Strauss was in many ways the perfect man to represent Nietzsche’s book in quintessentially modern program music (instrumental music inspired by or suggestive of a narrative or setting, a kind of precursor to the modern film score). Canadian piano prodigy Glenn Gould said of Strauss’s work:
It presents and substantiates an argument which transcends all the dogmatisms of art—all questions of style and taste and idiom—all the frivolous, effete preoccupations of the chronologist. It presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality—the argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.
Just as that other great individualist Nietzsche came to be misappropriated by Hitler and National Socialism, Strauss too was forced to work for the Nazis; he served for a short time as the president of their Reichsmusikkammer (state music office). In 1948 a “denazification” tribunal exonerated him of all collaboration with the National Socialists.
Director Stanley Kubrick made Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra the fitting and memorable musical centerpiece of his 1968 cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the film’s story, Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove) collaborated with British author Arthur C. Clarke, from whom he commissioned a novel about man’s place in the universe. In the 1960s Clarke was a member of a triumvirate of science-fiction writers that also included Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke had already begun to expand to novel length his 1951 short story “The Sentinel,” about man’s first contact with intelligent life beyond Earth, when Kubrick offered him the commission.
Kubrick’s film begins with a wide, Cinerama shot of the aligned moon, sun, and Earth, accompanied by Strauss’s stirring opening bars. The music returns in the film’s “Dawn of Man” segment when a tribe of apes-aided somehow by a perfect, black monolith of mysterious origin-discover they can use bones as weapons and thus defeat a rival tribe. Strauss, in his program note for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, could have been describing Kubrick and Clarke’s vision:
I did not intend to write philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche’s great work. I wished to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the superman. The whole symphonic poem is intended as an homage to Nietzsche’s genius, which found its greatest expression in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
2001’s final shot is legendary: A fetus floats star-like in the gorgeously textured, womb-like galaxy. Of all moments in Kubrick’s innovative, high-concept film, this one is the most reminiscent of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Zarathustra, the poet-philosopher describes the prophet, as he emerges enlightened from his mountain cave, as having become a child. And in Zarathustra’s tale of the “metamorphoses of the spirit” (p. 25), the spirit changes into a camel, then a lion, and finally a child. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying” (p. 26). Nietzsche also has Zarathustra utter maxims that ring with cosmic import, such as “one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star” (p. 13). Strauss’s music swells one final time, and as it rises two octaves it underscores Nietzsche’s and Kubrick’s narrative arcs.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Kubrick for an Oscar for his direction and Clarke and Kubrick for their screenplay, which was nearly devoid of dialogue. The film was also nominated for art direction, and it won the award for special visual effects, which hold up beautifully even today. In 1996 the American Film Institute celebrated its hundred-year anniversary by selecting the top hundred films made since the inception of American cinema. 2001: A Space Odyssey came in at twenty-two.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
A. VON ENDE
The growth of Nietzsche corresponds with that of the new school; first he threw off the burden of the historical and traditional past; then he shattered with the hammer of his genius all the small, low, and weak ideals of the present; and finally, upon the ruins he preached to his apostles the gospel of the only one—the Übermensch. This over-human being, discarding all humanity with the great herd, and from the unscaled heights of his temple throwing thunderbolts which flash upon the whole world—this Over-man, with all his consciousness of superiority and his claim of being beyond good and evil, felt too human, all too human, to dispense with being in touch with his fellow-beings. Nietzsche himself was the least free of free men; but his soul, wavering from pole to pole, asking questions and not answering them, found a universal echo, and this echo is the keynote of the poetry of young Germany.
—from The Critic (February 1900)
THOMAS COMMON
Besides being a philosopher, Nietzsche is at the same time the most interesting of all writers for cultured men and women to read. In brilliancy of style and originality of thought he is perhaps unequalled. He is not only the most serious and profound of writers, he is also the gayest and most cheerful. There has never been such a master of aphorisms. As a prophetic writer also he stands alone.
