Prologue 2 -- Positive Contributions

But enough with Jung's theory.  What do I think is going on in the prologue?  Honestly, I'm not really sure.  Unlike Jung though, I see the prologue as just that -- we can't come to a conclusion about the meaning of entire book just by reading the prologue.  As I observed before, Zarathustra develops as a character in weird circular way that is hard to do justice to with a strictly sequential reading.  Still, I think I can at least add a little order to my thoughts by breaking the prologue down into a few sections and examining the main themes.

1) Section 1 introduces one the main themes of the whole work -- the interconversion of opposites, which Jung calls enantiodromia -- in a couple of ways.  First, with its image of the sun rising and setting, it shows us how going over also means going under.  Second, it clearly inverts Plato's image of the eternal sun of the Good.  Not only does this sun rise and set (something the Good would never do) but it actually needs the beings for whom it shines.  It does not stand eternally aloof from the human world.

"You great star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine? For ten years you have come up here to my cave: you would have tired of your light and of this route without me, my eagle and my snake. But we awaited you every morning, took your overflow from you and blessed you for it. (9)

2) In section 2 we meet the old sage who Jung claims represents the spirit of early Christianity.  By dubbing it "early" he wants to convey something like the 'true spirit of Christ' before there was any church politics and dogma.  This early spirit has of course been lost, which accounts for the old man's disdain for a humanity that has abandoned its god, as well as his decision to stay in the forest and praise his god in the manner of the animals.  I don't know enough of the history of early Christianity to evaluate Jung's claim that Jesus was really talking about some sort of mystical divine within.  Here that historical question hardly matters though, since for Jung there is really only one perennial 'spirit of religiosity' that all religions partake in, and it seems clear to me that he's right -- the old man has something to do with a religious sentiment that remains true to itself.  Of course, Nietzsche concludes this section with one of his most famous ideas:

"Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!" – (11) 

So it seems to me that the old man is an image of a spirit of religiosity that has outlived any sense it might once have had.  It's a spirit that might be admirable and even wise in certain respects, almost kin to Zarathustra.  For example, the old man recognizes Zarathustra from when he "carried his ashes to the mountains" and acknowledges his "awakening" now that he has decided to go under(10).  Zarathustra for his part also seems to respect the old man and leave him to his beliefs.

When Zarathustra had heard these words he took his leave of the saint and spoke: "What would I have to give you! But let me leave quickly before I take something from you!" – And so they parted, the oldster and the man, laughing like two boys laugh. (11)

 

The kinship is strong enough that Zarathustra even remembers the old man at the very end of the prologue.

I found it more dangerous among human beings than among animals; Zarathustra walks dangerous paths. May my animals guide me!"
When Zarathustra had 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 some day 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. (22)

The implication is obviously that the old man's pride has stuck around long after his wisdom, and that this is a danger Zarathustra also faces.   So while Jung collapses these two figures into a single "wise old man" archetype that renews itself in every religious figure, I think it's clear that Nietzsche is differentiating these two characters even as he puts them into relation.  Becoming like the wise old hermit in the forest is a danger for Zarathustra, a possibility he wants to avoid, and one, if we read this passage as foreshadowing Zarathustra's later development, he will fail to completely avoid.  That failure, and its overcoming, might be described as exactly the plot of the whole book, if that's the correct term in this case.

3-5) In these sections, Zarathustra gives his first three speeches, which correspond to three different types or aspects of humanity -- the overhuman, the human, and the last human.

The first speech concerns the overhuman.  While this is obviously something beyond the human, I don't think we can say precisely what the overhuman is at this point.  The concept is the central subject of all of Part 1 of TSZ though, so we'll have plenty of time to revisit it.  Here, Zarathustra emphasizes two seemingly paradoxical things about the overhuman.  First, it is the meaning of the earth and the body -- things we usually think of as under us.  Second, the speech emphasizes that the overhuman is the cure for the nihilism that results from seeing even humanity's greatest virtues as painfully small: "it is this sea, in this can your great despising submerge itself" (12).  I think these two characteristics make it difficult to interpret the overhuman as a normal sort of goal or aspiration for humanity.  Given the metaphors at work here, it seems more accurate to think of the overhuman as something closer to vast sky mind, or in Jungian terms, the collective unconscious.  

