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Cave, eagle and serpent

© Arthur O'Neill
An excerpt from an as yet unpublished Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Melbourne University in 2006.
Not to be cited or otherwise circulated without due acknowledgment of source.

The first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra deserves the repetition Nietzsche gave it, as it is quite crucial to the text as a whole. In it Nietzsche gives us a sort of initial existential snapshot of his book’s eponymous protagonist. I reproduce it here in full:

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains.
Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned – and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!
You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey, without me, my eagle and my serpent.
But we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it.
Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have again become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth.
To that end, I must descend into the depths: as you do at evening, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too, superabundant star!
Like you I must go under – as men, to whom I want to descend, call it.
So bless me then, tranquil eye, that can behold without envy even an excessive happiness!
Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world!
Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be a man again.
Thus began Zarathustra’s going-under.¹

To summarise the scene here, we are introduced to Zarathustra as he stands in front of his lair, a cave on a mountaintop, the sun, whom he addresses as a revered friend, rising above him, his familiars, his snake and his eagle, beside him, and his destiny, his “going-under”(untergung) amongst humanity before him. We do well to compare this scene closely with the one from the penultimate note of The Gay Science, which we have just discussed.

In a philosophical context the most immediate association evoked by the notion of a cave is of course the allegory of the cave from book seven of Plato’s Republic.² In that tale the cave stands for the quotidian public scene of illusion and misguided opinion. This is the scene in which the would-be philosopher first finds themselves on Socrates’ account, one from which they must escape, if they are to make the arduous journey up and out into the bright sunshine of the Idea of the Good. The exterior nature of this journey, in which the career of the philosopher is plotted almost exclusively with respect to elements that transcend their own being, reflects the rather uncomplicated apprehension of self-hood or soul amongst the Greeks. Zarathustra’s cave is also in a sense his starting point, his “background” or “given-ness,” but it is a far more private affair. It is his dwelling-place, from which he only occasionally sallies forth. It is presented as source of solace and sanctuary for him, a home for himself and his menagerie of animal familiars. Unlike Plato’s cave, it is on a mountaintop, with broad vistas and ready access to the sun, and, also unlike Plato’s cave, in Zarathustra’s cave he is the sole human inhabitant.

In this regard the image perhaps draws more from Bacon than from Plato. In his Novum Organum Bacon had isolated four broad types of error to which the human intellect was prone. His second category he termed “idols of the cave.” These are the idiosyncratic “illusions of the individual man. For (apart from the aberrations of human nature in general) each man has a kind of individual cave or cavern which fragments and distorts the light of nature”.³ We see in this reference an ironic acknowledgement that Zarathustra’s doctrines are the work of an individual and are thus inevitably conditioned by history and personal idiosyncrasy. However, in counterpoint to the rather negative epistemic inflection the image of the cave achieves through these references, Nietzsche elsewhere uses the figure of the cave as a symbol for philosophically productive seclusion and solitude. When he does so he is (usually) also careful to underline that by this is implied neither physical nor even, necessarily, complete social isolation. The solitude he describes, and recommends, is rather a thoughtful technique of intense self absorption. It involves first and foremost a heightening of those experiences of interiority, of self investigation and self-adjustment, that are arguably our special endowment from two millennia of Christian self-redemption through self-surveillance and self-domination. This is “the cave behind the eyes” one might say. The cave of Christ’s resurrection, passed down to us through generations of earnest conversion and confession.

The cave image, for all these associations with this relatively recent experience of revelation and conversion through a practice of secluded interiority, also suggests the somewhat contrary image of the pre-history of humanity and the many cryptic relics that still remain from our stone age past. In this way it carries the further nuance that what one encounters within this interiority is never simply there, an item to be examined, categorised and discarded. Instead, the creatures of the cave are inexhaustibly subtle apparitions: apparitions that may well be no more than the masks or playthings of hidden forces. The forces have themselves been formed and reformed in the course of the long millennia of biological history. In this guise the cave image is frequently united in Nietzsche’s writings with that of the labyrinth, and of the heart. In such company it serves to underline the complex and profoundly historical nature of our passionate proclivities and of the conscious content they condition.

