Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Friedrich Nietzsche

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Zarathustra is indeed difficult to interpret. This task of understanding is further complicated if one is unaware of the rest of Nietzsche's philosophy. While first‐time readers can appreciate it without knowledge of those writings, they should approach the work with guarded enthusiasm and caution as well as humility. Especially if one considers that Nietzsche regarded his entire philosophical work to be a running commentary to his greatest masterpiece: Zarathustra.

WHO IS ZARATHUSTRA?

      The historical Zarathustra was a legendary Iranian religious figure. Living approximately in the second millennium BCE, he is considered the world's first prophet. During the Enlightenment, both Voltaire and Mozart treated him as a noble, tolerant forerunner of a pre‐Christian religion. In his comic opera, The Magic Flute, Mozart incorporated a version of Zarathustra – or Zoroaster, in his more common designation. Their cultural example may have served as one inspiration.

      The vagueness of the historical figure must have equally attracted Nietzsche. The fact that little was known about him, and yet he assumed a mythic stature, allowed Nietzsche to utilize the character of Zarathustra to awaken grander associations and aspirations. At the same time, he could fill the empty vessel with his philosophical content. In that way, he channeled the mythic quality of the legendary prophet and placed him into a modern setting that reflected the ambivalences and tensions of his times.

Above all, Nietzsche directed his readers' attention to the major reason he had chosen the figure. Nietzsche stated that Zarathustra was the first to have seen the struggle of good and evil as the true wheel of human history – morality as a form of metaphysics. Since he had created the fateful error, he would have to be the first to recognize his mistake.²

      For Nietzsche's purposes, and our understanding of the text, it is irrelevant if Zarathustra could be made responsible for such a momentous historical event. It was only important that Nietzsche used him for his personal objective of discovering the error of morality.

      If Zarathustra is about anything, then, it is about the uncovering, and his protagonist's personal overcoming, of historical morality – that fateful error.

NIETZSCHE'S EARLY YEARS

      All roads did not lead to Zarathustra. Nietzsche's early career as a student of philology paved the way for a future vocation as a professor. By all accounts, he was a promising scholar of antiquity. He received a position at the University of Basel, in 1869, at the precocious age of twenty‐four, solely based on a recommendation from his mentor. His academic future was set.

Then the unexpected happened: Nietzsche published a controversial interpretation of the ancient world, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). This text turned the mainstream views of the Hellenic age on their head. It was an ambitious reconfiguration influenced by his friendship with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche had met Wagner as a student in Leipzig, in 1868, and the composer enlisted him in his project of cultural rejuvenation.

      In trying to establish an intellectual grounding for Wagner's enterprise, Nietzsche challenged the consensus verdict on ancient Greece. The traditional view was that the culture was the product of noble, ethically superior individuals. He suggested instead a darker undercurrent. He uncovered two conflicting forces at work: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. While the Apollonian reflected the sober and rational side of Greek life, the Dionysian flipside of their being tended toward irrational excess. The result of that productive tension was Attic tragedy, the cultural height of ancient Greece.

      Two insights here were of great importance connected to Nietzsche's later Zarathustra. One was the study's focus on the Greek god Dionysus and his profound significance for the ancient world. The other was Nietzsche's suggestion that ancient Greek tragedy was at its highest point when it was killed off by Socrates. He could not grasp the deeper significance of the tragic worldview, and his rationalism undermined the basis for tragic art.

      Despite its undisputed brilliance, The Birth of Tragedy elicited a fierce backlash among academic colleagues. They criticized it for its overarching speculations and its lack of scholarly grounding. An academic review by a young, up‐and‐coming scholar damaged Nietzsche's reputation. It led him to distance himself from his profession and ultimately to retire from it completely.

The disappointment with the opposition to his first work, along with recurring ill health, were the main factors that led him to relinquish his position at Basel. But another overriding factor was the cooling of his relationship with Wagner and his disenchantment with their shared cultural ideal. Nietzsche now regarded his earlier commitments, both to his profession and to Wagner, as a false start and a distraction from his own preoccupations and concerns.

WANDERING YEARS

      Nietzsche now embarked on a ten‐year (1879–1888) itinerant lifestyle that took him further away from his native Germany and to a range of European locales: Sils in Switzerland, Nice in France, Genoa and Turin in Italy. All the while he read widely. Aside from the ancients, whose works, as a scholar of antiquity, he already knew well, he added to the list more contemporary literature, such as the French moralists and novelists, English moralists, and Russian authors, as well as classical works of European literature.

      Nietzsche also began to examine specialized scientific treatises on physiology and biology, and other texts dealing with the wider natural sciences. Most of all, he was intrigued by literature emerging on the question of morality and human development. Darwin was the hidden reference point for these naturalist investigations.

His reading at the time reflects the two sides of Nietzsche's complex nature. On the one side he was drawn to the cultural tradition of ancient Greece as well as the cultural output of the West. Since his youth, he had dabbled in literary production, writing mocking sketches as well as drafts for plays. He was also well versed in the rich German musical tradition. He was an accomplished pianist, though his own compositions are not highly regarded today. (Later, he suggested that the entire Zarathustra should be considered music.³) And throughout his life he wrote poetry. Having grown up in an intensely fertile cultural period, Nietzsche always harbored an ambition to make his mark on culture.

      On the other side, there was a probing, scientifically inclined intellect that could get to the heart of the matter with incredible vigor and precision. This part of his nature was sharpened further by his rigorous philological studies, which trained him to parse ancient texts with a cool, analytical mind. Nietzsche's boundless curiosity also drew him to the advances in a wider range of academic disciplines, including the natural sciences. These gave him both a greater field of content as well as exposing him to new methods and insights into the areas that interested him most – above all, history, philosophy, religion, and the arts.

      Despite having grown up in a religious household – his father was a Lutheran pastor – Nietzsche had come a long way from his childhood roots. Deciding early on to pursue an academic career in philology (displeasing his pious mother, who had wanted him to study theology), Nietzsche had taken gradual, though decisive, steps away from his Christian upbringing. He later claimed that his childhood faith had just slipped away, and he had encountered no struggle with it. It is an illuminating remark from a thinker whose masterpiece would initiate a radical break with Christianity.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST MORALITY

Nietzsche later stated that with the second book of his itinerant life, Daybreak (1881), he embarked on a campaign against morality.⁴ СКАЧАТЬ