The second speech talks about the human as a bridge, or a sort of transition species that will disappear when the overhuman arrives.  It makes clear that the goal of the human should be to perish, to forget itself, to sacrifice, to squander itself, in short, to "go under".  

The third speech describes the last human.  This self-satisfied boomer icon is the individual at complete equilibrium, incapable of creating anything new.  The last humans have come to rest in uniform crowd that belies it has reached the end of history.  Obviously, as some useful notes on the concept make even clearer, the last human is meant as the opposite of the overhuman.  It's tempting to call them the underhuman, though given the paradoxical relationship we've already seen between over and under, there seems to be some danger in this name.  Nietzsche probably doesn't use it for a reason.

6-7) Section 6 is the climax of the prologue and I scene I love for its almost cinematic brilliance.  Together with its continuation in section 7, and the beginning of 8, it show us three linked characters -- Zarathustra, the rope-dancer, and the jester.  While I don't want to fall into Jung's trap of claiming that everything = everything, I do think there are various hints that these characters are almost permutations of one another, as well as permutations of the three concepts Zarathustra just spoke about.  

• The old sage likened Zarathustra to a dancer (10) and this image will recur throughout the book.  As the Parkes and Del Caro translations make clear by rendering seiltänzer as "rope-dancer" (instead of Kaufmann's more idiomatic "tightrope walker") we are supposed to hear the tanz root as link between these two.  
• At the end of Zarathustra's first speech the people react as if Zarathustra's description of the overhuman were a carnival barker's introduction for the rope dancer (13).  Let's get ready to rumble!.  But then again the rope-dancer is clearly crossing a dangerous bridge just as Zarathustra described humanity.
• The jester leaps over the rope-dancer, converting him into a pretty good symbol for the underhuman -- a corpse (17).  And he threatens to do that same to Zarathustra, saying that it's only his link with the corpse that saved him so far: "It was your good fortune that you took up with the dead dog; when you lowered yourself like that, you rescued yourself for today. But go away from this town – or tomorrow I shall leap over you, a living man over a dead one." (19)
• After his decision to focus on finding disciples in section 9, Zarathustra explicitly compares his new course to the action of the jester: "I want to go to my goal, and I go my own way; over the hesitating and dawdling I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under! (21)

I'm not totally sure what to make of this tangle, but I suspect the point is not to set up an identity between these characters so much as to link them together as different moment in a series of transformations.  

8)  As we saw in detail last time, section 8 shows us a kind of absurdist mass where Zarathustra drags his dead companion to communion.  Jung asserts that this second old man is the same as the first, but then for Jung everything is a penis archetype.  Still, we might construe the hermit's grumpy indifference to whether the corpse eats (20) as similar to the old sage's indifference to humanity in section 2; he keeps up the same rituals even when they have ceased to make any sense.  And if this is a quick repetition of the same motif with certain variations, that would certainly be in keeping with the musical style of TSZ.  Only Nietzsche could come up with the image of someone trying to serve the body and blood of his dead god to a dead man.  

There's also another fairly obvious conclusion to draw from this section.  So far we've seen Zarathustra involved in dramatic action and heard him giving speeches on some esoteric topics.  But now he gets the munchies?  The hunger scene seems to intrude from out of nowhere to remind us that Zarathustra is human.  This is no ordinary prophet portrayed as floating through the world but in some sense already beyond it.  I mean, can you imagine Muhammed talking about how bad he wants a bag of cheetos, or Jesus' disciples relating how the first thing he asked for after three days in the cave was a pint of Ben & Jerry's?  In keeping with his own speeches, we need to remember that Zarathustra has an ordinary human body.  

9)  I think this same theme of the humanity of Zarathustra continues into section 9.  The second encounter with an out of touch old man leads directly to the revelation that he needs to change strategies if he is going to teach the overhuman.  Just as Zarathustra needs human food, he needs human companions.    We might put these two sections together and say that they show how Zarathustra needs communion, in every sense of that word.  

10)  Finally, in section 10, we meet Zarathustra's animals, the eagle and the serpent.  For Jung, the animals naturally represent the bodily instincts or what we might call the wisdom of the body.  I'll withhold fully endorsing that idea for now, but it seems a plausible association.  Jung also spends a lot of time discussing how the eagle and the serpent are old images of traditional enemies representing the higher and lower instincts.  So he counts the image in this section as more proof that the lowly body of Nietzsche the man (serpent) is wrestling with possession by the higher spiritual powers of the archetype (eagle).  Which is a revealingly bizarre and deliberate misreading of a text that makes clear the two are friends in this case.

