I teach you the Superman.
Man is something that should be overcome:
Archetypal Patterning in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
By Jonah Manning
When the madman came and proclaimed the death of god, he looked at his listeners astonished faces and said,
’I have come too early,’. . . ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. . . . This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.’
Now over a hundred years later god still survives, hangs on or is hung on to. The thought of his vacuum haunts Western civilization like a whisper in the dark, but few people can accept life without him. We need heaven; we need meaning to withstand the toil of suffering. Science and reason have chiseled away and eroded man’s formerly stalwart faith in a Christian god since the Enlightenment, supplanting his cosmology and ordination with mathematics and evolution, but there is still no heaven in science; man is only a mammal who must prove itself “fit” to survive and death is “beastly.” Could human life be so base? Finding meaning through science seems almost unfathomable. For this reason God is institutional and always has been. It feels good and safe to be his “children,” protected from the brutish chaos of natural existence. We are together. But now the light has dimmed, and other explanations have come to prominence. Our world has become fragmented and human life has thus become devalued. People hold onto god and despair, too afraid of meaninglessness, solitude and death. God is still the only gatekeeper to heaven. Campbell wrote, “the secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.” When Zarathustra preached, “I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” no one cared about that sort of heroic greatness (Zarathustra 41). They preferred Zarathustra’s “ultimate man” or the “last man,” who wants to live long in ease (Zarathustra, 46). Death was to be put off even at the expense of life. Nietzsche was right in his understanding that his path is not for all people—or at least all men wouldn’t choose it or find it satisfactory. God has always served as a means of overcoming suffering—the pinnacle of which is death. Instead they suffer mildly for no gain. Without god we face death alone. But now the death of god has come. What options are open to us? The death of god is at once the most terrifying of propositions, but it is also the most liberating. Nietzsche’s philosophy includes great suffering but with the ultimate gain—selfhood. The meaning god formerly granted us was a system of understanding our place in the world. This is who we are—the ancestor of Adam. This is selfhood. The goal is the same, but now it is harder; the system must be self-created and initiated. With the effort though, the rewards are greater.
Nietzsche’s project was to move beyond the ideology of transcendent beings and perception. God’s existence is irrelevant because we don’t have access to it; we, as beings, are incapable of objectivity. We are situated in the world and have limited sensory capabilities. The prime example is “The Book of Job.” In this poem, there is a fundamental breakdown between the morality of man and the divine intention of Yahweh. Job was the best of men and the will of God was still unknowable to him. God said that Job was right to question him. God said to Job’s friends and accusers, “You have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has.” By Blake’s interpretation, Job goes from being a pious man to more of an artist, a man more interested in the pleasures of the world. This is a great allegory for Nietzsche’s project as well. We are beings that are limited to perspective. We are not capable of any objective point-of-view. The world we know is the world our senses bring to our experience, and our mind then absorbs and analyzes. “There is no truth, only interpretation.” Since our perspective is always shifting with time and place, the world we experience changes as well. This introduces an important aspect of Nietzsche’s ideology—flux. There is nothing that can remain in stasis. Change is inevitable and natural. However, the inevitability of change and an inability to change are precisely the conditions that give rise to suffering. If we don’t initiate positive change, strive for it, than a negative change will fill the vacuum. Solomon’s seal: “this too will pass” is meant to generate humility, but it also states the obvious natural fact: nothing lasts. But how will it change? If we do nothing to change, we will first become bored, then change will happen by outside determination. We have conceded control. But to actively and continually change takes attention, effort, and energy—this is the determination to push through suffering.
With the understanding that either there is no transcendent god, or it isn’t guiding the affairs of the world (e.g. deism, no universal morality), then it becomes an individual process to discovering meaning in life and is at the core of Nietzsche’s ideology.
The existential process of self-becoming has three stages and culminates with what Nietzsche called the ubermensch, or the superman. For Nietzsche, this was the highest potential for human life, the greatest goal. The result isn’t necessarily a Platonic happiness; yes it is happiness or joy but it is bought with a high price of suffering. It is a happiness achieved through the accomplishment of the highest goal which is the pursuit of the self and self-knowledge. It is by knowing the self that we can discover our talents and joys, and we discover our task and work—that mountain that we alone must climb, and perhaps to our death. It is the success of this task that we obtain our highest bliss and joy.
The path and pattern of the superman can be understood in a traditional three-part movement:
1. He experiences a profound loss or disillusionment which separates him from himself and his world.
2. He works through nihilism to attempt to cut away any other false illusions. He reaches the bottom of his nihilism where little remains of the self until he gains a new equilibrium and foundation [will to power].
