Since I had copies of both Nietzsche's Zarathustra by Kathleen Marie Higgins, and Lawrence Lampert's Nietzsche's Teaching sitting on the shelf, I figured I'd give them a quick perusal before tackling the final, Deleuzian, leg in my Zarathustra bender.
There's not much to say about Lampert's book. I didn't reread the whole thing primarily because it's just so poorly written, somehow simultaneously pedantically academic and soaringly extravagant in a way that makes it sound almost like a parody of the language of TSZ. Lampert drones on by paraphrasing Zarathustra's speeches just where they don't require it, but then somehow manages to provide no real insight into the opaque overall structure of the work. Though he proposes to take seriously the context of each speech and the way they link together to form a continuous narrative, he doesn't have anything more profound to say than that Zarathustra develops as a teacher. Then to top it off, he completely dismisses the importance of Part 4, relegating discussion of it to an appendix and suggesting Nietzsche should never have appended something so 'light' to his masterpiece. While I'm certainly willing to debate the significance of Part 4, and I think it's appropriate to note that Nietzsche only distributed it to a small audience of friends, the simple fact that he wrote it at all can't be made to evaporate. If the story of TSZ is, as Lampert tells it, the story of how Zarathustra himself becomes the overhuman he initially only prophesized, then how do we explain that Nietzsche sees fit to write a sequel in which he clearly takes his own hero down a peg (or three)? If you don't understand the possibility of the laughter and self-parody in Part 4, I submit, you have missed something crucial in your interpretation of the first three parts.
Higgins, by contrast, manages to touch on the real spirit of Zarathustra. Instead of analyzing it as a book of doctrines as Lampert does, she grounds her engaging interpretation in an existential question that was clearly fundamental to all of Nietzsche's thought: what is the meaning of suffering? And she takes seriously the fact that not all of the book is serious. So her book deserves more detailed comment.
Higgins' thesis is pretty simple. She sees TSZ as an existentialist tragedy that encourages us to love life for its own sake and not as a means to anything else. The Eternal Return is central to the book because it encapsulates this idea by providing us a "present-centered" image of time. Our past suffering can be "redeemed", not because it leads to some permanent future salvation, but because we can reinterpret it as necessary to the spiritual growth that is happening to us right now. Thus, if we can love this feeling of growth enough, we can love all the accidents and absurd suffering that constantly threaten to make our tiny human lives seem meaningless. Importantly, Higgins contends that the book does not merely state this thesis, but is structured to show it to us.
Zarathustra, in her view, is an ambivalent prophet who we see fail time and again over the course of the story. First of all, he fails to be able to communicate his deep personal insights in a form that his audience will understand. He speaks first to everyone (Prologue), then to a few disciples (Part 1), then, increasingly, to himself alone (Parts 2 and 3). But Higgins points out that Zarathustra's failure to capture his insights in communicable form goes even further than this. The central drama or passion of the first three parts of the book seems to be Zarathustra's reluctance to embrace the sickening aspect of his own teaching. Part 2 ends with a cliffhanger where "The Stillest Hour" tells Zarathustra that his unwillingness to embrace the Return is because, "... your fruits are ripe but you are not ripe for your fruits!" And the climax of Part 3 in which ER is finally announced comes in a chapter entitled "The Convalescent". Zarathustra, it seems, struggles to communicate his own doctrine even to himself. He has to learn to live up to his own ideas and redeem his own failures and suffering and misinterpretations. He has to actually live his philosophy, and not merely expound its dead letter. This is the 'tragedy' of Zarathustra, which we as an audience can identify with and suffer through to achieve our own catharsis.
One of the most important parts of this thesis is that it allows us to see the purpose of the parody of Zarathustra in Part 4. Higgins argues that this part of the book is modeled on Menippean satire (and particularly on The Golden Ass). While I found her specific points of comparison only moderately illuminating, I think her general idea is a good one. The Zarathustra of Part 4 is indeed an ass. And he discovers his own folly through hearing the way the higher men parody his religious dogma -- precisely the ideas that were taken so seriously in the first 3 parts. But if we read as Higgins does, the possibility of an ending like this is telegraphed by the earlier message. We've seen a potential gap developing between Zarathustra's insights and their expression since the beginning of the book, a gap that can never be permanently and finally closed once and for all. There is no action and no doctrine that can promise to permanently spare us fragile humans from all possible suffering and misunderstanding. Life goes on, and we should never confuse it with our meagre Wisdom. In short, the message of Part 4 is that the climax of Part 3 recurs eternally.
I think Higgins' thesis is generally fairly in line with my reading of the text. There are some specific points I would disagree on (eg. she reads the animals in "The Convalescent" as the authoritative explanation of ER), and some of the parallels she provides seem too loose to be much help (eg. between Part 4 and The Golden Ass, and between the temporality of ER and our experience of listening to music). But if the thesis has a flaw, I think it's less in the direction it travels than in the distance it covers. It would be fairly straight-forward to extend Higgins' existentialist reading in the less humanist direction that Klossowski has indicated.
For example, her interpretation of the subtitle, "A Book for All and None" is fine as far as it goes:
Zarathustra offers his message to everyone, and yet in a sense his speaking is not for those to whom he speaks, but for himself. (pg. 76)
TSZ does show the inner development of Zarathustra through his attempts to speak. But if Zarathustra alone is the target audience, the subtitle should have been, "A Book for All and One". Higgins' ideas can be pushed in a more radical direction by observing that Zarathustra himself is None. Klossowski convincingly showed us that the Return dissolves all concept of a unitary identity. In this context, that would mean that Zarathustra's problem is less his inability to express some determinate inner insight in words that would be understandable to himself and others, and more the fact that every attempt at expression modifies what we need to express. There's no bottom to interpretation. There's no core to identity. We fail to adequately express it precisely because we try to, not simply because we're poor marksmen.
Similarly, Higgins rightly observes that ER should be seen as a "present-centered" theory of time. If things revolve in a circle, there can be no difference between past and future; the future becomes nothing but a more distant past. But to paraphrase Nagarjuna: if there's no difference between past and future, how the fuck can we live in the present? The present only makes sense sandwiched between these extremes. Dissolving their duality dissolves the concept of the present as well. So while, "Live in the Now!" is good advice, it's also, on deeper inspection, kinda meaningless. In fact, I (at least partly) take ER to illustrate that if you try to find the Now, you will end up discovering Eternity, and vice-versa. But Higgins only gives us the on-ramp to this great highway of the non-dual.
