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3.1 Introduction
In this chapter we look at one of Nietzsche's
major works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from the perspective of Pure
Consciousness Mysticism, contrasting its vision with the ecstatic poetry
of Rumi and Kabir, and also looking at the work of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
(Osho).
Nietzsche's links in the popular mind with the Nazis have generally been
refuted, though probably are still a widespread misconception. The historical
connection via his sister (who married a notorious anti-Semite) to Mussolini
and then to Hitler will always taint his ideas, but all the more reason
to look without prejudice at what he says, especially as some of it seems
to be exuberantly mystical. His own life shows a gently and kindly man,
a committed teacher of his students, a hatred of pettiness and bigotry,
and a compassion shown in his decision to serve as a medical orderly in
the war between France and Prussia in 1870. Perhaps Bertrand Russell's appraisal
of Nietzsche in A History of Western Philosophy may have something
to do with his poor reputation, though I think it has more to do with Russell's
style and his horror at the war, fresh in his mind at the time of writing.
In the short section that Russell devotes to Nietzsche, Russell summarises
his philosophy (which he describes as more literary than academic),
rather than investigate the man revealed through his writings, as I shall
attempt to do here. To bring home his views on Nietzsche, Russell pits him
in an imaginary argument against the Buddha, and before God. Nietzsche speaks
against the propagation of love and harmony that the Buddha seems to teach,
on the grounds of producing a dull world. "I appeal to You, Lord, as
the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed
by the degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath."
(Russell is really a bit unfair to think that Nietzsche would call the Buddha
a psychopath! Nietzsche actually once commented on Buddhism as a system
of mental hygiene much as Jung is accused of in the next century.) Russell
goes on to have Nietzsche say that if the Lord should decide for the Buddha's
world, "I fear we should all die of boredom". The Buddha replies:
"You might, because you love pain, and your love of life is
a sham. But those who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy
in the world as it is." [1] Does Nietzsche love pain? Is his love of life a sham?
We will consider these questions. But what of Russell? How do we compare
his comment that "no one can be happy in the world as it is" (a
version of which is part of Buddhist thinking, though Russell probably
misrepresents the Buddha as much as Nietzsche) with Whitman's acceptance
and sober delight in it? (Sober versus drunk: this will be a theme for looking
at Nietzsche.) For sure, happiness comes and goes, but it seems that to
accept and love life is what makes you bigger, and the kind of bitterness
shown in Russell's Why I am not a Christian [2] (for example), can only diminish
one. Having said that, Russell's final rejection of Nietzsche is on the
grounds of a lack of the love that Russell desires to be in the world. While
Nietzsche is as fiercely anti-Christian as Russell he does seem,
in Zarathustra, to be offering something real in its place, something
expansive. Zarathustra's vision of life is joyous, accepting of the polarities
of good and evil.
Whitman used to say that even the best of his admirers (O'Connor, Burroughs
or Bucke) only thought half as much of Leaves of Grass as he did
himself [3],
but Nietzsche spoke of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as in the azure distance
and beyond anything that had gone before, including Dante, Shakespeare,
and the Vedas. Where Whitman looked a little immodest in claiming
that Shakespeare was the poet for the feudal ages past, and he the poet
of the democratic age to come, Nietzsche's claims for Zarathustra
are startling:
The highest and the lowest forces of human
nature, the sweetest, most frivolous and most fearsome stream forth out
of one fountain with immortal certainty. Until then one does not
know what height, what depth is; one knows even less what truth is. There
is no moment in this revelation of truth which would have been anticipated
or divined by even one of the greatest. There is no wisdom, no psychology,
no art of speech before Zarathustra; the nearest things, the most
everyday things here speak of things unheard of. [4]
With this evaluation, admittedly by its own
author, we should investigate it: even if it only ranks alongside
the Gita and Leaves it will be worth it.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's mature work, though not his
last. But first, let us look at his life and how it led up to Zarathustra.