3. He begins the upward, restorative movement, rebuilding himself on a new foundation of understanding and experience [give style to one’s self,] and returns to selfhood and the world.
This pattern is complemented and validated by older patterns with striking resemblances. Joseph Campbell understood the classical hero’s journey in like terms:
- The hero is separated from his familiar surroundings and goes on a journey alone.
- He undergoes a mysterious initiation, during which he grapples with supernatural powers and gains a new understanding of himself in relation to his community and to the gods.
- He returns to share the new vision with his fellows.
It is also important to think of Nietzsche’s existential pattern in terms of simpler, well-known conceptions of spirituality and reality: Blake’s innocence→ experience → innocence. Or unity→ duality→ unity. In dialectics: thesis→ antithesis → synthesis. All of these patterns represent the same movement, of (1) an entity moving away, a (2) differentiation, an opposition, thus a gaining perspective, then (3) turning back toward its former position, though changed. Through the analogue to dialectics, this pattern is seen as a general method of learning or growth, and growth is a fundamental premise of life.
For Nietzsche the primary separation, the impetus to start the journey, is the loss of god. We realize that god is not functioning; he is not providing the meaning necessary for quality experience. Losing that influence is a shattering event and the existential quest is the search for obtaining a new foundation for selfhood and meaning. However, one cannot simply set out to find new meaning. Meaning derives itself from ethical and cosmological structures. We are imbued by our upbringing, culture, law, morality—all is founded on the premise of a transcendent deity—the one who lit the spark, the great puppeteer, the wrathful judge or some other mask of the divine. The concept is so deeply rooted, to get beyond god, we must peel ourselves like an onion, layer by layer, to test the dependence of our values on external transcendent ideals. This is self-destruction, annihilation. Everything must be destroyed so we can start over fresh and clean, with no false perceptions or foundless beliefs in a dead morality.
It becomes hard to think logically. Right and wrong become hazy; good and bad no longer hold up to scrutiny. In William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” the world gets tossed upside down. Nietzsche continually obfuscates terms like good and evil as well. Everything is questioned—nothing is a certainty. We must say I don’t believe in good and evil. Duality becomes an illusion, an archaic remnant of crusty ideologies now devoid of their essence. Thou shalt not kill—what about Bin Ladin? Was Bin Ladin wrong? We don’t know? Life and mankind have been completely depreciated.
At a point very near schizophrenia perhaps, we realize that there are no more beliefs that can be destroyed. Nothing is left but a shadow of self, nothing except a formless solipsistic self empty of meaning. This is a terribly lonesome realization, insinuating singularity and isolation. But it must be accepted; the only alternative is despair and denial. The realization—My life is only my life. I am unattached, so I am also free, in a sense, to make what I wish of my existence—I am my own creator. I must accept this—the only option is the chaos of crumbling Christendom.
Now, with a full affirmation of life, we center ourselves around the present, intentionally living life from the perspective of deriving meaning from the relationship of experience and self. This is fundamentally different from a Christian methodology. Christian dogma places the weight of experience in the future. Life is only lived to earn a place in heaven. Suffering is okay because heaven is the reward. Life is tolerated as a means to another end, not affirmed in and of itself. This devaluation is, for Nietzsche, nihilism.
Nietzsche’s nihilism is only a precursor to reconstruction—in this life. It is to be overcome. All that remains at the bottom with the empty self are two things:
the desire for power and the emotion of fear. And when Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivating principle for all human actions: the will to power.
Sublimated will to power was now the Ariadne’s thread tracing the way out of the labyrinth of nihilism.
Nihilism is overcome by the purest sensation of selfhood, the one thing that is universal to all living things—a will to live—but not solely a will to live, but a will to life. It encapsulates and is beyond Darwinism all at once. The will to power is the will to become strong, healthy, prosperous, and full—it is our drive toward our highest self. Blake saw it as pure energy. So the superman is “the ultimate sublimation of the will to power” (Zarathustra 27). It is the fuel with which the superman climbs from crisis to the peak of spiritual human potentiality.
How does the potential superman harness this power and discover himself and his path? The greatest power is the goal. To persevere through suffering and toil; the will is the strength he needs to continually turn inward and reassess himself and his values and always trace them back to himself. Nietzsche writes:
For believe me!—the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! (Gay Science, 228)
The will to power is the same will that the classical gods and the heroes harnessed—it came from the same place—their unconscious. The heroic pattern is the same as Nietzsche’s existential pattern, with the absence of gods and monsters. The pattern has become immanent and psychological; the gods and monsters have now been internalized and are to be manifested and overcome in the mind. Campbell wrote, “The last incarnation of Oedipus, the continuing romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light to change.” Myths are patterns that replay themselves over and over through the history of civilization. We embody them; they are our patterns, “the masks of god,”—and we are the gods. Myths are the divine and unconscious nature of ourselves.
