The Logic of Zarathustra
From the Death of God to Potential for Godliness
This summer I will be leading a course on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, perhaps Nietzsche’s greatest work. The first class starts July 17th, and the final sign up is tomorrow, July 15th. You can find all information about the course at Philosophy Portal. In this post, I hope to explain the overall logic of this work. Often times, when we think about Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we pinpoint some flashy passages about the overcoming of humanity, or the Death of God, or the eternal recurrence of the same. But there are relatively little overviews of the deep logic at work in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) as a totality.
The First Part of TSZ opens with a Prologue. Our main character, Zarathustra, emerges from an inner superabundance cultivated in deep aloneness (for as many as 10 years). In many ways, from the very beginning, Zarathustra appears to be reconciled with himself. His problem does not seem internal, so much as external: he wrestles with ‘the people’, or what he will often call: ‘the rabble’. His main goal seems to be related to somehow transferring via teaching this inner superabundance (which he frequently equates to an overflowing). However, he quickly discovers that he does not know the method by which this superabundance can be taught, or better, by which this superabundance can be perceived as an ideal orientation point for the overcoming of humanity itself.
He first proclaims that ‘God is Dead’, and thus makes the direct link that ‘God’ as an ideal orientation point, far from helping humanity to this state of being, may actually be preventing humanity from achieving this state of being. Zarathustra presents the idea that God is like a stop-gap to really living and experiencing in this world, and thus, a stop-gap from taking the existential risks necessary, to really know the overman. Thus, Zarathustra does not simply negate or deconstruct God, but also offers the idea that the overman is the real meaning of the Earth, and ends all illusions about an other side of being, an other side where we really get what we want (i.e. Heaven, unity with God, etc.). He claims that this ‘real meaning’, is related to the body and an abyssal self-overcoming, in a competitive striving for greatness.
This message mostly falls on deaf ears. The people (or the rabble) do not understand him. However, Zarathustra does not then claim that the problem is in them, but rather suggests that there is a lack and a flaw in his teaching and orientation. He first posits that this lack and flaw is related to a targeting problem, i.e. that this message requires a certain psychic receptivity, and that it cannot just be blasted to the masses. From this idea, he looks for companions, friends, those who are already potentially receptive to the idea that, not only is God dead, but that the Overman is the future and the meaning of the Earth.
In joining with companions and friends, co-strivers for greatness towards the overman, his message can become more nuanced and sophisticated. He points first towards a metaphor that becomes a major structuring moment for the work as a whole, a metaphor captured by the transformation of three categories:
Camel
Lion
Child
These categories form a triad of spiritual transformation whereby one can see deeper into the logic of the overman as a process. The camel represents the idea of spirit carrying a heavy load or disciplining itself, for its own sake. This idea separates the child from itself, and initiates the spirit to the world of adults. One must be first burdened by the world, learn how to cultivate the capacity for self-rule over the more unruly emotions and dimensions of our being. There is pain, there is hardship, there is new-found respect for limits and boundaries. One can say that there is a deep sacrifice here, and a deep loss, and this sacrifice and loss are, from the perspective of the camel, perceived as absolute, in the sense that, one may think, the essence of childhood is gone, never to return.
The logic of the next stage involves the transition from camel to lion. Whereas the camel carries a heavy load for its own sake, the lion spirit starts to question the ‘why?’ behind its hard work and self-discipline. The lion wonders about its desire, the lion wonders about becoming the master of its body; it does not just want to carry a heavy load or self-discipline itself for no reason, it wants to know its own bodily energy, it wants to have an aim that comes from within, it wants to be in touch with an intensity and a passion that makes life worth living. The lion risks everything to understand this body, this intensity and this passion; it behaves in ways that may at first appear counter-intuitive, or even self-contradictory. What is really motivating the lion is hunger and thirst from carrying the camels’s heavy-load.
The logic of the lion is a logic of feeding and drinking, of reconnecting with the excesses that were necessarily abandoned by the camel. However, this feeding and drinking, this excess, is itself transformed by the logic of the child. What we sacrificed and lost in the metamorphosis of the camel, is reconnected after a long and arduous struggle, involving both self-discipline and exploration of the passions. The child need not engage in a difficult struggle, nor does the child need to endlessly explore its thirst and hunger. The child is a spiritual innocence, the child is the spirit that looks at the world as if for the first time, and perceives in it, all of the wonders that the camel and lion are blind to (because of being governed by disciplinary self-restraint, and the gap involves in hunger/thirst qua desire).
