Search Results

This chapter presents an account of human life primarily through Nietzsche's character of Zarathustra, who argues that human life is irreducibly diverse and thoroughly dangerous. We are constantly trying to rebuild our home within it, constantly trying to glue all the pieces of the world we live in into a whole, to order it, to turn it into “our world.” But we will never be able to remove from this world the threat of catastrophe, of destruction, of the end; we will never achieve certainty that the next step in our lives won't march us into the abyss, into which everything that has been familiar till now, everything nice and warm and orderly, vanishes. In other words, an essential feature of life as we live it is chance: the new, unexpected, alien side of life. In its every moment, life is torn open, discontinuous, fractured: diversified.

This chapter examines what links the seemingly conflicting, or even mutually exclusive, concepts of eternity and passing, and Paradise and its loss. To life as a cup running over, to life as divinity humanized, to human life marked by the effort to move out beyond everything human, to life flooded in a sunlight that is not human—to this irreducible aspect of human life Nietzsche applies the term overman, and the chapter once again returns to the character of Zarathustra in examining this concept. The chapter then turns to next concept that Nietzsche uses to characterize life—the will to power: “Where I found the living, there I found will to power.”

In this article, Paul de Man discusses his plan to complete a book entitled Allegories of Reading. The book offers a reading of four important authors — Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — along with their texts dating from 1750 to the early twentieth century. The most extensive reading offered is that of Rousseau, who is considered at length in an overview that includes the major fictional, political, and confessional writings. In the case of Proust and Rilke, the corpus is much less extended, although it claims to be representative of structures that recur in the work as a whole. No such claim is made for Nietzsche, where the reading of The Birth of Tragedy and of some sections mostly taken from the posthumous works is preparatory to an understanding of larger works such as Zarathustra or The Genealogy of Morals.

This chapter shows how Nietzsche develops Goethe's critique of Bildung. The early essays on Schopenhauer as Educator and on The Uses and Disadvantages of History raise questions about the authority of the mentor and of the relation of humanistic culture to historical agency. These themes come to a culmination in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which until the late 20th century was commonly read as an expression of Nietzschean doctrine through a rather idealised eponymous mouthpiece. Only recently has it been recognised that Zarathustra is a character who represents the conscious crisis of Nietzsche's own authority, or capacity to make himself understood, is less troubled by his critics than by his disciples, and is at his most despairing the more accurately these repeat the formulae of his doctrine. At the same time, it is precisely his radical, and self-encompassing, critique which gives Nietzsche's thought its almost unique and enduring power.

This chapter describes the odd ending Nietzsche chose for “Sanctus Januarius” and The Gay Science. After sections that reasonably enough present conclusions to his reflections on morality, life, and “the dying Socrates,” Nietzsche ends with a section that mysteriously announces eternal return as a teaching that can either exalt you or crush you, and with a last section announcing the return of a Zarathustra who prepared himself with ten years in the mountains. Only over the next years would Nietzsche make that ending understandable as he published the three Parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. My chapter shows the cohesion that these final sections of a January book have as summary expressions of an ending and a beginning. What will replace the dying order that Socrates initiated is a new standard of measure and a new teacher who was historically even more fundamental than Socrates in establishing the order that has prevailed for millennia and is now passing.

This chapter discusses the prehistory of the Indo-Aryan peoples ancestral to those who composed the Ṛgveda. On the basis of shared linguistic and cultural evidence it defends the view that these peoples migrated into northwest South Asia, splitting off from the larger group of Indo-Iranians, a branch of Indo-European, who migrated south and east from the steppes. In particular it takes up the shared heritage of Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic) and Old Iranian (Avestan) language, literature, and religion, specifically comparing the poetry and ritual practices of the Ṛgveda with those found in Avestan, particularly the hymns, called Gāthās (songs), attributed to Zarathustra. It also examines the soma/haoma cult that dominated the ritual practice of both Vedic and Avestan elite populations.

This chapter examines Heidegger's first post-war lecture course of “What E-vokes Thought?”. Stretched over two semesters, the theme is developed in two different ways. In the winter semester, Heidegger's purpose was to approach the problem in terms of the philosophical tradition. With Nietzsche as his dialogue partner in learning, it is here that the author elaborates the Zarathustra analysis as signifying the correlation between Being and man. In the summer semester, he devotes himself to an exposition of his own composition of thought, developed through dialogue with the pre-Socratics. This chapter argues that it is Being that e-vokes thought as it is the process by which all beings emerge into presence. In order for the process to take place, there is a need for a There among beings. This want of a There is already an e-vocation of thought conceived as a fundamental structure.

‘Otobiographies’ is just one of several titles that introduce into the labyrinth of an ear: another is ‘Tympan’, the opening or threshold essay in Margins of Philosophy, and ‘Heidegger's Ear’, the second part of Politics of Friendship. Otobiographies appeared in a volume of conference proceedings entitled L'oreille de l'autre, The Ear of the Other, a phrase that also resonates in Derrida's text. For example, already in the parenthetical phrase ‘(everything comes down to the ear with which you can hear me)’, where everything comes down to the ear. Which ear? Whose ear? The ear of what? And even we might ask, recalling Zarathustra's strange encounter, the ear, who?