The first function of a god is creationism; “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” First they create the universe and then they order it, or some pattern similar: dividing and ordering chaos is a form of creation. Now creation is the task for the superman as well. But the question still remains how. We have destroyed all meaning; the world is again chaos: how do we rebuild selfhood. It isn’t morality or justice or compassion. Nietzsche writes:
One thing is needful.—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them in to an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . . Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; here it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. (Gay Science, 232)
The self-generation of beauty. Giving “style to one’s character” is the process which Pindar called “becoming who you are,” an idea Nietzsche pilfered for his own purpose. You create yourself by bringing forth what you already, in essence, are. The Gospel of Thomas reads, “That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves.” This is the idea of the entelechy, the seed of our being. This hints at our eternal selves: Today we are already in some sense the person we can be / will be tomorrow and forever. It also places the sublime within us. Life isn’t out there to find; it is immanent! Hence the psychological nature of mythology.
This philosophy is excessively subjective and relative, and, as such, has little to compare itself against, but Nietzsche found a sure test of the validity of the superman, and his true growth and self-becoming. The eternal recurrence of the same:
The Greatest Weight—What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘this life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!’—Would you not throw yourself down and gnash you teeth and curse the demon who spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: “You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine! If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Gay Science, 273)
Not only is there not a transcendent god, but now there is no afterlife either—no external salvation from the burden of existence. Only the superman could affirm what seems like such a grizzly proposition. I can live this life, forever; I have to live this life forever. This means that the whole of existence must be affirmed. “The greatest Weight,”—the heaven we wished for must be created here and now or it never will be. The suffering too, must be incorporated. We say yes. Amor fati. Nietzsche wrote:
--thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation. (Zarathustra, 18)
Life must become beautiful. To make everything beautiful is the surest way to make eternal life palatable. We strive to make ourselves beautiful, “to give style” to ourselves and now we learn that we must do the same for everything. We “give style” to our world by reinterpreting suffering: “Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; here it has been reinterpreted and made sublime” (Gay Science 232). Perhaps it is the entelechy of the world to be transformed into a secular heaven just as man becomes like one of the gods, creator of both.
Nietzsche’s only novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, represents obliquely this movement of man becoming the superman. Unlike Hermann Hesse and more modern spiritual writers like Richard Bach or Paulo Coelho, Nietzsche is not writing for all men, but only the elite, and his phrasing and layering make Zarathustra challenging to understand in its most profound depths. Superficially it is a simple story of a wise man / prophet who comes down from his mountain to teach “the superman” to people. He also prophesies a day when man will squander his freedom of thought and creation through lassitude. Nietzsche creates a Christian metaphor, representing Zarathustra as John the Baptist Zarathustra says, “Behold, I am the prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman” (Zarathustra 45). In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist “came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him” John is the prophet of Jesus as Zarathustra is the prophet of the superman. However, it is my understanding that Zarathustra becomes the superman / Christ through the course of the first three chapters of the book. It is these first three chapters which at one time constituted the whole of Zarathustra that this essay is going to be dealing with.
There are two levels of the heroic pattern: the physical and the psychological. Physically, Zarathustra begins on his mountain and decides to “go down;” “I must descend into the depths” (Zarathustra 39). He goes to town and preaches but too little avail and much mockery—he only wins over a dead man. Eventually, he disregards trying to teach the public and, like Jesus, takes disciples instead, and he returns to the mountains. This cycle is repeated again with “the higher men.”
The more important movement is the psychological “going down” (Zarathustra 39). This begins to take place with his failures to teach the superman. They say to him, “’Make us into this Ultimate man, O Zarathustra’ . . . ‘You can have the Superman!’—the Ultimate man was what Zarathustra considered, “the most contemptible man” (Zarathustra 46, 45). He said:
Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars. Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself. (Zarathustra 46)
This passage also demonstrates some of what is so difficult about Nietzsche: “the man who can no longer despise himself”—and this is meant negatively. This is a difficult lesson: why would man want to or need to despise himself? Nietzsche, life Blake before him, habitually turns terms upside down: “I love only Life—and in truth, I love her most of all when I hater her!) (Zarathustra 132). The good is not good at all; the bad is not bad. This is a conflation, but for both of them it was a method of getting their reader’s attention. The reader is taken out of their comfort zone and forced to redefine their most basic understandings of language and being (which is what we must do to finally accept suffering). Nietzsche here connects self-contempt with the will to power. Contempt is what fuels the will—contempt is that which is to be overcome. If we no longer see ourselves as flawed, then we will become lazy and pleased with ourselves. We will stop working, striving, suffering, and we will fall into stasis—which results in true despair. Art and beautiful things do not rise out of languor; therefore, the ultimate men will “give birth to no more stars”—this is the task of the superman.