This triad is not necessarily a strict linearity. Time is not a line, nor a circle, in Zarathustra’s mind. One gets the idea that, throughout the entire work, Zarathustra is working to cultivate all three metaphors towards, not only his own relationship with the child spirit, but also to teach and call forth the child spirit in those who listen to him, and follow him. What is implicated in taking on this triad is the capacity to be in intense contact with the real of passion, but also madness, loneliness, self-contradiction, and most of all, a working against and away from the herd qua rabble. The herd qua rabble perceives all of these spiritual metamorphoses as dangerous and destructive. The rabble does not engage in the hard inner work necessary to know the camel, nor does it speak from the truth of its desires to know the lion, and finally, it certainly does not know the innocence of ‘yea-saying’ which organizes the life of the child.
Zarathustra would claim that this is a self-fear. How courageous does one really need to be to wrestle with the depths of your own being? He claims that in this wrestling you do have to confront an inner desire for death (that you want to die), that you are always tempted to project the ‘inner thing’ to an elsewhere (not just heaven or God, but also to imagistic idols that could function as external support structures), and confronted with hatred, shame and envy, where you undergo the vicissitudes of (somehow) building your self beyond both state and market dynamics. For Zarathustra, the state is a death trap, a new false idol which captures the mind into group conformity; and the market is a noisy mess where people of small virtues distort themselves into images of greatness.
What is at stake in all of this struggle, on the overman’s path structured by camel, lion and child, is the capacity to understand and mature your sensuous inner images, cultivate friendships around new values, and learn how to die well with fullness and a future heir. No small task, no easy task… no wonder so few make the journey!
The second part of TSZ opens after years in silent solitude away from the disciples who would allow him to articulate the metaphor of the camel, lion and child. He finds himself in a deep worry about the status of his teaching, but feels again an overflowing to return. This time his return is mediated by less naivety as it relates to both the rabble and his disciples (against taking into himself a self-relating negativity). He appears to be a man who is more deeply aware of the need to include loss within himself, to include awareness of evil motivation within himself, and also to view other humans more on the level of animals. He emphasizes how most of society is structured by ubiquitous traps for becoming higher.
Why does Zarathustra include within himself this deeper level of self-relating negativity as it relates to loss and evil? The first thing to note is that, while he was well aware that everything is in a becoming, and that man is but a bridge to the overman, he knew this only in his deep solitude. This means that Zarathustra needed to learn how loss would permeate throughout his teaching for his disciples. Teaching disciples is not the same thing as teaching content of a certain subject. In teaching disciples, the disciples will themselves change, will themselves need to go through processes of becoming involving deep solitude, will need to be left or broken, whether on their own accord, or whether on the decision of the master or leader. What this means is that, becoming entails an irreducible loss, since all being treated, either consciously or unconscious as permanent and eternal, will have to pass. The overman is non-plussed, un-phased by such a reality.
The second thing to note, is that Zarathustra was in a great overflowing fullness in his solitude, but why did he really return to the people? Why did he really want disciples? Was it coming from a place of pure selflessness? Was it coming from a place of really wanting others to become the overman, too? Or was it coming from a place of wanting to be recognized as a great teacher? Was it coming from a place of wanting to be seen as the man who knows the way, and points the way? The point is that one has to be in touch with this depth of motivation, inclusive of all its potential evil, in order to become the overman. These moves of self-relating negativity are not so much the recognition or identifications of flaws of character, but rather using one’s own mistakes as the very ‘spiritual material’ that will open up a new discourse about processes of becoming.
Consequently, in the second part, Zarathustra targets the ethics of the creator, its relation to emptiness, loneliness (which signal a relation to loss), but also to not knowing. He starts to emphasize that emptiness, loneliness and not-knowing are essential defences against the ‘false fullness’ that structures much socializing and knowing in society among the rabble. The rabble present themselves as full, meaning non-contradictory identities that know and are embedded in meaningful social bonds with ‘neighbours’. Zarathustra claims this is all a masquerade. That the rabble’s full meaning, non-contradictory identity, and social knowledge is all a mask for the will to power, and that these people do not really know the truth, because they do not really know themselves.
The ethics of the creator requires a deeper knowledge. For the spirit concerned with becoming the overman, there must be a direct knowledge with the will to power which the rabble is masking over. This will to power is necessary to really know self-overcoming. While the pathway of this self-overcoming involves, to some degree, a heroic figure, Zarathustra also claims that this heroic figure must be dissolved. What is at work in the hero, for Zarathustra, is a figure who is capable of fighting external dragons and demons. What is involved in the dissolving of the hero is to fight with internal dragons and demons. Once these internal dragons and demons (or the word he uses often: ‘monsters’), has been destroyed, the very need for the hero is also destroyed. The hero is a response or a reaction to the monster. The hero is in some sense similar to a mix between the camel and lion energy in spiritual metamorphosis. The dissolving of the hero is similar to the dissolution of the camel and lion energy into the child. The inner monster may be what ultimately awaits the lion, the death of the inner monster could be equal to the appearance of the child.
