James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2013
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In the Temple Terrace (Florida) Library Guide for February & March, I noticed that Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” was to be discussed. When I mentioned this to someone, he said, “That’s well beyond me.” This gave me pause. Like it or not, the existential philosopher has had profound affect on everything cultural in the West over the last hundred years, often in subtle ways we take for granted; then again in ways that go against the grain of our cultural programming.
My purpose in developing this piece was to show relevance to our lives, while recognizing that Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) may offend cognitive biases and long held cultural beliefs. Remember, philosophy can be speculative and visionary in an attempt to get to the core of human truths. That said philosophy appears to have gotten as mechanistic and as objectified as science and psychology at the expense of passion and risk avoidance. Consequently, philosophy does not have near the impact that Nietzsche (1844-1900) has had, which I hope to show here.
Zoroaster as source to this work
Zoroaster (628-551 B.C.E.) was a religious prophet and teacher of ancient Persia. He is however ordinarily known as Zarathustra from the Greek. He left his home and entered a mountain cave retreat where he remained in solitude for ten years not leaving until he was 30, the same age that Jesus when into the desert for forty days.
Details are sketchy but Nietzsche sees a natural association of Zarathustra with Jesus as well as with the works of Plato. Jesus, after his desert interlude, commenced his mission, while Zarathustra after a much longer interlude, returned to share what he had learned in the cave to human society.
It is not an easy transition. He attempts to proselytize at home, and fails, descends into the valley and moves beyond with his good news. His essential revelations were in the realm of individual awareness and personal insight, reversing Plato’s valuations of the inner and outer world. Once beyond his home turf, his message spread rapidly as the new religion known as Zoroastrianism. It contrasted people of the righteous and people of the lie. Rudiments of Zoroastrianism are evident today in the three major religions of the 21st century: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Nietzsche uses Zoroaster’s partial footprint to project as a parody of similarities and dissimilarities to religious models to transcend them with Zarathustra as an alternative to mainly Jesus (Christianity) and Socrates (secular society). He has admiration for the historic Jesus, but less so for the historic Socrates.
Nietzsche hits sacred beliefs with a hammer in an effort to get the reader to think using Zarathustra as a sage with a message to the modern world. Thus Spake Zarathustra preaches a wide spectrum of ideas that include “the will to power,” the nature of “Superman” versus the “Last Man, and the idea of “the eternal recurrence,” concepts in the promotion of human development.
“Superman” versus “the Last Man” and Beyond
Nietzsche’s “Superman” has been maligned, especially as it is associated with Nazism and the idea of the “Master Race” of Hitler’s Germany in WWII. It is true Nietzsche’s “Superman” is devoid of human timidity, is unabashedly an elitist continually aspiring to greatness, never satisfied with the status quo, living a life of creative engagement and letting the chips fall where they may. A rare breed, he claims, which is nearly extinct.
Cleverly, he contrasts his “Superman” with “the Last Man,” who is a caricature of everyman, a person who is risk averse ensconced in his comfort zone, a safe hire who never makes waves, a person who goes along to get along. He challenges the reader to ask himself: which mode of existence does his life embody and promote?
The “will to power” goes beyond preoccupation with good and evil to entertain the drive to greater involvement in life that is not simply limited to motivation and behavior, but is fundamental to meaningfulness and self-preservation.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes in for criticism for insisting we are not all equal in value because most people fall into “rank order” of which they cannot escape, an order dominated by “the Last Man,” an order where most people find themselves gravitating towards which they subconsciously know is where they belong.
I have identified people as foot draggers (15 percent), followers (70 percent) and hard chargers (15 percent) in most workplaces. Zarathustra would see me as an optimist.
What about this “God is dead” stuff?
Most readers are familiar with Nietzsche’s claim “God is dead.” People are fixated on the idea of God when this philosopher is more concerned with the decline in spirituality.
Like many of Nietzsche’s educated contemporaries, who did not consider religion important, he did. He coupled “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith as the West raced through the Industrial Revolution and soared on scientific materialism. He saw the increasing dominance of science as substituting one self-negating myth (religion) for another myth (scientific secular materialism), seeing the latter as the worst of the two.
Thus Spake Zarathustra is a call for the rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature by preaching the “meaning of the earth.” Nietzsche saw the shift in the West from a Christian to a secular society as Christianity became more remote, abstract, insular and perfunctory and therefore disembodied from real experience.