Finally Zarathustra’s cave is his piece of the earth. If we hark back to the first chapter and its attempt to convey the sense of the in-alienable, non-durational Dionysian unity of the world, we might put it that Zarathustra’s cave represents his participation in that whole. It is also implied that, in so far as Zarathustra has achieved a just disposition, this is where he gained it; as though Zarathustra’s cave, like some of those of Ancient Greece, is also perhaps the abode of an oracle.⁴

When Zarathustra emerges from his cave to greet the morning sun he is accompanied by two animals, a snake and an eagle. Elsewhere it is implied that there might be other animals in his cave, other “hermit’s pets,” but these two are his special, almost constant companions.⁵ There is a boundless flood of allegorical associations we might attach to each of these, and with both together. We can give some form to our enquiries here if we begin by first attending to the rôles the two animals play in the course of the narrative. As fellow-denizens of the cave, the implication is that they are, in a sense, aspects of Zarathustra himself. This impression is both heightened, but also rendered somewhat problematical when, at the end of the Prologue, Zarathustra greets his animals as they return to him, calling them “the proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun”, and then he murmurs to his heart:

I wish I were wise. I wish I were wise from the heart of me, like my serpent!

But I am asking the impossible: therefore I ask my pride to always go along with my wisdom!

And if one day my wisdom should desert me – ah, it loves to fly away! – then may my pride too fly with my folly!

Initially the clear implication of the first sentence of this passage seems to be that Zarathustra’s own wisdom, and that of his serpent, are quite different; so that a fortiori Zarathustra and his serpent too must be thoroughly distinct entities. But the utterances which follow gainsay this first impression. Zarathustra proceeds to talk of the relationship between his own wisdom and pride in terms that strongly suggest the relationship that holds between his serpent and eagle: when these animals first appeared on this scene they too were described as closely bound: “And behold! An eagle was sweeping through the air in wide circles, and from it was hanging a serpent, not like a prey, but like a friend: for it was coiled around the eagle’s neck”.

We can go some way towards resolving this complex passage if we suppose Zarathustra’s wisdom to be something like an urge, or a “will to”, a complex, historically conditioned matrix of passionate proclivities and ideal elements, such as we met with in the previous chapter. In that case Zarathustra is not wise from the heart because this way of being is not his sole possibility, it is, if you like, an aspect of his character, not its completion. (We can take his claim here, that he would like to be wise from the very heart, pretty much with a grain of salt. The claim is made after his first attempt to address the public at large has ended in failure and near disaster. He is feeling foolish: in public his wisdom had deserted him, and so too his pride). Which brings us back to the return of his eagle and snake in unison. If we take the snake to be emblematic of Zarathustra’s will-to-wisdom, a device he uses to help him recognise this aspect of himself, then the snake is “wise from the heart” in a way that Zarathustra is not. It is the very definition of the snake that, when Zarathustra is “possessed” by this force, he then is wise from the heart— his passions are all devoted to being wise— but he is not always so possessed.

On this interpretation Zarathustra’s eagle will similarly refer to whatever aspect of Zarathustra’s being— of his dynamic passionate structure, its associated constellation of ideas, and the experience of “self” and “world” that is revealed to him thereby— it is that allows him to recognise himself in context and “wonder at his own value.” The eagle and the snake are thus motifs for aspects of Zarathustra that bear a rough functional correspondence to Descartes’ passionate structures of self esteem born of love and of prudence respectively. By introducing these as animals Nietzsche is able to capture the sense in which such aspects of the self are complex, mutable, evanescent and historical. By their having their own eyes, voices, and in general their own external manifestations beyond him, this image is able to express the notion that these are forces which mediate between Zarathustra and existence, and in a sense deliver a world and an apprehension of self-hood over to him, in a manner that is perhaps beyond Descartes’ form of presentation.⁶