He was born in 1844 as the son of a Protestant pastor; his father died of
a brain disease when the boy Nietzsche was young, and so he grew up mainly
in the company of women. He was unusually intelligent, and gained a scholarship
to Schulpforta (one of the best schools of the time) in 1858 at the age
of 14, where he was mostly first in the class. He was often ill as a boy
and had a conspicuous stare, sometimes with a wild or threatening look.
He was very serious however, and nicknamed 'the little pastor' because of
his religious interests, but his passion was for books and writing: he wrote
an autobiography at the age of 14 and named it after Goethe's autobiography
(who was to remain one of his heroes). He also liked to play war-games with
toy soldiers, and would invent games with his sister and childhood friends,
taking a dominant role in these. He went on to University to study theology
in his father's footsteps, in 1864, and attempted to enter the usual social
life of students in those days including the joining of an undergraduate
fraternity. He persisted in spite of a lack of natural gregariousness, and
apparently even visited a brothel with his fraternarians, though he confined
himself to playing the piano which he discovered there to his great relief.
Theology did not satisfy him however, so he changed to philology at which
he excelled, and transferred to Leipzig under the tutelage of Professor
Ritschl, where he founded the Leipzig Philological Society and contributed
an impressive paper to it. Despite his brilliance at philology he began
to take more of an interest in philosophy, and read Schopenhauer who was
an important early influence, but whom Nietzsche never met. In 1867 he entered
the army, but after serving for a few months he fell off his horse, broke
his ribs, and suffered an infection that probably also weakened his health
in later life. Nietzsche met Wagner, whose music impressed him greatly,
and entered a period of orbiting this great man, writing to him and about
him, and spending time with him and his mistress Cosima. It seems that Nietzsche
saw in Wagner a role model, though later on he rejected the turn of Wagner's
work and its narrowing nationalist focus. In 1869, at the age of twenty-four,
Nietzsche was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel, and
received an honorary doctorate for his writings in philology. He was noted
for being a good and kind teacher to his students, who may have appreciated
him also for being closer to their age than most of their lecturers. He
even received a raise for excellence in teaching.
In 1870 Nietzsche enlisted as a medical orderly in the Prussian army (at
war with France), which was quite voluntary, as he had given up his Prussian
citizenship in order to work uninterrupted at Basel, an act that left him
officially stateless up to his death. The human carnage he saw at first
hand among both French and German soldiers appalled him and challenged his
patriotism, turning him to philosophy for consolation. He soon became ill
himself, with dysentery and diphtheria, and he was discharged to recuperate
at home. It may have been this experience that made him a critic of both
militarism and statism, a quite explicit stance in his writings that is
at odds with the Nazi claims on him.
In his teaching years at Basel he continued his friendship with Wagner,
though the relationship between Wagner and Cosima offends his rather prudish
sensibilities (Cosima was then the wife of Hans von Bulow, the conductor
of Wagner's operas). Wagner was enthusiastic about one of Nietzsche's early
books The Birth of Tragedy (which the philologer Ritschl was hostile
to), but the friendship eventually waned as Nietzsche considered that Wagner
had 'sold out' to the German public. Nietzsche grew impatient with philology
and began to consider that philosophy was more important to him, but the
University refused to let him transfer from the one discipline into the
other. In 1876 Nietzsche's health deteriorated to the point where he had
to give up teaching, and from then on he lived on the tiny University pension
he received, publishing his works at his own expense.