The superman is the Poetic Genius, Los the creator. The same energy that flows from the will to power to self-create can be manipulated for external creativity as well. Artistic creation is self-expression in essence. Nietzsche understood creation as the highest work, the ultimate task of the superman. Goethe was Nietzsche’s personification of the superman—a man of letters, social stature and respect, he carried himself with calm and assurance—he was a well rounded man who excelled in every area of his life. He “gave style” to himself; he made his weaknesses become strengths, and his life looked like a natural consequence of his person.
Andrew Harvey wrote, “It takes great courage to be ruthless with one’s griefs,” and Zarathustra was certainly ruthless. He was lacking in some wisdom, and he couldn’t discover it. He wrestled with his dreams until he could pry their meanings from them. It was a case such as this that brought Zarathustra to the point (crisis) where I argue he made his turn toward the superman.
He had a dream where he “saw a young shepherd writhing, choking, convulsed, his face distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of his mouth” (Zarathustra 180). Zarathustra tried to pull the snake out, but “it had bitten itself fast” (Zarathustra 180). He told the boy to “bite” and he did; he bit down and spit the head of the snake out onto the ground. The shepherd was changed: “No longer a shepherd, no longer a man—a transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had a y man laughed as he laughed!” (Zarathustra 180). First after this “transformative” experience, the boy is “no longer a man” which alludes to, “man is something that should be overcome” (Zarathustra 41). But Zarathustra couldn’t make out its symbolism and interpret it.
The shepherd was in the midst of a horrific experience which he overcame—and his response to the experience is laughter, an affirmation. Zarathustra replies: “My longing for this laughter consumes me: oh how do I endure still to live! And how could I endure to die now!” (Zarathustra 180). The dream represents the knowledge which Zarathustra himself lacks—the path he lacks—specifically, the affirmation he lacks. He is immensely critical of man and society and himself. This is not the problem—but that he takes these things to heart. It is a personal failure to him that the world doesn’t correspond to his teachings.
Nietzsche differentiates between two levels of experience, what can be called the eternal and the temporal. Everything exists within the eternal; it is our unconscious mind, our entelechy. The temporal level is our conscious mind, our growth, our path toward and from our entelechy. It is the differentiation of these two realms that makes the reality of paradox valid. Schopenhauer said, “If only people could understand that something can be true and untrue at the same time.” For instance Amor fati—love your fate. This is the ultimate affirmation, but if we were to affirm everything (on the temporal level) we thought and did, we couldn’t grow and change; we’d be satisfied. Amor fati exists in the eternal realm; it is an eternal truth that is always there, transcending our experiences. Meanwhile, in our conscious, temporal state—we suffer and toil; we critique our every action to see how we could improve and change, better ourselves. In short, we don’t take our failures, our weaknesses, to heart. There is a clear distinction between the two realms: no matter how hard we criticize ourselves, we know, ultimately Amor fati—I love myself and my life; I strive for my life, not against it. “Become who you are”—this can only make sense if considered in the eternal sense. In the temporal realm, we are striving to become who we already are in the eternal realm. Like Yahweh, “I am that I am,”—we are who we are in a synthesis of the two realms: I am—here and now—who I am—eternally. This is the superman. The goal of life is to manifest this eternal essence in temporal consciousness. For the ultimate man, there is a great gulf—they know nothing of the eternal realm, which is still occupied by the shade of god.
Zarathustra hasn’t learned how to at once affirm life while criticizing it as well. He hasn’t understood the differentiation which the superman has. Everything is good—but work hard anyway! Why, because it makes you, you. No other reason than that. Zarathustra suspects that the shepherd dream contains the key to the learning he needs.