This chapter is a discussion of the legacy of Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. I concentrate on his basic claim, that “Nietzsche’s model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relation to the world turns out to be interpretation.” The criticisms of this notion that I raise have to do with whether this “model” accounts for the way Nietzsche understands self-knowledge and self-realization. I note as well the dangers of too aestheticized a view of Nietzsche’s enterprise.

This chapter explores quasi-Nietzschean visions of psychological or spiritual utopia that found voice in works by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Zemlinsky, in self-conscious rejectionof visions of redemption proffered by Schopenhauer and by Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Working in a milieu saturated with reflections on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg glimpsed redemption from suffering in personal identification with the recurring cycles of death and rebirth in the natural world. In an early setting of verse by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen, Zemlinsky identified, through tonal means, human life and desires with the cycles of the natural world. In his Gurrelieder, Schoenberg transformed Jacobsen's poetic epic into an extended meditation on this quasi-Nietzschean vision, in which the suffering of the poet's human protagonists dissolves into an ecstatic hymn to the perennial springtime rebirth of all life.

This chapter looks to provide a more thorough account than has yet been offered of how far, and to what ends, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sceptical ‘realism’ was fashioned with an eye on Cynic styles of argument. Starting with the reappearance of Diogenes of Sinope in The Gay Science, it explores the histrionic characterization of dertolle Mensche and his ‘untimeliness’ in ways that open up Nietzsche’s sense of the typology and stylistic gambits of Cynicism as helpful but inadequate models for the lived practice of philosophy. The focus then moves to how Cynicism helps to drive Nietzsche’s thinking in two main respects: first, his attempts to articulate what may be required to be ‘free-spirited’ in one’s philosophizing and fashion a philosophical style in the assumption of that freedom; and, second, the important role of Cynicism in the articulation of the genealogy of morality.

When individuals tell awakening stories, they weigh in on cultural disputes over truth and meaning that emerged during various historical eras and evolved through time. This chapter sketches a cultural history of the awakening narrative formula, showing how awakening narratives proliferated over time with the rise of various discursive communities. It discusses several cases that span different contexts, belief systems, and historical periods -- from the Axial Age to the late modern era -- in order to show how awakening stories emerged in various historical eras to mark the prominent cultural and moral tensions of those eras. These cases variously express philosophical, religious, political, scientific, psychological, and sexual worldviews and span different levels of analysis. These include the story of Zarathustra, Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Buddhist story of Siddh?rtha Gautama, the Christian story of Paul the Apostle, the Western Enlightenment narrative, the Marxist account of false and class consciousness, and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Finally, this chapter discusses the proliferation of awakening stories that accompanied the rise of identity politics and new social movements, including New Age movements, in the 1970’s and 80’s.

This chapter discusses the interpretation of Nietzsche, especially Nietzsche’s views of the “nihilism crisis,” as these views were developed in Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche in the 1930’s and 1940’s. There are two main points. First, Heidegger is right, has something very useful to contribute, in trying to understand Nietzsche in terms of his own early existential phenomenological project in his 1927 work Being and Time. Especially important is Heidegger’s understanding of “meaning” (Sinn) and nihilism as a crisis of meaning. Second, Heidegger is interestingly wrong when, in the 1936 lectures and especially after the 1940 lectures, he turns against Nietzsche and his own early project, accusing Nietzsche and himself of still being part of the Western metaphysical project that terminates unavoidably in nihilism. I argue that this begs the question against Nietzsche, and misses the radically practical element of Nietzsche’s work.

This chapter introduces the reader to an important theme in Zoroastrianism’s sacred texts, as well as to the major elements in the broader historical and theological contexts essential to the interpretation of that theme. Coming to the fore are teachings of Zarathustra’s principal spiritual descendants, the Magi, concerning the contest of cosmic forces of good and evil, represented (respectively) by the deity Ahura Mazda and by Angra Mainyu, the leader of the hordes of chaos. Drawing from all the formative periods of Zoroastrian history, from Achaemenid times through late antiquity and medieval times, the author, Jamshid Choksy, provides a superb overview of the tradition, concluding with a brief reflection on the implications for adherents of the faith in our time.

This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s reading of Socrates is guided by his reading of Paul, with both Socrates and Paul disappointed with an ideal. Nietzsche’s questioning of morality seems to stem from his disappointment with the modern ideal of the Hegelian synthesis. The chapter emphasizes Nietzsche’s self-reflection in the same terms with which he reflects on Paul. Nietzsche’s contemplation on the Nietzsche–Paul relationship includes four points. Firstly, he explains one of his writings entitled “Why I am a Destiny,” yet warning against being interpreted as “holy” (like Paul). Secondly, Nietzsche wrote about Paul’s revelation that “this second of his sudden enlightenment, he possesses the idea of ideas.” Third, Nietzsche writes that he found history revolving around Paul. Finally, he argues that if Paul is the teacher of the destruction of the law, Zarathustra—from his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra—is the teacher of the eternal recurrence.