In 1881 he started on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but his health worsened
and only a few works followed this (which he reckoned to be his finest achievement)
before his complete breakdown by 1890. The first two parts of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra appeared in 1883, in the same year that Wagner died; the
third part in 1884, and the fourth part appeared in 1885. In 1888 the first
signs of madness appeared, and in his very last letter dated 6th January
1889 he begins: 'Dear Professor, in the end I would have much preferred
being a Basel professor to being God. But I did not dare to carry my private
egoism so far that for its sake I should omit the creation of the world
...' He caused a public commotion soon after this letter by throwing his
arms around an old cart-horse whose misery aroused in him such pity that
he was overcome [5]. Pity was one of the emotions he railed against endlessly
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He was nursed, first by his mother and then by his sister, up to his death
in 1900. In the last twelve years of his life he was considered insane,
and was unable to converse or even dress himself, though he often left an
impression on visitors of a grace or profundity, or some kind of greatness,
through the wreck 'from which the mind had fled'. One such visitor was Rudolf
Steiner (at the age of 34) who had been approached by Elisabeth Nietzsche
for advice in setting up the Nietzsche archive (Steiner had been working
for the Goethe-and-Schiller Archive). Steiner wrote this in his autobiography:
... But I am still grateful to Frau Forster-Nietzsche
for taking me into Friedrich Nietzsche's room on the occasion of the first
of the many visits that I paid her. There he lay in mental darkness on
a sofa. I was struck by the nobility of his brow the brow of an artist
and thinker. It was early afternoon. Those eyes, in which though the fire
in them was dead the workings of the soul could still be read, took in
his surroundings, but conveyed no images to his mind. One just stood there,
and to Nietzsche it meant nothing. But looking at that face that was so
eloquent of the spirit it was almost possible to believe that this was
the expression of a soul which had spent the morning piecing together thoughts,
and now desired to rest awhile. My soul was seized by an inner convulsion,
which could have been interpreted as understanding of the genius whose
gaze was directed towards me but did not meet my eyes. The passivity of
that prolonged stare blocked the understanding in my own gaze so that I
saw but encountered no response.
I could think only haltingly about what I had seen; and these halting thoughts
are the content of my book, Nietzsche, a Man against his Time. But
the halting nature of the book cannot obscure the fact that it was Nietzsche
who inspired it. [6]
Steiner, a young academic easily as brilliant
in his early promise as Nietzsche, published two other works on Nietzsche's
philosophy and psychopathology. Steiner saw that what Nietzsche had destroyed
(and which needed to be destroyed) Nietzsche could not replace: he had scorned
the emerging scientific ethos of the age. Steiner himself pursued his own
path, which started out in a scientific way, but became the occultism he
is now remembered for.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written in short periods and in unusual
circumstances. According to his notes on the subject in Ecce Homo,
it was in August 1881, while walking in the woods by lake Silvaplana that
the concept of eternal recurrence (a redemption of the past based
on affirmation) came to him, and which forms a theme in the book. From this
point to its 'delivery' in February 1883 took eighteen months, which he
thought would suggest to Buddhists at least that he was really a female
elephant. In this period he also wrote the Gay Science and a musical work,
which, he says, bore the proximity of something incomparable Zarathustra.
Nietzsche lived in a quite bay of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, and spent
his mornings, health permitting, walking in the woods up in the hills above,
and in the afternoons in walking around the bay. The concept of Zarathustra
grew on him in this period, or crept up on him, as he says. He considers
that the book came from him almost as an act of revelation:
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century
a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration?
If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition
left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is
merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces.
The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with an
unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something
that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact.
One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a
thought flashes up like lightening, with necessity, unfalteringly formed
I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension somehow
discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one's steps now involuntarily
rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside of oneself
with the distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickles
down to one's toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and
gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded,
as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light; an instinct
for rhythmical relationships which spans forms of wide extent length, the
need for a wide-spanned rhythm is almost the measure of the force of inspiration,
a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension ... Everything is in
the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling
of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity ... The involuntary
nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no
longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself
as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression. It really
does seem, to allude to a saying of Zarathustra's, as if the things themselves
approached and offered themselves as metaphors ( 'here all things come
caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride upon
your back. Upon every image you here ride to every truth. Here the words
and word-chests of all existence spring open to you; all existence here
want to become words, all becoming here wants to learn speech from you
'). This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one
has to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could say to me 'it
is mine also'. [7]
We are tempted to whisper back to Nietzsche
"Whitman?", but no matter. This passage that I have reproduced
in whole is suggestive of the kind of transforming experience that brings
a person to cosmic consciousness (to use Bucke's phrase), and reinforces
our need to examine Zarathustra. Nietzsche spent a period in Rome,
and then in Nice: for each of the first three parts of Zarathustra he required
only ten weeks, and was an extraordinary period for him:
my muscular agility has always been greatest
when my creative power has flowed most abundantly. The body is inspired:
let us leave the 'soul' out of it ... I could often have been seen dancing;
at that time I could walk for seven or eight hours in the mountains without
a trace of tiredness. I slept well, I laughed a lot I was perfectly vigorous
and perfectly patient. [8]
This could almost be Whitman talking, as perhaps
in this passage from Leaves:
Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee.