And behold! An eagle cut broad circles through the air, and upon it hung a snake, not as prey but as a friend, for the snake curled itself around the eagle's neck. (22) 

Given how well read Nietzsche was, it seems obvious to me that he knew the traditional symbolism of eagle and serpent and wanted to invert it to make a point.  As in section 1, these opposites too can be reconciled.  But for Jung, you never escape the archetype, you just repress consciousness of it, so he's unable to say anything useful about the inversion of the traditional image.  

The symbolism of the eagle and the serpent (representing pride and cleverness, respectively) also plays a role in the ambiguous ending of the prologue that we quoted in discussing section 2.  Zarathustra now asks for his animals to lead him.  But he immediately goes on to reflect on the fate of the first old sage and seemingly foreshow his being led astray.  Is this to suggest that the instinctual animals will be responsible for his error?  But that reading would not be in keeping with the focus on the wisdom of the body, nor would it fit well with Zarathustra's desire to be, "clever from the ground up, like [his] serpent".  So I'm not sure whether to impute an important role to the animals in misleading Zarathustra.  Maybe the symbolic identifications with pride and cleverness are just there to make a concrete image out of his "folly"?  We'll see whether Zarathustra's trajectory can be described as the eagle of his pride flying off with the serpent of his cleverness like two friends who nevertheless lead him on a quixotic quest.

Prologue 1 -- Trash-talking Jung

One of the benefits of reading several interpretations of TSZ is that I will have a chance to compare not just their particular ideas about the text, but their overall interpretive strategy.  Finding the right strategy is no small matter in this case.  As I mentioned before, the book is at best obscure and at worst deceptive.  Interpreting it as "normal" philosophy is bound to fail; if Nietzsche had wanted to give us some particular propositional message, he wouldn't have written in this style.  Interpreting TSZ as literature, as if it were a novel, seems like a better strategy.  

Unfortunately, we often approach novels in a way that does them (at least the good ones) a disservice.  We frequently treat characters, events, and objects in them as symbolic in a very simple sense.  The whale symbolizes God.  Tom Joad is Christ.  X = Y.  Etc ...  Any art that can be reduced to this sort of simplistic mapping of meaning is, I submit, bad art.  In fact, it's not really art at all, but simply an essay or op-ed walking around in disguise, usually one with a strongly one-sided political motivation.  Good art doesn't just mean something, it does something to us.  In fact, with the best art, what it ultimately means is what it does to us, what transformation it produces in us, how it 'moves' us.  

TSZ is good art.  So even if we decide to approach the book as literature, we shouldn't do so as if it were just a sort of propositional code.  Nietzsche is not trying to found a new religion.  He hasn't taken his new 'truth' and disguised it in symbolic form to make it more amenable to mass consumption.  Zarathustra is not the anti-Christ and the Overhuman in not the new God.  To say that any of the X images symbolize Y will trivialize any good art.  With TSZ though, the danger of this type of (mis)interpretation is raised to a new level.  Because this wicked book constantly tempts us to make this very mistake.  Nietzsche's heavy use of metaphor constantly borders on allegory.  We are tempted to try and make sense of the book by identifying what each character or image represents.  This is our natural way of approaching the text and even the world -- we encode it into symbols.  I think part of Nietzsche's goal in TSZ is to show us this interpretive process repeatedly happening within ourselves, and show us its repeated failure.  In a way similar to Kafka, he has created what seems like a puzzle that should have a solution.  This suggestively charged parable should mean something, right?  But it doesn't have a solution -- even the thesis I'm outlining here is not a solution in the sense of "what the book really means" -- because it's not actually a puzzle.  It's not something we're going to solve, but something that is going to work on us, do something to us, if we let it.  This turns out to be exactly how one Zen master describes koan practice:

To work on a koan is to let a koan work on you ...  Any analysis is a waste of time, and at best will produce a "fox" or pseudo-Zen response. Koans are a devilish instrument because they deliberately tempt us to make an interpretation, explanation, imitation or analysis; and yet, it is only when we exhaust or give up these lines of investigation that a deeper level of inquiry becomes possible. Often, only when we are able to admit in frustration that we don't know anything, can true koan practice begin

