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.
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