('Song of Myself', v. 10)
However, Nietzsche says that apart from those
ten-week period the 'gestation' period for Zarathustra was a time of stress
without equal (giving us a picture of his extremes of despair and elation).
Nietzsche explains why he chose Zarathustra as the hero of his book he had
searched for a prophet or religious figure whose teachings were based on
the conflict between good and evil. The Persian seer Zoroaster, and founder
of the Zoroastrian religion, fitted the bill, though Nietzsche's Zarathustra
bears no resemblance to his namesake, other than in his heroic or mythic
status. Instead Zarathustra becomes Nietzsche's alter ego.
3.2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
have only a thread of a narrative running through them. Each part is broken
down into sections which revolve around some theme or insight, and are mainly
the sayings of Zarathustra, though sometimes replaced by a dialogue or a
descriptive passage. The sayings of Zarathustra are in the form of aphorisms,
and these crowd on top of each other, many of them representing penetrating
insights into human nature.
In Part One Zarathustra has already spent ten years in solitude on his mountain-top,
and is so overflowing with wisdom and beneficence that he feels the need
to descend and share it with the populace. On his way down he meets a hermit
and wonders that the old man has not heard that 'God is dead'. He arrives
in the market place in the nearest town, where the people are about to watch
a tight-rope walker, and he starts to preach his basic message: man is something
to be overcome; they should prepare for the appearance of the Superman.
In a reference to Darwinism he points out that all creatures have hitherto
created something beyond themselves man in turn must give way to the Superman.
The Superman is free from the superstitions of the past and is true to the
earth. Then comes a bizarre scene where a tight-rope walker appears from
one of the two towers that support a rope above the crowd in the market-place,
and begins his journey across it. Half-way across a 'buffoon' in brightly-coloured
clothes comes after him and berates him for being between the two towers;
why is he not back in the tower, locked up where he belongs? The buffoon
then screams at him and jumps over him, causing the tight-rope walker to
fall, mortally injured, at Zarathustra's feet. Zarathustra takes the corpse
away to bury it reflecting that the people of the market-place would not
understand his message, and so he resolves only to speak to individuals
who could understand: his disciples. The rest of Part One is taken up with
a series of discourses for them on a range of subjects, but all illustrating
the necessity of sweeping away the old decadence and preparing for the Superman.
Zarathustra makes known his views on a wide variety of subjects including
the State, virtue, justice; and famously, the advice not to forget one's
whip when visiting women. At the end of Part One he takes a loving farewell
of this disciples and returns to his cave in the mountains.
In Part Two Zarathustra waits 'like a sower who has scattered his seed',
i.e. his wisdom, and eventually has a dream that his doctrine is in danger,
which revives his longing to preach again. He returns to his disciples and
launches into a series of attacks on traditional values: in particular those
groups held in esteem by his society, including 'sublime men': poets and
scholars, priests and philosophers, the so-called virtuous, and the 'tarantulas'
those who would preach the equality of men. Part Two also includes the 'Night
Song', one of the most poetic and rapturous passages in Zarathustra.
Towards the end of Part Two Zarathustra seems to falter, having a strange
nightmare and doubts about his role as great teacher, for he lacks the 'lion's
voice for command'. He leaves his disciples again, grieving, and in Part
Three after crossing the Blissful Island takes a ship across the sea. He
is silent at first and then describes a nightmare, in which he is, or he
sees, a shepherd with a snake down his throat choking him; he then introduces
his idea of eternal recurrence. Once the shepherd bites off the snake's
head, he is liberated, and Zarathustra's spirits are raised. There follows
the thought that happiness runs after him a kind of innocent state; and
then a rather mystical section called 'Before Sunrise' where he becomes
quite ecstatic. Zarathustra arrives in his own country, meeting on his way
an 'ape' who has borrowed his teachings and distorted them; he also finds
'apostates', those of his disciples who turn back to Christianity. He returns
to his cave in the mountains, where he is reunited with his animals: an
eagle and a serpent. He ponders that up in the free air of the mountains
all words become available to him, seek speech in him, while down amongst
the people all speech is in vain. He speaks in solitude on some of his central
themes, on the 'Spirit of Gravity', which destroys the spontaneous and natural
in man, on good and evil, on the will to power, and on eternal recurrence.