—from Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet (1901)
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Nietzsche is worse than shocking, he is simply awful: his epigrams are written with phosphorus on brimstone. The only excuse for reading them is that before long you must be prepared either to talk about Nietzsche or else retire from society, especially from aristocratically minded society (not the same thing, by the way, as aristocratic society), since Nietzsche is the champion of privilege, of power, and of inequality.... His pungency; his power of putting the merest platitudes of his position in rousing, startling paradoxes; his way of getting underneath moral precepts which are so unquestionable to us that common decency seems to compel unhesitating assent to them, and upsetting them with a scornful laugh: all this is easy to a witty man who has once well learnt Schopenhauer’s lesson, that the intellect by itself is a mere dead piece of brain machinery, and our ethical and moral systems merely the pierced cards you stick into it when you want it to play a certain tune. So far I am on common ground with Nietzsche. But not for a moment will I suffer any one to compare me to him as a critic. Never was there a deafer, blinder, socially and politically inepter academician.... To him modern Democracy, Pauline Christianity, Socialism, and so on are deliberate plots hatched by malignant philosophers to frustrate the evolution of the human race and mass the stupidity and brute force of the many weak against the beneficial tyranny of the few strong. This is not even a point of view: it is an absolutely fictitious hypothesis: it would not be worth reading were it not that there is almost as much evidence for it as if it were true, and that it leads Nietzsche to produce some new and very striking and suggestive combinations of ideas. In short, his sallies, petulant and impossible as some of them are, are the work of a rare spirit and are pregnant with its vitality.
—from Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Volume 1 (1906)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Among my writings my Zaratbustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights-the whole fact of man lies beneath i
t at a tremendous distance-it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness. Here no “prophet” is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from this mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom....
It is no fanatic that speaks here; this is not “preaching”; no faith is demanded here: from an infinite abundance of light and depth of happiness falls drop upon drop, word upon word: the tempo of these speeches is a tender adagio. Such things reach only the most select. It is a privilege without equal to be a listener here.
—translated by Walter Kaufmann, from Ecce Homo (1908)
H. L. MENCKEN
Despite Nietzsche’s conclusion that the known facts of existence do not bear it out, and the essential impossibility of discussing it to profit, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is by no means unthinkable. The celestial cycle put forward, as an hypothesis, by modern astronomy—the progression, that is, from gas to molten fluid, from fluid to solid, and from solid, by catastrophe, back to gas again—is easily conceivable, and it is easily conceivable, too, that the earth, which has passed through an uninhabitable state into a habitable state, may one day become uninhabitable again, and so keep seesawing back and forth through all eternity.
But what will be the effect of eternal recurrence upon the superman? The tragedy of it, as we have seen, will merely serve to make him heroic. He will defy the universe and say “yes” to life. Putting aside all thought of conscious existence beyond the grave, he will seek to live as nearly as possible in exact accordance with those laws laid down for the evolution of sentient beings on earth when the cosmos was first set spinning. But how will he know when he has attained this end? How will he avoid going mad with doubts about his own knowledge? Nietzsche gave much thought, first and last, to this epistemological problem, and at different times he leaned toward different schools, but his writing, taken as a whole, indicates that the fruit of his meditations was a thorough-going empiricism. The superman, indeed, is an empiricist who differs from Bacon only in the infinitely greater range of his observation and experiment. He learns by bitter experience and he generalizes from this knowledge. An utter and unquestioning materialist, he knows nothing of mind except as a function of body. To him speculation seems vain and foolish: his concern is ever with imminent affairs. That is to say, he believes a thing to be true when his eyes, his ears, his nose and his hands tell him it is true. And in this he will be at one with all those men who are admittedly above the mass today. Reject empiricism and you reject at one stroke, the whole sum of human knowledge.
—from The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908)
MAX NORDAU
There are two kinds of men who have a natural propensity for exaggerated language: madmen and charlatans. The insane, who suffer from systematic delirium and maniacal excitement, receive very few impressions, but they are very strong. Their consciousness is filled with a very small number of ideas, often by a single one around which all their thoughts revolve in an impetuous whirl, as the waters of a rushing torrent boil around a rock that rises in the midst of their course. These sufferers have no connection with reality, and no comprehension of it. The violence of their subjective feelings renders them insensible to outside impressions. Their obsessions drive from their minds every other thought, and cover with their shadow the entire image of the world. They have lost the sense of proportions, and the faculty of comparing objective phenomena among them and with their reflection in their minds. The contents of their consciousness, feelings, or images, have for them the importance of the absolute, and when by language they express their impulses and their inward visions, no word, no expression seems strong enough to do justice to the peerless importance of their mental pictures. The writings of Nietzsche, especially those of the last period, the fourth and last portion of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Antichrist, and so forth, are good examples of these overstrained modes of speech, always rising to the most extreme tonality of madmen attacked by acute or chronic mania. Among charlatans, the case is incomparably more simple. Extreme exaggeration is not with them an internal necessity, but a very external one, not an organic impulse, but a deliberate intention with an object in view. They raise the voice powerfully to dominate the noise of the friars, to attract attention imperiously to themselves, to disturb, to deafen, to hypnotise the hearers and, by paralysing their faculty of judgment, subject them to their suggestion.
