and a stance of not allowing oneself to become debilitated by “suffering with” another perso
n is really the more compassionate approach.
Perhaps the most interesting idea to make its appearance in Zarathustra (and in several of Nietzsche’s other books) is “eternal recurrence,” which he immodestly claims to be his greatest idea and the fundamental conception of the book. Eternal recurrence is the idea that the sequence of events, including the events that make up one’s life, has already happened and will recur again and again and again. This metaphor (although there is some evidence that he took it literally) underscores Nietzsche’s endorsement of the affirmation of this life, exactly as it is. True, life always involves suffering. The proper response to suffering, however, is not resentment or disengagement but wholehearted “Dionysian” acceptance. Embracing the idea of eternal recurrence, being willing to endure one’s life, with all of its pains as well as its pleasures, indicates a real love of life. Resentment, regret, and remorse, by contrast, suggest an unwillingness to accept one’s life as it is and thus an unwillingness to live one’s life again. There is a difference implied here between loving one’s life because of its achievements and enjoyments and loving one’s life for the sake of life itself. It is one thing to relish one’s victories and successes. It is something else to love one’s life despite or even because of one’s failures and suffering.
Near the end of The Gay Science, Nietzsche gives us a provocative description of eternal recurrence:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra Page 3