Zarathustra signals that he is nearing the basement of his life, saying, “oh how do I endure to live” (Zarathustra 180). This is the bottom of the second stage of the pattern at the point of crisis. But as he has been decending, that which he lacked has been slowly rising in him, hinted at throughout many of the previous sections. It comes to Zarathustra all at once however after a long state of turbid repose. “Alas, man recurs eternally!” (Zarathustra 236). Zarathustra discovered the eternal recurrence, and it is his great existential turning: “[I] am the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now [my] destiny” (Zarathustra 237). What the eternal recurrence is to him is not only a test, but it, for him, is also his calling (which it is not for us, per se). This is self-discovery, the uncovering of his entelechy, and this is the ultimate movement toward the superman.
He says, “The greatest all too small!—that was my disgust at man! And eternal recurrence even for the smallest! That was my disgust at all existence!” (Zarathustra 236). This is a tremendous revelation in several ways. First, Zarathustra was unable to affirm all life because he couldn’t condone the “ultimate man.” We saw his spite and disgust throughout the first three chapters. He hadn’t followed his subjectivity out to its extreme end: he thought he had “Truth” to teach such men. But with the eternal recurrence—all men recur, even the small ones; his “Truth” doesn’t matter. Yes, it applies to him and his life, but the world isn’t going to be saved—it simply is as it is. His ideal is really only his own. The realization that “things are as they are” prompts his second awakening: he begins to distinguish between the two realms of experience. Now he has to accept others as they are, but at the same time realize that it is also his task, his “destiny” to teach the eternal recurrence. The two levels were the eternal and the temporal. Eternally the world recurs and recurs over and over. We affirm it. But on the temporal level, we have to grow and change in order to be happy or sustain meaning in our lives. For Zarathustra, that now means the manifestation of his entelechy (which resides in the eternal realm) here and now. He must teach. Before, he was teaching because he thought man had to learn; now he teaches because he knows he must teach. The teaching is for himself. If they refuse his teachings he no longer will take it personally. His life is now centered and he can’t be thrown into despair or disgust. The ultimate men are fine the way they are. They don’t have the power anymore to destroy the world. What looks to be an unfulfilling path, the way of the ultimate man that is, cannot be explained or understood by Zarathustra or Nietzsche. It just is.
Zarathustra’s angst has passed into an assured calm. This is the end of the third chapter which was the initial end of the book. He has found peace, even in the midst of his ever continuing search for the superman.
Nietzsche has his own understanding of the three-part movement of existence. I haven’t used it thus far because, with Zarathustra, Nietzsche cut out the first movement. Initially the pattern looks somewhat disparate from the models we’ve used thus far. The resemblance is difficult to explain, but the similarity is uncanny and unmistakable. I am talking about “the Three Metamorphoses” (Zarathustra 54). They are the camel, the lion and the child. The camel can be thought of as a youth, someone being initiated into society, learning its rules and customs. His habit is of humility, submission, learning, accepting,. The symbol is a camel because the youth is taking all this learning as a burden; he is working and toiling—as this is the path toward growth. The camel also journeys into the desert, a place of separation. This journey of the camel into the desert is the first stage of our traditional patterns, e.g. separation, though the nihilism starts with the first metamorphosis. The camel changes into a lion. The lion is a good Blakean lion (vitality); it is the destroyer; it is the strength that the camel has generated by the great burden it bore. But the lion destroys all the learning, all the culture and normalcy which the camel so willingly took upon itself. This is the great nihilism and crisis of the second stage of the hero archetype, the antithesis of the dialectic sequence. Zarathustra, of course, is the lion. We never saw him learning all he knows. He obviously was a good student of society (camel) somewhere at some point before he moved into the mountains. The lion is the teacher, the individual. When Zarathustra learns the eternal recurrence though, he changes. He becomes calm and peaceful; he smiles and composes poetry. The last metamorphosis is to the child (Blake’s innocence – experience – innocence). The child is ambivalent toward the world; he is a creator, a self-creator, with all of life before him:
The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world. (Zarathustra 55).
Psychologically, Nietzsche’s superman is a child. The child is the return, “a new beginning,” but somehow changed. It has been through the thesis—antithesis duality and renewed itself. Zarathustra (1) learned man (presumably before the novel), then (2) attempted to change man, and now at the end of book three, (3) he is simply himself, still a teacher, still looking for the superman, but turned inward, as the innocence of a child turns its imagination inward, not knowing good or bad, only caring about its own natural impulses, dreams and reality. The “new” child is the same metaphorically—changed by age and experience; his breadth is much wider, his empathy for the world sincere. What the true child unknowing disregards, the “new” child, in a sense, transcends.
Steven Mitchell. trans. The Book of Job (New York: HarperCollins, 1979.), .p. 91.