This chapter identifies various important ideas that emerge in Nietzsche's posthumous fragments dating from his time in Sorrento, and tracks these ideas through to their ultimate manifestations in Things Human, All Too Human and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The pattern is to look at an experience specific to the South of Italy and Nietzsche's travels there and to track the abstraction of this experience to a grander scale, as it becomes an important element in his new Philosophy of the Free Spirit. The first of these instances is centered on Paul Rée, whose thinking about the physiological manifestations and origins of morality has a great influence on Nietzsche at this time, which he will engage strongly in Things Human, All Too Human, much to the despair of his Schopenhauerian friends. Nietzsche will later refine these ideas in his important work, On The Genealogy of Morals. The tracking process culminates in the establishment of the connection between the Isle of Ischia, which Nietzsche could see, along with Mount Vesuvius, from his balcony at the Villa Rubinacci, and the figure of the Blessed Isles central to Zarathustra. The Blessed Isles are where Zarathustra's disciples live, who are called free spirits.

The second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, entitled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”, contains some of Nietzsche’s earliest reflections on the relation between life and wisdom. This relation figures prominently in pivotal sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and is clearly connected with the doctrine of eternal recurrence that Zarathustra confronts. Thus it is surprising that the “Uses and Disadvantages” essay has received almost no attention in this context. In this paper, I consider the “antithesis” of life and wisdom that Nietzsche presents in the “Uses and Disadvantages” essay and argue that two important claims in that work ought to guide our reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first claim is that life essentially involves injustice. To live is to be driven in one way or another, Nietzsche maintains, and in relation to that drive an object can appear to the living being as valuable. Taking it to be valuable is, however, a matter of injustice since there is nothing about the object in itself that would justify this attitude. The second claim concerns the way in which awareness of this injustice through the discipline of history affects the living person. Such historical wisdom can leave one disheartened, even convinced that there is no reason to continue to live, but Nietzsche also suggests that for one «involved in life» knowledge of past forms of injustice could perhaps have value. This value, I suggest, is grounded in the value for life of the creation and pursuit of a novel goal for action. Thus Nietzsche maintains that life and wisdom are essentially intertwined, with a vitality of the subject necessary for enduring wisdom, which itself can, in some instances, further life. These two elements of Nietzsche’s early engagement with the notion of life reappear in the second and third books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There the figure of Zarathustra grapples with an “abysmal thought”, confronts the thought in a state of nausea, and finally reconciles himself with the character of Life herself—all against a background of repeated allusions to the eternal recurrence. I contend that approaching these scenes with “Uses and Disadvantages” in mind yields a new approach to Thus Spoke Zarathustra that privileges Zarathustra’s abysmal thought in relation to the doctrine of recurrence.

I have argued that Nietzsche invokes Empedocles less directly than in syncretistic conflation with other names, like Heraclitus, as Nietzsche identifies both as the «tragic philosophers», but also, and this is better known, as other commentators also make this comparison, like Zarathustra. As Nietzsche raises the question of tragic knowledge in terms of an aesthetics of tragedy he also explores an explicitly tragic ethics (he will name Anaximander in this fashion) and with Empedocles, and here he is preceded by Hölderlin, Nietzsche envisions a tragic politics. Empedocles’ answer to the question of value of existence is love, and it is also the question of time and of death as commemorated by Hölderlin in his several drafts of The Death of Empedocles. Nietzsche’s own method of posing the same question varies and I here wish to consider Empedocles’ reply to that question as Nietzsche reflects in his Schopenhauer as Educator, the third of his Untimely Meditations: «Do you affirm this existence from the bottom of your heart? Are you willing to be its advocate, its saviour? For all it takes is one single truthful “Yes” from your mouth—and life, now facing such grave accusations, will be set free» (SE 3).

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche uses the title character as a medium for exploring the project of a cultural founder or creator. Zarathustra’s project fundamentally differs from that of Free Spirits, since the Free Spirit project is in the first place one of self-cultivation, whereas Zarathustra’s project is (or begins as) one of cultivating broader human community. The motivating force that draws Zarathustra into engagement with the broad swath of humanity is his defining trait of love. Zarathustra’s love is not a romantic love that finds satisfaction in a particular person, but it is a kind of neediness which requires others for its fulfillment (others whom it can benefit through its creative activity). The drama of the work consists of Zarathustra’s attempt to fulfill this need (or determine whether it can be fulfilled). Zarathustra's self-understanding therefore evolves over the course of his journey, as he is forced to wrestle the question of how (or whether) his need for love can be made compatible with truth. On this reading, the primary function of the work's famous doctrines of the will to power and the eternal return is to drive forward Zarathustra's drama of evolving self-understanding.