The world was changing and the demands on people were changing but the Christian culture was unwilling or unable to make such allowances. “I counsel the innocence of the senses,” declares Zarathustra, a role he found Christianity had aborted.
God for Zarathustra had gone from God the petty to God the pitiful:
“Thus spoke the devil to me once: God too has his hell; that is his love of man. And most recently I heard him say this, God is dead; God died of his pity for man.”
God has died because he was no longer godly. The alleged killer of God, the Ugliest Man insists:
“But he had to die; he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no shame; he crawled into my dirtiest nooks . . . The god who saw everything, even man – this god had to die! Man cannot hear it that such a witness should live.”
Think of the world we live in today where there is no shame, no disgrace, no embarrassment no matter how reprehensible or counter humane the behavior. With these all gone, what matter has God?
Zarathustra also sees the Roman Pontiff retired since God’s death, but complains:
“He was a concealed god, addicted to secrecy. Verily, even a son he got himself in a sneaky way. At the door of his faith stands adultery.
“Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself. Did this god not want to be a judge too . . .
"When he was young, this god out of the Orient, he was harsh and vengeful and he built himself a hell to amuse his favorites. Eventually, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmother. Then he sat in his nook by the hearth, wilted, grieving over his weak legs, weary of the world, weary of willing, and one day he choked on his all too great pity.”
Zarathustra concludes that we are better off without Him:
"But why did he not speak more clearly? And if it was the fault of our ears, why did he give us ears that heard him badly? . . . There is good taste in pity, too; and it was this that said in the end. Away with such a god! Rather no god, rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself.”
But even Zarathustra is the end is ambivalent about the idea of God or gods:
“For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in twilight, though this lie is told. Instead, one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods themselves – the word: There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me.”
The reader is left with the wonder of the meaning of night.
Pleasure and Pain and Dionysus
The unfortunate legacy of the Christian outlook, Nietzsche charges, is that we are disintegrating beings with our natural existence inherently deficient as we are driven to take revenge on ourselves and the world for our inabilities, real or imagined.
This leaves us naked and without the moral or intellectual fortitude to embrace the challenges of an increasingly demanding human existence.
Zarathustra is saying we gravitate to pain rather pleasure, apologize for our success rather than enjoy it, are more attracted to the noise of an outer existence than to the calm of an inner world, more interested in impressing than being satisfied. He urges a reexamination of our inner lives and a reassessment of our nature. He finds inspiration in the ancient Athenian god Dionysus that was lusty and sensual, or the other side of the coin of life that Christianity denounces.
Readers may have trouble, given their biases, to visualize the contrast between Dionysus and Christ. Whereas Christianity celebrates the individual soul, the soul of Nietzsche’s Dionysus joyfully participates in the sorrows of the world. We on into suffering as an end in itself, he is saying, because we take our individual existence too seriously.
He encourages us to experiment with life asserting our individual virtues and powers to see the world in fresh ways. “I counsel the innocence of the senses,” he says, which involve delighting ourselves in the world of experience, embracing new things in a quest to improve our wounded sense of adequacy, learning how to love ourselves and live in the world on its own terms.
A constant theme in Nietzsche is “eternal recurrence”: time is infinite but our energy states are finite. Freud borrowed this idea in terms of the delimiting nature of psychic energy with the caution: we dare not squander it. This underscores Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, which is a direct attack on Socrates’ claim that life is a disease.
Relishing life with pleasure rather than pain is the affirmation of life. This is not easy for us. It is easier for us to be resentful of life, to see life as a yoke we must carry, regret that we didn’t have different parents or come into different circumstances, remorse that life didn’t break our way. We are unwilling to love or be loving, but still expect love to visit us nonetheless. It is inconceivable to us to love and enjoy life for the sake of life itself. Nietzsche asserts the proper response to life is not resentment or disengagement but Dionysian acceptance and involvement.
Nature naturing, forgiving and forgetting
Nietzsche uses Zarathustra as the vehicle for promoting a loving contemplation of all natural things, as nature is the primary source of the meaning of life.
Zarathustra counsels us to forgive ourselves our pasts and engage in the promise of ongoing life. Many have said, and the prophet would agree, what is past is past, and today is the first day of the rest of your life. He counsels us to take inspiration in the beauty of the natural world, the things so easily taken for granted and that Christianity too quickly demeans such things as being “worldly.” He says,” Place little good perfect things around you . . . What is perfect teaches hope.”