These observations serve as a good prologue to our first real foray into Jung's commentary.  I've read up to the point where the seminar reached the end of Zarathustra's prologue.  Since there are 262 pages of seminar transcript covering the first 12 pages of TSZ, this is definitely a close reading.  Jung has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the text, and slides into a number of interesting tangents about both historical questions and the state of the world in 1934.  But at this point it's clear that he's approaching the text with the fundamentally flawed interpretive strategy I just discussed.  His basic premise is that TSZ should be read as the dream or vision of a madman.  Since interpreting neurotic's dreams is Jung's bread and butter, this shouldn't really surprise us.  Nor does he mean to dismiss the book with this perspective.  On the contrary, Jung is genuine in his belief that the whole idea of psychoanalysis is to use these glimpses of the 'abnormal' psyche to understand how the 'normal' psyche functions under the surface.  While this general hypothesis might be fine as far as it goes, it turns out to be a tremendously limiting way of approaching TSZ.  Jung interprets the character of Zarathustra as an example of the archetypal "wise old man" who represents a powerful spiritual truth.  The book itself then becomes nothing more than the record of the man Nietzsche's possession by this archetype.  Nietzsche comes to identify himself with, and lose himself in, this powerful archetypal figure in a process that Jung calls an "inflation".  TSZ is merely a symptom of the hidden megalomania that will eventually drive Nietzsche insane (8 years after he writes TSZ).  In fact, Jung goes so far as to read the death of the rope-dancer, and Zarathustra's comment that the dancer's, "... soul will be dead even sooner than [his] body."(pg.18) as Nietzsche's premonition of his own catatonic insanity.  Identifying with strange archetypes is a dangerous business apparently, and this is what happens Larry.

I think this flunks Literary Criticism 101 for any number of reasons.  It commits the cardinal sin of identifying the author with his protagonist.  It reduces everything Nietzsche wrote to a set of pre-existing archetypes like the wise old man and the anima, etc ...  which prevents him (or anyone else for that matter) from ever saying anything genuinely new.  And of course it requires us to know a contingent biographical detail from nearly a decade in Nietzsche's future to make any sense of the text as published.  But worst of all, it packages everything up into a neat set of symbolic identities that propose to decode Nietzsche's 'dream', thus reducing it to bad art.  Jung makes all the correspondences admirably clear in a little chart he provides on page 130.

This chart is a travesty.  Jung claims in his essay in Man and His Symbols that dream interpretation is an art that must be carefully attuned to the subject, and that the same dream could mean different things in different cases.  He emphasizes there's no standard meaning for a given dream symbol.  Here however, not only are we reductively mapping a complicated and highly ambiguous set of philosophical symbols straight onto a boilerplate version of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, but we don't even get anything sensible out of the process that we didn't put into it at the beginning.  Jung is attempting to 'mathematically' demonstrate that Nietzsche = Zarathustra (3.d), but this is exactly the assumption he began his diagnosis with!  In the meantime he's done nothing useful to elucidate the inner relations of the symbols in the prologue because, as you can see from the chart, everything = everything!  The overall interpretation is so bizarrely deaf to the contents of what Nietzsche actually says that it almost makes me want to psychoanalyze the good Herr Doktor himself.  Was Jung afraid that a genuine reading of Nietzsche would show how much psychoanalysis in general and he himself in particular owed to Nietzsche?  

But the strangest aspect of Jung's approach to TSZ is that while his main point is to reductively use Nietzsche to illustrate his theories, on many occasions he actually proves to be quite a perceptive reader of the text.  For example, the most puzzling part of the prologue is section 8, where Zarathustra carries the corpse of the rope-dancer away from of the town in order to bury it.  Upon leaving, he encounters a couple of gravediggers who joke that Zarathustra must be trying to steal the corpse from the devil.

At the town gate he met the gravediggers. They shone their torches in his face, recognized Zarathustra and sorely ridiculed him. "Zarathustra is lugging away the dead dog: how nice that he's become a gravedigger! For our hands are too pure for this roast. Would Zarathustra steal this morsel from the devil? So be it then! And good luck with your meal! If only the devil were not a better thief than Zarathustra! – he'll steal them both, he'll devour them both!" (pg. 19)

This is an odd exchange we might at first pass over.  But the way this section continues confirms that the reference to the corpse as food is more than a turn of phrase; Zarathustra himself grows hungry in the very next paragraph.