The general manner of representing the self or soul that Nietzsche employs here, as a sort of menagerie, is not, however, without significant philosophical precedent. In Plato’s Republic, book IX, Socrates attempts to illustrate to Glaucon how it is that acts of injustice must necessarily harm those who perform them, even if such people still manage to keep up a reputation for being just all the while.⁷ To this end he suggests to Glaucon that they “fashion in their discourse a symbolic image of the soul.” This image, although it appears without in the likeness of a man, is in fact composed of, not only a little man within, but also a lion and “a manifold and many-headed beast that has a ring of heads of tame and wild beasts and can change them and cause to spring forth from itself all such growths.” Amongst the many states that such an internally complex organism might assume Socrates mentions one in which the lion and the snake dominate, which manifests as a wilful and irascible character, and another in which the “mob-like beast” as a whole dominates the little man and causes the lion to degenerate into an ape – leading to a base and cowardly character (the types of the Tyrant and the Democrat respectively). Socrates asserts that all the actions we perform serve to nourish and empower some aspect of this polymorphous interior beast, and enlists Glaucon’s agreement that conditions of the soul such as the foregoing pair are undesirable, in order to conclude that all of our actions are crucial if we are to maintain a noble state of being. As a corollary he then adds that we must “give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast – like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild – and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth”. In the context of the dialogue as a whole then, our “little man” here is that aspect of our being which serves to maintain the justice of the soul.

Something like the notion of the menagerie soul also appears in later Christian writings. So, for instance, St. Augustine in his Confessions XIII chapter 21 talks of three evil things: “the savage monster pride, […] the sloth and the sensual pleasures of lust and, […] quibbling knowledge that is knowledge only in name”. He says that these impulses of the soul are wild beasts, cattle and serpents respectively and adds that by following the example of Christ and his servants the beasts will be tamed, the herds broken in and the serpents will loose their sting: they will be “cunning only to be on their guard. They will pry into the secrets of the temporal world only as far as needs be, to enable us to catch a glimpse of eternity as it is known through your creatures.” ⁸ We see here I think a significant precedent for Zarathustra’s snake. (Augustine’s use of cattle here, to represent undifferentiated quotidian desire, also serves, perhaps, to explain why it is that one of the towns closest to Zarathustra’s cave is called “Pied Cow.”)

Note that in neither of these cases is it simply a matter of dominating the passions by an act of permanent suppression, as it was for instance with Descartes. So, for instance, in the image Socrates presents to Glaucon, harmonious concord and growth is said to be achieved for all the beasts, by handing control to the “little man” inside us. But there is also a glaring problem with Socrates’ suggestion. The image of internal organisation which Plato gives us here is also an invitation to embark on an infinite regress, as is clearly telegraphed by Socrates’ ironic statement that we must both “give the man within us complete domination over the entire man” and “make him take charge of the many headed beast …” (my emphasis). In the broad sweep of Plato’s dialogue as a whole a halt to this regress is attempted in terms of the ideas. The little man is united with the whole man (and perhaps also the whole man to his community at large), and harmony or justice is brought to the soul, by loving, and hence striving to embody and draw others on towards, the Ideas. With Augustine the problem of uniting the little man with the big man seems gone. But in fact it has only been displaced. We might say that it has now become the problem of converting the snake. Harmony and justice are achieved on his account by living with others in loving community in Christ. Augustine finishes the Confessions with the thought that such community is cemented by joyous participation in the ongoing project of interpreting the sacred texts. This is how “a glimpse of eternity” is vouched safe to us, human, creatures. In both cases then, the image of the menagerie soul is deployed in order to argue for the need of some external, socially mediated, point of adhesion if one is to obtain the centripetal force required in order to bring peace and harmony to what is an inherently chaotic realm.