Thus Spake Zarathustra teaches patience with ourselves as we are, encouraging a sense of gradual but sustainable development, cultivation and transformation. In modern parlance, he is advocating our continuous reinventing ourselves to meet the fluid demands of a changing world.
Our nature and the natural world are continuations of each other. Our only real project, which is provisional and revisable, is in practices that are refined through many repetitions. This is the central theme of success in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outlier” (2008). Contrast this with the Christian notion that any serious past failures or contretemps can earn us infinite torment and damage, which we are obliged to learn from but never forget.
Nietzsche suggests that one can turn failure to one’s advantage and enhance one’s life by moving forward unshackling one from the past completely. He compares this to the subtle growth of love over time, implying today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Are we “the Last Man”?
Playing it safe, being averse to risk, putting ourselves in a cage of good citizenship and following the general rules to the letter rather than assessing and exploiting our own particular talents and virtues in the context of our innate character is what he condemns as the “herd mentality.” Eric Hoffer describes this mentality as the “true believer” in his book of the same name; a morality of stationary grazing animals not creatively energized human beings.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche proffers the choice we must make between the master and slave of our personality, between the good and evil of our temperament. It is likely that were Nietzsche alive today he would see us consumed with the slave mentality in our obsessive preoccupation with things that seem good but paradoxically foster evil.
Nietzsche was not pleased with his characterization of society being dominated by “the Last Man,” while he was disappointed with the interpretation of his “Superman.” He said this in an ad hominem (i.e., to the man, or personal reference) in “Ecce Homo” (1888):
“I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth . . . Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker . . . what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker . . . The self overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.”
Zarathustra’s great achievement, then, was not making the distinction between good and evil but embarking on the process of making the discernment, then moving beyond this dichotomy. Nietzsche sees the great religions of the West latching on to moral categories while failing to examine and reexamine situations and formulating new distinctions. His morality reached a point of self-overcoming.
Self-overcoming, he claims, cultivated in subsequent religious traditions, has led to the death of God, and the current crisis in values. Zarathustra has evolved into the opposite of a moralist, such as Freud, but into Nietzsche himself and his fictional spokesman.
Nietzsche war on Christianity is complicated and contradictory, and personal. It is an attempt, in part, to distance himself from “the Last Man.” This is evident as he sees the Christian God as a projection of human characteristics outside the self, dissociated from the human power to think, to take action, and to love, all of which were difficult for him. Fear is the motivation of this projection with this caveat. Unencumbered man can exceed his natural forces by seeing himself as godlike and then he is little better than Daedalus.
At the same time, Nietzsche has little problem with Christian heroes, as he is an admirer of Jesus, the Doctors of the Church, and Jesuit priests for their self-overcoming consistent with Zarathustra. He also admits religion, Christianity included, offers a superficial vision that improves life for many believers.
Nietzsche's other influences
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and German composer Richard Wagner influenced Nietzsche. So did America’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially his “Transcendentalism” and advocacy of individualism expressed in his essay, “Self-Reliance.”
Nietzsche took Emerson’s essay on the “Over Soul” and reconfigured it into his “Ubermensch,” or his “Superman”; and used Emerson’s “Joyous Science” for the title of his book “Gay Science” (1882). It is speculated that he got the idea for the celebration of individual experience, the cyclical rhythm of time, and the idea of the death of God from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838):
“Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given done, as if God were dead . . . We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought . . . The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.”
Nietzsche’s rejection of orthodox theology found him also influenced by Homer’s “Odyssey,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” all the works of Plato, along with many others such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Rene Descartes, Martin Luther, Sophocles and of course, Charles Darwin (“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman.”).
Affirmation of life is an affirmation of love
Readers of my works across the globe will see themes here that they have seen in my works. I am however a rank amateur in Nietzsche philosophy, but see in Thus Spake Zarathustra an affirmation of live and love that is kindred to those themes.
This work may be an introduction to Nietzsche for some readers, whereas a flawed presentation to Nietzsche scholars. I take that risk. My purpose is modest: to show the work’s relevance to everyman.
Nietzsche is often discounted as too difficult, too esoteric and remote whereas I see him as close to mainstream. Once you get past religious and cognitive biases, and entertain the ancient wisdom of Zarathustra, Nietzsche hammer can seem like a tickling feather. To that end, I wish you well.
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