Zarathustra did not say a word and went on his way. By the time he had walked for two hours past woods and swamps, he had heard too much of the hungry howling of wolves and he grew hungry himself. And so he stopped at a lonely house in which a light was burning.
"Hunger falls upon me like a robber," said Zarathustra. "In woods and swamps my hunger falls upon me and in the deep night.
My hunger has odd moods. Often it comes to me only after a meal, and today it did not come the whole day: just where was it?"

And then he soon stumbles upon the house of the old hermit, where he and his 'follower' are offered nothing less than bread and wine.

The old man went away but returned promptly and offered Zarathustra bread and wine. "This is a bad region for those who hunger," he said. "That is why I live here. Beast and human being come to me, the hermit. But bid your companion eat and drink, he is wearier than you." Zarathustra replied: "My companion is dead, I would have a hard time persuading him." "That does not concern me," snapped the old man. "Whoever knocks at my house must also take what I offer him. Eat and take care!" (pg. 20)

Putting these pieces together, we suddenly realize that we're reading a twisting of the idea of the communion.  It can't be coincidence that we're discussing a hunger for the body and blood of a corpse just before getting served bread and wine.  Nietzsche is alluding to the sarcophagy (as in sarcophagus) at the core of the Christian ritual.  This was lost on me the first time I read it, but once it's pointed out, it's pretty unmistakeable.

Jung of course has an elaborate theory about how this scene represents some voice inside Nietzsche the man who calls him back to the body, trying to warn him of the dangers of identifying with the overly spiritual archetype.  He identifies this old man with the old man from section 2 of the prologue (the one who didn't know that god is dead) and counts them both as figures of the "wise old man" archetype that he believes Nietzsche has lost himself in.  For Jung, these old men symbolize the original spirit of Christianity as a living religion or a sort of perennial philosophy, before it was corrupted by the dogmas of the church.  And Zarathustra is also nothing but another avatar of the same archetype, a reincarnation of Christ whose goal is to sweep the money lenders from the temple (again) and restore the true spirit of religion.  

As I said, the theory is a bunko where everything = everything = Jung's theory of archetypes.  It doesn't allow Nietzsche to say anything new, despite the fact that he's clearly inverting all the symbols and values we associate with these archetypes.  Here, for example, we symbolically see an absurdist Christ offer communion to a corpse, as if he were trying to redeem himself through his own body and blood, and then react with grumpy indifference to Zarathustra's suggestion that this doesn't seem like it will work.  

For Jung, even the most radical variations of archetypal images, even their direct reversals, are still nothing but new presentations of the same old forces that lie within our unconscious the way Plato's form of Beauty lies within every beautiful boy.  But if Jung weren't so busy prematurely forcing the 'mad' Nietzsche into the straight-jacket of his theory of the unconscious, he might be able to see that Nietzsche the man understood the power of archetypes quite well.  So well, in fact, that he might agree with Jung that you can never escape the power of an archetype merely by negating it or turning its image on its head.  These simple transformations still leave you within its orbit, stuck in a perpetual cycle of negating the negation of the negation of ...  How to escape this endless cycle of death and rebirth in order to create genuinely new images is precisely the problem Nietzsche sets for himself.  It seems to me that TSZ isn't an attempt to solve this problem so much as to live it.  

This interpretation puts a completely different spin on Jung's idea that Nietzsche was 'possessed' by an archetype.  Nietzsche is actually showing us something like Jung's theory in action.  Certainly, the man must have experienced forces that he felt came from beyond himself to be able to write TSZ.  The document we are left with though is not a blind expression of those forces overwhelming a person, but of the personal struggle to understand what it would mean to 'overcome' those forces.  At least in his discussion of the prologue, Jung doesn't give Nietzsche enough credit.  His interpretation would be closer to the mark if he attributed most of his own ideas to Nietzsche, rather than patronizingly diagnosing the poor man as too overwhelmed to understand what was happening.  

But I think Jung's theory of archetypes may be incapable of handling a problem like this.  At its root, if it is anything real at all, an archetype is a static figure, conceived in a representational mode that Deleuze calls, "realist, materialist, and subjective or individualist".  The archetype may seem to have a profound transpersonal being, but it can only have an effect through the prior assumption of a standard human subject.