If we turn from these considerations back to Zarathustra, as he stands before us in the opening section of the book, we see that his relationship to his animals is already presented to be one of peace and harmony. When we look to the passage from the end of the Prologue, which we have just read, we see too that it is implied there that this harmony is first and foremost a matter of the quality of the relationship that holds between his animals. An eagle might normally be expected to devour a snake, and a snake to resist elevation by an eagle, but these two seem to have become inseparable friends.⁹ To see any further into what might be going on here we need to garner more clues as to the likely character of each.

The image of the snake gives out into an exceedingly rich seam of associations in western thought. However we can, I think, distinguish two fairly simple general elements. There are firstly the connotations the snake has to desire in general and to the more common desires in particular, drawn perhaps from its physical similarity to an arrow and to a penis; and there are also its connotations of prudence, or, sometimes, cunning. These latter associations stem perhaps from this animal’s need for cautious circumspection— it lies close to the earth, so that its field of vision is very limited and it is easily trodden on— and to its uncanny, tortuous and slithering mode of locomotion. In the imagery of the Greeks the snake was associated in particular with medicinal wisdom and the power to heal. As is well known, in the Judeo-Christian tradition the connotations are generally less salutary. We also saw in the excerpt from the Republic quoted above, how Socrates associates the snake with irritability and sudden anger, and so employs it as the symbol for a resentful, choleric degeneration in what might otherwise be a courageous, leonine spirit. In nature the snake is particularly irascible when involved in procreation, or when changing its skin. This last attribute of the snake, considered poetically, as the ability to overcome one’s way of being when it has become too constricting, is one that Nietzsche explicitly employs in several places.¹⁰

Snakes also bite of course. When the drunken Alcibiades begins his eulogy of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium he says that “people say, you know, that when a man’s been bitten by a snake he won’t tell anybody what it feels like except a fellow sufferer, because no one else would sympathise with him if the pain drove him into making a fool of himself.” He mentions this because he intends to confess to them a bite he himself has received; but this is fine, because all present have similarly been bitten. Alcibiades goes on to tell how he has “been bitten in the heart, or the mind, or whatever you like to call it by Socrates’ philosophy, which clings like an adder to any young and gifted mind it can get hold of, and does exactly what it likes with it.” Socrates’ philosophy bites Alcibiades by causing him to feel shame in his usual behaviour.¹¹ At various points in his work Nietzsche too talks of the pangs of conscience as snake bites. So, for instance, §38 of “The Wander and His Shadow” (Human all too Human volume II) runs: “Sting of conscience.—The sting of conscience is, like a snake stinging a stone, a piece of stupidity”. This thought is moderated however, later on when, at Beyond Good and Evil “Maxims and Interludes” §98, Nietzsche adds that “If one trains one’s conscience it will kiss us as it bites.”

For the Greeks the eagle was linked with Zeus. The birds were said to have brought Zeus nectar, prior to his ascendancy, whilst he was still in hiding from Cronus. Eagles fly high, and so, the thought runs, in their circling perhaps they sometimes fly, or at least see, into the future. For these reasons sightings of the bird were considered to be omens of great portent. Many of the remarks in Nietzsche’s texts, that either use or concern eagles, seem to draw primarily on this association. Zarathustra himself will later claim that eagles bring him back food from the future.¹²

Birds more generally are used by Nietzsche as examples of a great sense of freedom and power. He uses them explicitly to refer to our capacity in imagination to go where we will, and so by extension, to our capacity to synthetically draw individual experiences into a broader context. To this general capacity he adds the more specific content that the bird’s eye view can thus enable one to see things in a more distanced way, abstracted from some of the foreground evaluations one nearer the action would be compelled to adopt. It is only in this last sense that Nietzsche employs the aspect of the eagle as a bird of prey. The image of the eagle has come to have predominantly warlike associations, mostly due, I suspect, to its adoption by the bellicose legions of the Roman imperium. So, for instance, Montaigne urges us never to trust a peoples whose banner bears an eagle. The Romans saw the attack of the eagle as it stoops to its prey, as the paradigmatic example of sudden and decisive death from on high; and so found in it a most suitable emblem for the rough justice of “might is right.” Nietzsche never uses the image of the bird’s attack in this specific sense, rather he sees in the eagle an agent that may swoop down on whim and ruin the would-be “innocent.” The reference to Zeus is evident again here. For Nietzsche, by its ability to see a far wider context, the aquiline point of view has within it the power to debauch the naïve, because it discerns the broader grounds for behaviour and so carries the potential to expose the not-always-so-innocent basis for the appearance of “the innocent.” It is only in this context that he uses the bird as an emblem for aggressive justice and the thrill of attack.¹³