He undergoes a crisis which resolves itself into an ecstatic discourse with
his soul, and an ecstatic ode to Life and a restatement of his theme as
the prophet of eternal recurrence.
Part Four has a different style, as we would expect from the fact that it
was a later addition, and in fact intended to be part of further additions,
though these did not materialise. Zarathustra spends many years in his cave,
becoming old and white-haired; again his beneficence is oppressing in its
abundance and he reflects that his disciples will now come to seek him rather
than he descend to them. He hears a great cry of distress in his forests
below as a prophet warns him of the last seduction to the sin of pity.
Zarathustra goes down to the forests to find the source of the cries of
distress for they come from the Higher Man. He meets in turn, two kings
with an ass, the conscientious man of the spirit, a sorcerer, the last pope,
the slayer of God (the ugliest man), the voluntary beggar, and his shadow,
each of whom he sends up to his cave for hospitality. Having still not found
the source of the cries of distress, he suddenly hears it again, many-throated,
but of one voice, and emanating from his cave. He returns there to meet
them, the Higher Men. He tells them that they are not high enough or strong
enough: they are only bridges for others to step over. Nevertheless, he
prepares a feast for them the Last Supper and exhorts them to reach beyond
themselves. The sorcerer sings a strange song, as does the conscientious
man of the spirit (who turns out to be the archetype of the scientist),
but Zarathustra berates them for falling prey to fear he teaches them courage.
Zarathustra's shadow (the wanderer) also sings a song, and Zarathustra is
overjoyed to see that they have become convalescents in his company. They
proceed with a strange festival in worship of the ass, but Zarathustra only
congratulates them on their merriment and sings his own 'intoxicated' song
for them. The next day, he is first to rise and realises that they cannot
be his disciples after all: a flock of birds settle on him, and a climax
is reached as a lion joins him and fawns upon him. The Higher Men awake
to greet him, but are chased away by the roaring lion, and they disappear.
Zarathustra is left alone and with the realisation that he had after all
succumbed to his pity for the Higher Men, but it was of no consequence.
His lion, that was missing at the end of Part Two, was now with him and
his children were to come, for now it was time for the great noontide his
work was begun.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be seen as a book of insights into human
nature, and its destiny. One of the best Neitzschean insights in Zarathustra
is his idea, expressed early in the book that man is a bridge between
the animal and the divine. This is a concept perhaps familiar in the East,
but rarely expressed so vividly. For Nietzsche the bridge is from an ancient
and restrictive concept of the human, to a man he calls the Superman: all
of life should be an overcoming of the old man to reach to the new. He illustrates
it in the episode where Zarathustra watches the tight-rope walker fall to
his death as the buffoon rushes over him, shouting that he does not belong
between the towers. This is a wonderful metaphor for the agony of human
existence: stretched between the animal and the divine, in a state of tension
that is only appeased by a return to the lower passions, or by a leap to
the transcendent, the superman. The buffoon represents all the forces that
are against the crossing-over, and the fall represents the possible consequences
of attempting it.
But the divine has to be redefined by Nietzsche, as, in his famous phrase,
'God is dead'. All afterworlds are to be discarded as the inventions of
the 'sick and the dying who despised the body and the earth and who invented
things of heaven'. Nietzsche was a pastor's son, we remember, and in his
youth showed a religious tendency that led to his enrolment for pastoral
studies. Nietzsche rejects all the old traditions wholesale, as does Krishnamurti,
and in its place expounds the Superman. In many ways this is the last part
of the Western revolution from feudalism to democracy: the feudal religious
systems have to go, and Nietzsche is attempting to put something new in
their place in the same way as Whitman. Much of Zarathustra seems
at first glance to contain Whitman's themes: celebration of the body, of
nature, and rejection of the renunciative tradition. Zarathustra says of
the preachers of death (all the following quotes are from the translation
by R.J.Hollingdale [9]):
They encounter an invalid or an old man or
a corpse; and straightaway they say 'Life is refuted!'