... even if we oppose a collective or cosmic unconscious to the individual unconscious, the former can act only through its power to inspire representations in a solipsistic subject, whether this be the subject of a culture or a world. (D&R pg. 104)  

In reality, Zarathustra can't be an archetype at all, for the simple reason that he develops over the course of the book.  The character of Zarathustra and the book as a whole certainly use the idea of something like an archetype, but one important point of the book seems to be to show the limitations of this idea and the shortcomings of any fixed 'spiritual' doctrine.  Accordingly, Nietzsche shows Zarathustra developing his teachings.  He shows hime doubting and changing his mind.  Even here in the prologue he shows our hero failing to be able to communicate with the crowd.  And he shows him waking the morning after he buries the corpse (pg. 20) to the new idea that he needs to attract a few likeminded disciples instead of preaching to everyone.  Can it be coincidence that he discovers this immediately after senseless mass where the old hermit 'hosts' the corpse, whether he likes it or not?  If Zarathustra is a moving target then Jung's whole theory of Nietzsche's identification with his archetype falls apart.  Which Zarathustra is he identified with?

An Experiment

Having finished re-reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I've begun to wade into Carl Jung's seminar (though the original complete and unabridged version of course, not the compromised second draft).  I think these classes will be very interesting; I'm immediately impressed by how widely read Jung is.  For example, right off the bat there is a knowledgable discussion of Zorastrianism and its influence on Christianity and Judaism.  Since I'm still constantly overcoming my prejudice that early psychoanalysis was all a bunch of pseudo-scientific bullshit (which is part of the point of reading the Jung lectures) I found myself impressed that Jung's description of Zorastrianism was remarkably close to the more modern descriptions I've perused recently.  His dating of Zarathustra (~800BCE -- pg. 5) doesn't line up with the modern linguistic assessment of ~1400 BCE that Peter Clark provides, but otherwise he seems to summarize it pretty well.  

[Clark makes an interesting suggestion that Zorastrianism's universal moral God had a direct influence on converting Judaism into a monotheistic religion; the Jews would have come into contact with Zorastrianism during their period of Babylonian exile.  It had actually never occurred to me that Judaism was not always monotheistic, but in retrospect it makes complete sense.  You don't go around telling folks that your God is the only real God and noisily proclaiming that this sole universal God just happened to select your particular tribe as his Chosen People unless you're pretty worried that your God was secretly no different than every other local tribal deity.]

Jung also devotes some illuminating pages to the pagan influence on Christianity.  That the catholics are basically pagans in disguise has long been obvious to me.  But I'd never heard of the particular cult of Mithras and the way its very similar rituals might have interacted with early Christianity.  

None of this, however, is my point.  My point isn't even that Jung is going to tackle the chapters in TSZ in order, as if they were the patient's dreams on successive night, and that this is a really hard, and somewhat dangerous, way to read Zarathustra.  The book is specifically resistant to the live blogging (or live seminaring) format.  Trying to understand the symbols in each chapter by going through it chronologically is bound to result in a huge stack of merely provisional identifications.  Too many of the images and ideas are suggestive but almost totally ambiguous the first time they are introduced.   They only gain in clarity and concreteness as they are reworked throughout the text, as if the only way to hear the original theme were to hear all the variations first.  To make matters worse, as I mentioned last time, Nietzsche is wily.  Which means that the provisional meaning of a passage can be a deliberate trap.  Since I was already wrestling with the question of how to approach the text, I don't fault Jung for simply proceeding linearly.  I don't really see another way to do it if you're trying to be systematic.

But who said we had to be systematic here at FPiPE?  We'll get another ordered look at the book simply by following along with Jung.  In the meantime -- and now, yes, at last, this is my point dude -- I'm going to try just skipping around and writing about TSZ thematically, whenever a thought occurs to me, and with reference to whatever part of the book sparks it.   

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Today's theme is the self-overcoming of nihilism.  It is brought to you by Graham Parkes' discussion of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani's book by the same name.  Though apparently Nietzsche himself coined this apt phrase somewhere in his notebooks, so it's straight from the source.  My interpretation of this idea is really simple, but I think it actually opens up a profound question.  Why is nihilism so famously exhausting?  I mean, if nihilism is true and nothing means anything, why is that a problem?  The lack of meaning can only register as bad if we previously expected that finding meaning would be good.  But this expectation too is meaningless.  We're not real nihilists if we sit around bemoaning the fact that everything would be wonderful if only nihilism weren't true.  In that case we're just cowards.