The natural superlativists, madmen and charlatans, serve as models for many imitators, who employ their grotesque and piercing shouts not by instinctive impulse, but in a coldly methodical fashion, because the method seems to them impressive, fine, efficacious, and above all, the very latest modern fad.
—from The Bookman (March 1912)
EDWARD GARNETT
Nietzsche’s appearance in European thought marks a strong, savage reaction against the waves of democratic beliefs and valuations now submerging the old aristocratic standards, more or less throughout Europe. Other philosophers such as Herbert Spencer have made their protest against modern tendencies; other thinkers, as Ibsen, have put some of Nietzsche’s questions in a tentative spirit; but Nietzsche is the first man to fall foul of democratic values altogether, and try to formulate his aristocratic standards of life into a definite creed-Master-Morality versus Slave-Morality.
There lies Nietzsche’s value. It is because Nietzsche challenged Modernity, because he stood and faced the modern democratic rush which is backed by rank on rank of busy specialists today, because he opposes a creative aristocratic ideal to negate the popular will, instincts, and practice, that he is of such special significance. He showed the way the crowd is not going. Than this, nothing is more valuable in an age where the will of the majority is apt to become an imitation of its chance environment, a will to copy the majority; when the “standard of values” is chiefly given by the mass of minds that are anxious to think and do what they are told the majority is thinking and doing. And Nietzsche’s antipathy to the crowd largely springs from his conviction that to give the reins of power over to the popular mind is to put a premium on the “wholesale,” the “average,” and “machine-made” ideal, for that suits it, that pleases it, that it is its instinct to follow....
Nietzsche’s special inspiration, the key that unlocked his most secret depths, was pain. Pain, cruel and prolonged, pursued, chased, and captured him, deepened the world for him, and forced into the light all the tendencies of his nature. It was pain attacking his aristocratic soul that brought out all his endurance, pain that emphasized so violently the will-to-power. For what is this philosophy, in his case, but the definition of the spirit in which he dared it, and scorned to bend. And this power to face suffering, the lack of which casts the weak, delicate, or ordinary mind outside itself, into the arms of “reliance on a God,” exhibited in a satiric light to Nietzsche the sufferings of inferior natures, and made vulgar all sentimentalism, expression of suffering, the daily illusions of mankind, and the panaceas of the priests. And suffering also threw into Nietzsche’s mind the deep light of understanding as to how life fabricates in man his petty concepts of what is good and what is evil, what he wishes to avoid and escape—i.e., what he is afraid of. Thus pain brought to Nietzsche the necessity for hardness, courage, sternness even cruelty, if mankind is to be shaped on fine, strong, and heroic lines. Pain also it was that gave him aspiration towards joy, gaiety, and the mocking spirit, because these are the antithesis to the weak despairing soul. But to give in to suffering! to give in to life! that is the part of the vulgar soul; to face reality, to triumph over it, was the fundamental instinct of Nietzsche’s indomitable spirit. Pain therefore it was that made Nietzsche inhuman, intensified his caste bias, and transformed his natural distaste for the cheap idealism and shallow optimism of the mass of m
en (who cannot either suffer life nobly or enjoy nobly) into a virulent hatred of Modernity, that Modernity which advertises all its benefits aloud! and is afraid to even recognize its weaknesses. Suffering it was that made Nietzsche isolate himself from the outer world, and concentrate on himself on the immensely richer world of passions, tastes, hatred and distastes within him. Pain forces him to revise all his acquired opinions, to cast away his enthusiasms, his first idealistic interpretations of life, and it forces himself also into keen self-analysis, into a passion for analysing all “goodness” and discovering its motive.
—from Friday Nights (1922)
EDWIN MUIR
It was Nietzsche’s fate to be always more true and interesting than his philosophy. However unsound his thesis might be, he uttered truths in supporting it which came clean out of reality, so that he seemed sometimes to hear life itself speaking. This union of something artificial and something true in his nature is what makes him so difficult and so interesting.
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