But only they are refuted, they and their eye
that sees only on aspect of existence.
('Of the Preachers of Death')
This is probably a direct attack on Buddhism
(even though Nietzsche seems otherwise to respect it) as it is in the Buddhist
tradition that the young prince Siddhartha saw, in the this order, an invalid,
an old man and a corpse (exposure to which his father had prevented up to
this point) and that led him to renounce his wealth and title and become
a forest hermit in search of enlightenment. Nietzsche is against the simplistic
rejection of life on the grounds of suffering, old age and death; in fact
no religious tradition of either East or West is to be retained.
Zarathustra transcends and reaches forward for the Superman he lives alone,
with only his animals for company, apart from those times when his soul
is so full that he must descend and share his overflowing wisdom with the
people. Nietzsche returns again and again to the theme that man as he is
must be overcome, and much of Zarathustra is devoted to spelling
out just what it is in man that is to be transcended. Nietzsche found the
prevailing culture of middle-Europe at the middle and end of the 19th century
stifling, and he ruthlessly attacked all the cultural icons: not just the
Protestant religion of his family and country, but the geniuses of culture
that in the popular mind had replaced the aristocracy. In crossing over
the bridge there was no baggage allowed: only a lightness of spirit and
an inner personal freedom. His idea of the will to power has to be seen
in this context, as a personal statement, and not as a political one.
Nietzsche echoes Whitman and Jefferies in praising the body; that they did
this at a similar point in European history is no coincidence, as the Victorian
morality and dread of the body's natural functions laid a dead hand over
the imagination of many of the great thinkers of that period. We live in
a time where the body is largely restored its natural place, or perhaps
too greatly emphasised even, and may find it odd that these writers should
lay so much stress on it. Let us look at some of Nietzsche's thoughts on
the subject, as expressed through Zarathustra:
Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the
body: and then this contempt was the supreme good the soul wanted the body
lean, monstrous, famished. So the soul thought to escape from the body
and from the earth.
Oh, this soul was itself lean, monstrous, and
famished: and cruelty was the delight of this soul!
But tell me brothers: What does your body say
about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and dirt and a miserable ease?
('Zarathustra's Prologue')
Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of
the healthy body, this is a pure voice and a more honest one.
Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy
body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of earth.
('Of the Afterworldsmen')
'I am body and soul' so speaks the child. And
why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened, the enlightened man says:
I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something
in the body.
There is more reason in your body than in your
best wisdom.
('Of the Despisers of the Body')
'Since I have known the body better', said
Zarathustra to one of his disciples, 'the spirit has been only figuratively
spirit to me; and all that is "intransitory" that too has been
only an "image"'.
('Of Poets')
Compare these with some quotes from Leaves
of Grass:
I have said that the soul is not more than
the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than
the soul.
('Song of Myself', verse 48)
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I
engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them,
respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with
the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their
own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad
as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as
the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is
the soul?
('I Sing the Body Electric', verse 1)
Nietzsche is emphatic about Nature as a whole,
not just the body, taking a delight in it as his long walks in the woods
during the gestation of Zarathustra show. He would often take friends to
the 'Zarathustra stone' a waterwashed boulder on the shore of Lake Silvaplana
and wax lyrical in the beautiful surroundings on the origins of the book.
There are not that many descriptions of nature in Zarathustra, but he spells
out his views in these passages:
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let
your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I entreat you, my brothers, remain true
to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial
hopes! They are the poisoners, whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, atrophying and
self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone!
Once the blasphemy against God was the greatest
blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme
the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of
the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth.