This is not to say that the nihilist position refutes itself.  On the contrary.  Nihilism is perfectly self-consistent.  There's nothing logically incoherent about saying: " "I believe in nothing".  Even this statement I just made."  The problem is not logical, but existential.  The very being of the nihilist refutes his position.  Whatever the nihilist actually does indicates some sort of valuation by default.  Whether it's passing out in a pool or cutting off our girlfriend's toe, the very facts of living shows that we do in fact, consider something to be meaningful, at least in that moment.  So nihilism overcomes itself through the inevitability of action.  And there's no escape from the evaluation implied by action.  Even suicide reveals life's evaluation of itself -- as valueless.  Even inaction is a form of action.

The way Nietzsche might phrase this, at least early on in TSZ, is to say that our body has never been a nihilist.  Throughout the prologue and the early section of part 1, Zarathustra preaches about remaining "faithful to the earth" and the encompassing nature of the body. 

   But the awakened, the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body. 
   The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd.
   Your small reason, what you call "spirit" is also a tool of your body, my brother, a small work- and plaything of your great reason.
   "I" you say and are proud of this word. But what is greater is that in which you do not want to believe – your body and its great reason. It does not say I, but does I.  (quoting from the Del Caro translation since I can't find a pdf version of Parkes, but using Parkers' page numbers -- pg. 30)

Only a spirit separated from its body can get wrapped around itself and fall into the apparent trap of nihilism.  Nietzsche's point is that this despairing spirit is really only a tiny part of our experience, a part that is able to appoint itself judge of that experience only when the body is weak or sick or weary in some way.  

This appeal to a larger "I", its link to the body, and the way it changes our perspective on the question of nihilism turns out to be remarkably similar to the Buddhist (particularly the Mahayana) view of the world.  In fact, my understanding of the self-overcoming of nihilism was partly crystallized by reading Adyashanti.  One of the potential pitfalls on the road to awakening is something he calls "the trap of meaninglessness".  Consider the way he describes this problem.

One of the most common of these traps is a sense of meaninglessness.  From our new view of reality we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning.  We see that the ego's desire to find meaning in life is actually a substitute for the perception of being life itself.  The search for meaning in life is a surrogate from the knowledge that we are life.  Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning.  Only someone disconnected from life will look for purpose. (90)

The mind will start to say, "Oh God, I no longer have any purpose or meaning."  You have seen too much of reality to believe in egoic purpose or meaning any longer.  Yet there is still enough ego structure left to be invested in meaning and purpose.  The illusion of ego is noticing that there is no meaning; it is peering into the truth, as it were, which can be very disorienting. (91)

I've met people over the years who have had a very real seeing, but their ego has reacted to what they saw.  Ego literally reacts to the reality that was perceived, and the reaction can be very negative.  The ego may get depressed; meaning and purpose have dissolved out of its structure, and there's still enough ego there to sit around and feel bad about it. (92)

 Of course I am biased in many ways, but I've been constantly surprised how 'Eastern' Nietzsche feels now that I'm reading him as an adult.

Zarathustra Style

As many devoted readers already know (personal communication) I have embarked on a Zarathustra bender.  The complex reasons for this grog-on would be of interest only to other music nerds; suffice it to say that I'm reorganizing my bookshelf autobiographically.  The current reading list is:

1. The complete two volume transcriptions of the seminar Carl Jung gave on Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1934-39.
2. All four volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures given around 1935.
3. The first English translation of Pierre Klossowki's influential Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which marked the emergence of the 'French Nietzsche' in 1969.
4. Whatever sundry secondary material or other works by Nietzsche that may be useful along the way.  

It's been 26 years since I read Nietzsche's masterpiece though, so I needed to go back to the original first.  To my surprise, I discovered that there have been two new English translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the past few decades.  You can find an interesting review of both translations, together with a critique of the old Kaufmann version, over here.  I chose Parkes' translation mainly because it was a whole lot cheaper, but, following the advice in that review, I also read a pdf version of Adrian Del Caro's introduction -- it was indeed a great essay, certainly much more organized and illuminating than the one Parkes' provides.