In order to bring this variegated posy of allusions together, and weave it as it were into some sort of, at least provisional, unity, the final piece of the puzzle is of course Zarathustra himself. Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? There are many hints throughout the text that in large part Zarathustra is a fabulous concoction based ultimately on— Nietzsche himself. This is broadly clear from the fact that the content of many of the speeches that Zarathustra makes are reiterations of views familiar to us from other of Nietzsche’s works. Indeed Nietzsche chose the name “Zarathustra” for his protagonist because this is a variation of the name of Zoroastra, a prophet of ancient Persia. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche explains that he chose this particular prophet because he considers Zarathustra to have been the first to introduce to the world of thought the idea that good and evil are metaphysical entities, and that existence is essentially a battle between the two. Nietzsche says that “Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality; consequently he must also be the first to recognise it”.¹⁴ As we have seen, this recognition is something Nietzsche proudly considers himself to have achieved, as the title of his next work, Beyond Good and Evil makes pretty clear. Zarathustra’s approach to the general rôle of the thinker is also very like the one which, in my chapter two, we found at the heart of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. In one of his first speeches, “On the Three Metamorphoses,” Zarathustra gives an outline of the life of the philosopher that is congruent with the model found in the Untimely Meditations: the sympathetic study of history (the moment of the camel in Zarathustra’s speech), employed critically (the moment of the lion) in order to provide the conditions for innovative insight (the child).

There are also some more personal similarities between the two. Zarathustra’s peregrinations in the course of the narrative, from the mountains to the lowlands and the sea and back again, bear a strong resemblance to Nietzsche’s own: for much of his later life Nietzsche spent winters near the Mediterranean and summers in the Alps. And when, in a chapter entitled “The Funeral Song,” Zarathustra ruefully recalls the most painful moments of his past, the events recalled are entirely new to the narrative and appear nowhere else in it, yet they make a great deal of sense if we have any knowledge of the events of Nietzsche’s own life. So, for instance, Zarathustra says accusingly:

And once I wanted to dance as I have never yet danced: I wanted to dance beyond all heavens. Then you lured away my favourite singer.

And he struck up a gruesome, gloomy melody: alas, he trumpeted into my ears like a mournful horn!

Murderous singer, instrument of malice, most innocent man! I stood prepared for the finest dance: then you murdered my ecstasy with your tones.¹⁵

These claims here make no reference to any other part of the narrative of Zarathustra, so they seem entirely without motivation in that context. They make excellent sense in the context of Nietzsche’s life; they express his great dissatisfaction with Wagner. Nietzsche had tried, in The Birth of Tragedy, to convince Wagner that his own path to greatness lay in the reprisal of all that was great in Attic tragedy, but Nietzsche felt entirely let down by Wagner’s later work and political associations. He considered the latter’s Parsifal to be a celebration of all the worst, most life-denying and ascetic, aspects of Christianity.¹⁶

