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]
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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)