What is most interesting at the end of the Second Part, is that Zarathustra finds himself in deep engagement with a silent (feminine) voice. What he finds here is something which seems to be of the highest profundity. What he finds is that only the child is capable of founding the new as a leader without shame. What he finds is that most would follow (e.g. the rabble) because to really command the new, to be a leader of the new, is the most difficult. To not only talk the talk, but to walk the walk, so to speak. Only the child, who has avoided eternal death and resentment which structures the rabble, who has connected to an innocent yea-saying, only this child can be the leader. We get the sense or the impression, at the end of the Second Part, that Zarathustra is still finding himself. We get the sense or the impression, that even if Zarathustra was in an overflowing fullness in his solitude, that connecting this overflowing fullness among his disciples, is a totally other challenge, which is challenging him in unexpected ways.
The Third Part of TSZ starts, again, after long solitude. However, the difference at the start of the Third Part is that we find Zarathustra, not resting in a cave away from the world, but actively hiking the mountains, walking long and arduous pathways. We get the idea that long walks and hikes are a metaphor for the overman’s path being a path that is ultimately unfollowable, a singularity and unique difference that can never be traversed by a second. Of course, we here confront a mind-bending paradox about difference and similarity, since Zarathustra is claiming that the overman is the meaning of the Earth, a path universally open to all humans, but at the same time, the path is singularly unique, a path that cannot be traversed by a second.
What awaits the overman on this path is the simultaneity of the deepest and the highest. The idea of the mountain here functions as a perfect metaphor for this simultaneity of depth and height. In the real, we get the idea that the depth can be likened to the ‘most abysmal thought’. We also get the idea that the overman is the being with the courage to be with this ‘most abysmal thought’. So what is the form and the content of this thought? It may surprise many that it is related to the idea of the eternal recurrence. For Zarathustra, this thought is not an objective fact, but the most dreadful possibility. Imagine that we live in a universe where nothing really new is possible, where everything is doomed to repeat again and again as a closed circle. This is the deepest terror for the overman, since the overman wants to rise above humanity, to affirm the new, to become what is beyond what is known or has ever been known. Zarathustra lives in and strives for the highest potentiality of being as becoming.
Here we get a window into what Zarathustra thinks about the overman’s path, since the confrontation with the ‘most abysmal thought’ (eternal recurrence), is the very motivation necessary to avoid its reality. This is how the metaphor of the deepest and the highest comes together. Once one has confronted the terrible idea of a universe which repeats endlessly (depth), then one has the motivation necessary to overcome this very possibility (height). The logic is that the overman is proof that there is a gap in repetition, that what repeats is not a closed circle, but rather open to a new repetition, a repetition that has never been before. We can hypothesize, from this idea, that the rabble are those that falsely close the circle, cover up the gap or the abyss in their own hearts, and thus never know the potential heights that the overman may one day actualize.
The metaphor that Zarathustra uses to communicate the beyond of both the abysmal depths and the potential heights, is the transformation of hiking in the mountains, to flying in the sky. Flight in the sky communicates another very important idea that Zarathustra links to the ‘essence’ of the overman against the ‘Spirit of Gravity’ which claims all humans in a pulling downwards. The sky is perceived as a silent expanse beyond words, and flight is perceived as an indifference, or even a positivization, of both accident and limitation. The overman flying in the sky is capable of ‘rolling the dice’ into the unknown, which is basically a metaphor for taking risks, and building higher virtues out of possibilities that are one’s own doing.
Zarathustra specifically identifies what keeps most humans close to the ground, grounded by the Spirit of Gravity, and far away from flying in the sky, what he calls the ‘best-worst-things’: sex, power and selfishness. Sex is a phenomena that Zarathustra feels to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, sex is simplistically negated by the ‘body-despisers’; on the other hand, sex is too easily affirmed by the ‘pigs and the partiers’. What is needed for sex is a type of sacred gate or boundary, this sacred gate or boundary opens up one’s spirit to the highest, while ensuring that one’s heights are not parasitized from below. Power is a phenomena that Zarathustra feels to be deceptive, perhaps because those who strive for it are doing so with the aid of an unconscious will to power. The essence of his critique of power-seeking is that one dooms oneself in the end. One could say that, for every King, it is only a ‘matter of time’ before they fall, before someone comes for their head, so to speak.