If we accept this reading, so that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is understood to be a fabulous account of its author’s life, yet another enticing parallel with Descartes steps to the fore. Descartes introduces his autobiographical Discourse on Method by remarking, in its first part: “I am presenting this work only as a history or, if you prefer, a fable”.¹⁷ It is tempting to see Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche’s riposte; to see it as also, in effect, Nietzsche’s Discourse on Method.¹⁸ The cave here is then the correlate of the stove heated room; Zarathustra/Nietzsche spends ten years in there, not just a day. And the animals are the outcome. They are Zarathustra/Nietzsche’s method. Before we turn back to them with this insight in hand, we might also remark that this parallel suggests we might expect the body of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to include, as does the Discourse, an outline of truths that Nietzsche takes himself to have come by through the employment of his method, a prospectus of what the method might have to offer future humanity, and a strategic attempt to seduce the body to the method. As we have already gleaned an inkling of, from our analysis of Gay Science note 341, and as shall be further confirmed in what follows, this is about right. But first of all, the method.

Suppose we take the snake as it creeps along to represent our day-to-day mode of experiencing ourselves and the world as we go about our business: the head looking forward and low representing our focus on the immediate future of what surrounds us, a focus attuned to the predominant activity of satisfying desire; the tail representing the usually very limited array of past events that are vivid to consciousness; the general “snaky” mood being one of mild anxiety. Using this image we might surmise that Zarathustra’s snake is firstly the prudent understanding of himself and the world that he comes by in this general mode of comportment. We might then go on to interpret the snake’s transportation to a different location, by an eagle, say, as an imaginative leap, as, for instance, one might achieve by reading, and really “getting into,” a thoughtful account of life, which has been written by someone whose conditions of existence are quite different from one’s own. A very widely travelled snake on this interpretation, might come to be particularly good at discerning differences between one way of being and another, whilst still, fundamentally, being a snake. An eagle that befriended such a snake and carted it around might also come thereby, to a very different understanding of the world than it would otherwise achieve. Eagles, on this account, have a capacity to form a lofty overview of the context of any particular moment of history, but little capacity to feel them “from the inside” as it were. Along such lines of thought as these we might take the union of snake and eagle to be emblematic of the procedures Nietzsche took himself to have achieved, for sharpening his historical sense so that it became for him a means of “sniffing out” the underlying passionate proclivities which give a particular mode of being its life; and his concomitant development of an historical overview, which plots out the interactions between, and the developments made within, the various passionate types that have hitherto held sway.¹⁹ That is: we can see the snake and the eagle as representative of the forces and capacities that, as Nietzsche saw it, had enabled him to construct his vision of history as the intrigue of the body’s will to power, and to employ that vision to satisfy himself of his own “intellectual conscience” – his pride. We might put it that associated with the snake is his dance-hall of human types and ideas; with the eagle, the imaginative will to power vision that enables him to deal magnanimously with these types.²⁰ The additional element Nietzsche introduces in the first book of Zarathustra is that the snake is and remains “wise from the heart”: it is not merely an undirected power of differentiation, its differentiations are always ultimately relative to a specific “love” or goal. That goal in general is the perennial philosopher’s goal, as Nietzsche understands it to be: the overcoming of humanity as he finds it.

The complex dynamic structure Nietzsche thus hands to us through this image of the union of the two beasts, also cunningly suggests the tension that must lie at its heart. The well travelled snake, in its fundamental mode of being as future directed anxiety and desire, conceives with the aid of the eagle’s vision, a love for a specific Superman: the ideal of overcoming the spirit of revenge. But, relative to this goal, it must also cast suspicion on the will to power point of view itself: is this view not itself an abstraction from, and hence an implicit accusation of, existence? As such does not it too smell suspiciously of revenge? For the eagle’s part: its lofty overview permits vision, or at least informed speculation, concerning the future. What if this vision should suggest the inevitability of the spirit of revenge? Would that not be the ruin of the snake? All is perhaps not quite so rosy in Zarathustra’s household as it appears to be, as we behold him there, at the beginning of the book, standing exultant before the morning sun. Before him lies the problem of maintaining a just equilibrium between his snake and his eagle as he involves himself with humanity.