Since I'm going to be working with TSZ for a while here, I don't feel the need to organize all my thoughts about it into a single post.  Which is a relief, because I really don't feel like I understand it very well.  Zarathustra is truly one of the strangest books in the history of philosophy.  The weirdness begins with Nietzsche's decision to put his ideas in the mouth of a prophet, and to tell the story of the life of this prophet, rather than adopt a more propositional form of discourse.  What results is some combination of novel, parable, psalm, sutra, gatha, and dialogue that defies generic description.  But this unclassifiable style is only the beginning the weirdness.  When we try to pin down what content fills this strange new form we run into seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  Unlike with a lot of modern philosophy though, the problem is not the language itself.  Nietzsche is an absolutely superb writer.  Zarathustra's speeches are brilliant, witty, visceral masterpieces of oratory.  Many of the narrative images, like the man choking on a snake (pg. 137), or Zarathustra's shadow flying into a volcano (pg. 113), or the concluding Ass Festival (pg. 274), are vividly clear and unforgettable.  As far as I know you have to go all the way back to Plato to find a philosopher who can stand beside Nietzsche on literary grounds.  

So the problem is not that we literally don't understand him.  We actually have the opposite problem.  There are too many wonderful ideas and catchy phrases and moving images.  But they don't all point in the same direction.  In fact, many of them are blatantly contradictory.  Others appear to be related as variations on a theme, but since the book has a constantly shifting series of contexts, you can never be sure quite how they relate.  And then there's the dawning realization that TSZ is not merely complex and multifaceted, but that Nietzsche is actually out to deliberately trick you.  Consider just one example that Deleuze has pointed out.  Nietzsche repeatedly said that the idea of Eternal Return was the central idea in the book.  However, this idea isn't even mentioned in a recognizable form until the beginning of part 3 (ie. more than halfway through the book on pg. 135), and when we get the seemingly definitive statement of it towards the end of that same part, it doesn't come from the mouth of Zarathustra himself, but from his animals (pg. 190).  Almost everything is shrouded in multiple levels of indirection like this.  Nietzsche's thought, as he himself would be the first to admit, is truly wicked.  

How do we think about a book with such mysterious contents written in the style of an unknown genre?  I can only throw out a few suggestions that pop into my head.  

It might be useful to see TSZ as a form of science fiction, or more broadly, speculative fiction.  Of course, Nietzsche has invented and developed this character.  But what if we were to read the book as if it were non-fiction, as if it were exactly what it claims to be -- the chronicles of a prophet who launched a new sort of anti-religious religion?  In what kind of future world is Nietzsche's text the new Avesta?  After all, if there's one clear thing in all of TSZ, it's the constant concern with overcoming the present and producing the future.

One of the best things about this new translation is the footnotes, which cite many letters Nietzsche wrote to friends.  Many obscure images and phrases are illuminated by the context of Nietzsche's life.  It becomes clear that the book was intensely and searingly personal for Nietzsche.  Specific passages are related to specific feelings experienced at specific places.  There are thinly veiled references to friends like Wagner and philosophical mentors such as Schopenhauer.  And the whole works is written in the wake of a breakup with his special lady friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé.  Maybe the best way to read the book, then, is as one soul's dialogue with itself.  Nietzsche isn't presenting what he already believes, but working out what he needs to believe in order to keep working.  He is dramatizing an inner turmoil that he experienced as simultaneously personal and spiritual or metaphysical.  Looking at the book as a dialogue of sorts has the advantage of placing it into relation to Plato.  I found that reading TSZ produced a similar feeling to reading some of the longer Platonic dialogues like, say, Phaedrus, or The Sophist.  Since different characters and perspectives are in dialog, you never know quite where the author himself stands.  So when you reach the end, instead of finding a clear cut conclusion, you are forced to retrace your steps and consider how each of the twists and turns fit together.  Plato's dialogues, with their long narrative context and mythic contents, are also a good model for the genre-bending aspect of TSZ.

Finally, we might consider TSZ as a piece of music.  In his introduction, Parkes talks explicitly about how he wanted his translation to "restore the musicality of the text".  And there is something clearly musical about the way the book works.  Themes are announced, and then repeated with the same sense of variation and development you find in a symphony.  The scenes of climax especially have a certain tone and rhythm.  So you might look at the whole works as a type of long poem, or perhaps better as the libretto to an opera.  The prologue, for example, and much of part 4, definitely read as something that should be staged or filmed.