(Prologue)
A consistent theme throughout Zarathustra
(and in much of his other, late work) is the breakdown of the conventional
concepts of good and evil. Whitman said he was the poet of evil, just as
much as good, and that his poems may do as much evil as good; Nietzsche
echoes a more conventional view, held by many European writers at the time
that 'everything was now permitted', as Zarathustra says:
O my brothers, is everything not now in
flux? Have not all railings and gangways fallen into the water and
come to nothing? Who can still cling to 'good' and 'evil'?
('Of Old and New Law-Tables')
Zarathustra teaches that good and evil are intertwined:
Now it is with men as with this tree.
'The more it wants to rise into the heights
and the light, the more determinedly do its roots strive earthwards, downwards,
into the darkness, into the depths into evil.'
('Of the Tree on the Mountainside')
Many of the mystics hint that their condition
is beyond good and evil, or that evil does not exist (which is another way
of saying the same thing), and this attitude is consistent with one who
'crosses over' the bridge. Let us take another example in Zarathustra:
'Man is evil' all the wisest men have told
me that to comfort me. Ah, if only it be true today! For evil is man's
best strength.
'Man must grow better and more evil' thus do
I teach. The most evil is necessary for the Superman's best.
It may have been good for that preacher of
the petty people to bear and suffer the sin of man. I, however, rejoice
in great sin as my great consolation.
But these things are not said for long ears.
Neither does every word belong in every mouth. They are subtle, remote
things: sheep's hooves ought not to grasp for them!
('Of the Higher Man' part 5)
Nietzsche is referring to Jesus in the 'preacher
of the petty people', and is consistent here with his attacks on the teachings
of Christianity. He points out that this 'truth' is not for long ears (i.e.
those of donkeys) the concept is subtle. His reference to sheep is again
a dig at Christianity. Mystics in all the world traditions are divided on
how they treat the prevailing religion: many use its language to convey
their union with ultimate reality, and some of these do so out of choice,
or innocence, while some had to in order to survive the enforcement of orthodoxies.
Others denounce the prevailing faiths in one way or another, or run foul
of them: Whitman mostly ignores his contemporary Christianity; Krishnamurti
rejects everything, past and present, out of hand, Rajneesh rejected all
traditions, but not the mystics; many Zen monks on reaching spiritual maturity
rejected their Masters, almost as a tradition. That Nietzsche is so vehement
in his denigration of Christianity, and that he rejects all prevailing notions
of good and evil, therefore tells us little about his mystical credentials.
Nietzsche's Zarathustra praises evil because the energy of it lifts a person
from dullness and mediocrity, but Nietzsche himself committed no criminal
or evil acts and his energy poured itself more into his writings. Nietzsche
was not by temperament the warrior type, whose virtues he extolled, but
Vivekananda was - we learn of an almost Nietzschean outburst from him on
his way to the United States in 1899, from Rolland:
When people spoke of the rarity of crime in
India he cried, "Would God it were otherwise in my land! For this
is verily the virtuousness of death." "The older I grow,"
he added, "the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness; this
is my new Gospel." He went as far as to say, "Do even evil like
a man. Be wicked if you must, on a great scale!" [10]
References for Nietzsche, part One
[1]
Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Sidney,
Wellington: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 738
[2]
Russell, Bertrand, Why I am not a Christian, Unwin Paperbacks, George
Allen and Unwin, 1975
[3]
Bucke, R.M. Cosmic Consciousness - A Study in the Evolution of the Human
Mind, Olympia Press, London, 1972, p. 185
[4]
Nietzsche, F. Ecce Homo, Penguin Books, London, 1979, p. 106
[5]
Gilman, S.L. Conversations with Nietzsche, New York, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987, p. 218
[6]
Steiner. R. The Course of My Life, New York: Anthroposophic Press,
1969, p. 189
[7]
Nietzsche, F. Ecce Homo, Penguin Books, London, 1979, p. 102
[8]
ibid, p. 104
[9]
Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 1969
[10]
Rolland, Romain, Prophets of the New India, London, Toronto, Melbource,
Sidney: Cassell and Co., 1930, p. 351 (footnote)
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