Down-going

Zarathustra’s naïveté concerning the complexities of giving and taking, sharing and exchange quite generally are manifested in his morning address to the sun. He extols the sun’s superfluity and says that he intends to adopt this as his own modus operandi. Zarathustra too wants to become a sun; but he mistakes the sun’s abundance for generosity. He describes it as a giving: an activity that succeeds only in so far as that which is distributed is accepted as a gift. Zarathustra’s hubris in this regard extends to supposing that the sun comes up to his mountain each morning in order to find recipients. This absurd piece of anthropomorphism reveals a significant difference between the sun and Zarathustra. As Zarathustra understands superfluity it is not merely a matter of abundance, for him it remains inflected by an underlying expectation of exchange.

For this reason Zarathustra’s down-going amongst men is not, like the sun’s, a merely superficial distributive operation; it changes him. He begins the book claiming that he is weary of his wisdom, like a bee who has too much honey: as though it is purely a matter of off-loading an excess. But of course one wearies of wisdom by getting bored with it, in which case one does not need to distribute it, one needs the opportunity to bring change to it. It turns out that men are either rather unwilling or at best imperfect recipients for Zarathustra’s honey. The exchange does not go off as he had expected. Yet it is because Zarathustra is not like the sun, his giving is not a mere radiation, it is an exchange, that he thereby achieves new revelations, and eventually, a new way of being. Thus his misunderstanding concerning the nature of abundance is both his tragic flaw, the fundamental basis for his suffering, but also the key to his remaining in becoming: his changing rather than resting, fixed and unmoved.²¹

* * *

We have already touched on the complex, esoteric nature of many of Zarathustra’s “teachings” as he wanders about making speeches in the first part. There is a brilliant outpouring here of allusions, attitudes and assertions that is almost solar in its extravagance. Strangely, however Zarathustra never discusses how it is that he has come by his insights, the roots of his historical method itself are never on display. Instead we might put it that in his speeches from the first part he is predominantly speaking as a snake to other snakes. “Remain true to the earth” is a regularly repeated admonition and there is much talk of arrows and longing. The speeches chiefly concern virtue and the correct regulation of desire. The broad gist of Zarathustra’s advice being that creation beyond oneself is the thing; current humanity has not surveyed all the options and discovered the best, it has merely become stagnant. We are in danger of being trapped in a “miserable ease”, a community of “cunning love-less egos.” One should not strive for too great a harmony between one’s various drives he says in the Prologue because “one must have chaos within one, to give birth to a dancing star”.²² What is required above all is the capacity to find and hold on to a guiding passion, a love of the heart and soul:

Once you had passions and called them evil. But now you have only your virtues: they grew from out your passions.

You laid your highest aim in the heart of these passions: then they became your virtues and joys.²³

As was discussed towards the end of the last chapter, Zarathustra introduces the Superman as a general place holder for the view that the possible modes of human being have not been exhausted, and that a glorious and noble life is one that is passionately dedicated to developing new modes of being. The somewhat more covert content of his speeches being that a specific hurdle to this striving is provided by the tendency in modern thought to suppose that the only visions of oneself and world that are worthy of passionate adoption are those that are strictly conditioned by the theoretical formulations of modern science.

Zarathustra’s first excursion to the lands below his mountain is not a raging success. He begins by addressing a group of people who have gathered in a market place to watch a circus spectacle. The group are un-receptive, and he is later told that he offended many and was lucky to get away with his life. His interference with the circus troupe also leads to his being involved in an incident in which one of their number is killed. As a result, rather than continuing to address the public in general, Zarathustra decides thenceforth to confine himself to discoursing to a select group of disciples. At the end of the first part, having relieved himself of his wisdom, he bids these fellow “creators” adieu and heads back up to his cave.

The second part begins with a quote from the valedictory speech Zarathustra had delivered to his disciples at the end of the first part. There he had exhorted them not to rest content being believers, but to lose him in order to find themselves

— and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

Truly, with other eyes, my brothers, I shall then seek my lost ones;

with another love I shall then love you.