This brings us to selfishness. Zarathustra has counter-intuitive ideas about selfishness. First, he suggests we need to reclaim the idea of selfishness, that for a virtuous selfishness, we are opened to the path towards the overman. In a virtuous selfishness one can explore the real of the body, one can understand one’s own underlying motivations, one can be in deeper touch with the sensual images inside one’s own experience. Thus, in a virtuous selfishness there is the possibility to, in navigating the vicissitudes of sex and power, rise above even the heights of the mountains, and start to fly in the sky, rolling the dice, and building one’s virtues out of one’s own actions, and create one’s own possibilities for future becoming.
Towards the end of the Third Part, Zarathustra opens us to an idea that, at first, may seem to contradict his entire philosophy. There is certainly a paradox at work in his ideas. Where the overman, who has even transcended the mountain climbing, finds himself, is with a pulsating creative eternity beyond all biological reductions, and yet still on this side of the process of becoming. This pulsating creative eternity is not the eternity of a static being, but rather the endless process of becoming where the new flows forth out of one’s own drive. There is the idea that, for Zarathustra, there is no other wish than to be one with this very flow and force. When Zarathustra is one with this flow and force, there is the feeling that everything has been realized and actualized, but only at the end, only after having done the hard work (the work of the camel and the lion), only after one has dissolved one’s own hero-energy, and only after one has confronted the most terribly abysmal thought of the endless repetition of the same. Here we can juxtapose the endless repetition of the same, with the endless repetition of the new, where every turning of ‘the ring’ (of eternity), there is a difference. This difference is the positive identity of the overman.
And yet we are not done, we are still not finished. The Fourth and Final Part finds us with Zarathustra after his most prolonged silence, perhaps even spanning another 10 years in the mountains. We get the impression that Zarathustra has matured into old age, and is ready for a final self-sacrifice. Zarathustra calls this final self-sacrifice the honey sacrifice, because his blood and spirit is thick and tasty. He claims that this is the destiny for all who have matured in spirit. One loses time in the thickness or the density of one’s own spirit. We could even say that this matured spirit is the very embodiment of a little slice of the eternal becoming new to itself in this world.
What is this self-sacrifice all about, then? Zarathustra claims it is a self-sacrifice for his future children. He is challenged once more with the idea of the eternal return of the same, that there is no possibility for the new, that there is no possibility for the future spirit children in this world. But he quickly, and seemingly with ease, transcends this idea, and starts to explore the forest around his mountain for his spirit children. One by one he encounters higher men, men on a spiritual search who are looking for guidance, and many who are looking specifically for Zarathustra. He sees that each of these men, in their own way, point towards what is lacking in the contemporary man, and at the same time, points towards the potential for the future child.
He invites all of these men back to his cave in the mountains, and organizes a ‘last supper’. At this supper, he encourages discussion about the potentials of the higher men, and the ethics required for confronting this pathway of giving birth to the future spiritual children capable of overcoming the Death of God. What is most important in all of this, is the way in which the dinner and the night come to a close. What we find the next morning, at the end of the story, is that the story is far from over, in fact, it is just beginning. Zarathustra claims that he has not found his future children, but his future children are ‘near’. He claims that the higher men whom he hosted, are merely a bridge to these future children, and that they do not yet exist. What happens as the final act, is that a large yellow beast visits with Zarathustra, and behaves around him as if a totally loyal, faithful and domesticated monster, ready to serve a process of yea-saying into the future, and into the human world.
How are we to interpret this ending? I think that, connected with the larger metaphor of the work, that of the transformation from camel to lion to child, that the book ends with the idea that Zarathustra has finally completed this transformation. His inner lion, his monstrous beast, has been sublated, and now serves him completely. In his final self-sacrifice, in his willingness to find the higher men, to help them understand their lacks, and to help them towards their highest potential, he has won his own freedom, and his own child-like innocence in yea-saying. Now we get the beginning as the end, Zarathustra, after his hard work (camel), after taming his inner beast (lion), has found his capacity to say yes to this world.
What I hope has been achieved here is a “logic of Zarathustra”. We have travelled throughout the entire contents of TSZ, in all of its four parts. However, this logical overview still only gives a surface-level initiation into the true depths of the work. Thus, it is for that reason that I am leading the course on TSZ throughout the summer, with the first class starting July 17th, and with the last sign up on July 15th. Find out more at Philosophy Portal, and hope you join me for this adventure of all adventures.