I

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. The duplicity of Nietzsche’s subtitle is obvious but its sense is uncertain. If Zarathustra is read thematically, the suggestion is that it contains a teaching with significant and shattering implications for everybody—the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, for example—which hardly anyone will grasp. Interpreted intentionally, the motto draws attention to Nietzsche’s isolation and loneliness, seeming to express simultaneously both a desperate wish for a universal audience and a defensive move in which he assures himself that a degenerate ninteenth-century audience could hardly appreciate his prescient work. Both views, which may be complementary, can find some support in letters or other Nietzschean texts; he refers to the “most abysmal” thought, eternal return, as the “basic conception” of the work in Ecce Homo, and his later writings on art constantly contrast the strength of the artist who writes for himself with the weakness of one who needs an audience (“Wagner needs Wagnerians”). There is a place for such thematic and intentional considerations. More directly, however, we are told that Zarathustra is a book for all and none. Contrary to much Anglo-American opinion, Nietzsche is generally a meticulously careful writer. It is not the doctrine or the author’s personality which is said to be duplicitous here but the text itself. There is something uncanny in the textuality of Zarathustra (as there may be in its doctrines—if it has them—or its author). This preliminary ambiguity is heightened when we juxtapose the subtitle with the title. Zarathustra spoke, but what we have in our hands is a book. The great sages of religion and philosophy (Socrates, Jesus, Zoroaster) did not write: they were fully present to those contemporary with them. The writings which seek to preserve their sayings testify to an absence, as the gospels mark the need to compensate for Jesus’ failure to reappear in such a way as to put an end to the constant loss which is time and history. As the history of religious texts suggests, there is a constant threat of the ostensibly secondary book replacing the primary sayings and a further danger of the text being displaced by its interpreters who are in turn displaced by the next generation of interpreters. These reverberations on Nietzsche’s title-page suggest dualities of speech and writing, authorial meaning and reader’s interpretation.

By centering attention on its own facticity as a book, Zarathustra leads us to question the importance of its thematics or the personality of its author. Yet we would arrive at the questionability of the text by starting from either thematic or authorial premises. The “doctrine” of the eternal recurrence is absurd when taken literally. How can we make sense of the idea that precisely the same events happen in precisely the same order in infinite succession? The question is not about the truth of the notion—for which no arguments are given in Zarathustra—but about its meaning, given some rather prosaic criteria of meaning. How does an infinitely repeated cycle vary from one which occurs five or seven times—or only once? There is no principle of individuation which would allow us to count repetitions of the cycle nor can there be any experiential difference for anyone in these various circumstances, for experience in all cycles is precisely the same. So we quickly come back to Nietzsche’s strategy in placing such a view in his book. The problematics of origin and authorship again return us to questions of textual strategy. Zarathustra, on one level, purports to be a privileged book, a bible containing “Old and New Law-Tables,” plus records of teaching to disciples about the state, scholarship, marriage, and education. Yet the authority of such teachings is put in question by one of them: “God is dead.” Alternative sources of authority—reason, society, nature—are all undercut within the text. Perhaps the eternal return is to be grasped in a formal sense as the circle of self-referential questions which the book raises about itself.

Philosophers can be tempted to avoid the embarrassments of this circle by doggedly insisting on thematic or authorial approaches. Some of them may find it a relief to classify the text as having the self-containment or opacity of a poem, for it can then be excluded from philosophy’s charmed circle. In the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, however, Zarathustra is not simply an object to be classified, captured, or surrendered to the enemy but is itself one of the more self-conscious reconsiderations of the struggle itself. (I say “self-conscious” in the sense of Selbstbewusst, which does not carry the associations of uneasiness that our English word does). In the very beginning of the book, or Vorrede, a discourse which precedes discourse, Zarathustra says “I am weary of my wisdom” (“Ich bin meiner Weisheit überdrüssig”): we are given a motivation for Zarathustra’s descent to men in his desire to impart his wisdom to them. Such imparting is usually a matter of sharing and communicating in which ownership is extended without any loss or dilution. Spinoza sums up the philosophical tradition with his claim that knowledge is a unique good in that it can be commonly owned and need not give rise to any competition. Yet Zarathustra speaks not of extending possession of a good thing, but of emptying himself of something which has filled him to the point of satiation. Not only does überdrüssig convey a sense of being sated, but wisdom is metaphorically linked to a bee’s uncomfortable superfluity of honey. Wisdom is to be given away, that is, dispersed or possibly exchanged for folly, rather than socialized. Zarathustra does not speak of attaining completion through a community of intelligence as do philosophers from Plato to Hegel, but of a cleansing through surrender, an askesis not for the sake of wisdom but of wisdom: “Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again (Z, 39; 4, 12)”¹ Yet such askesis does not signal a capitulation of philosophy to poetry. In the chapter “Of Poets” in part two, there is a somewhat parallel disavowal of poetry: “I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: they all seem to be superficial and shallow seas.” The chapter cited and the book’s division into parts will deserve some attention later. It is worth noting now because it sounds a cautionary note against the temptation to see Zarathustra as poetry—at least in any simple sense. The texture of Zarathustra is indeed highly metaphorical and imagistic. One encounters an apparently endless series of passages like this:

Even allowing for the significance of Nietzsche’s revaluation of the body, it is a relief that he did not proceed to the intestines. In any case, the reader may already be tempted to exclaim “Ich bin der Metaphern überdrüssig.”

Philosophers and critics often tend to privilege metaphor in their accounts of literature, usually in order to contrast the polyvalent texture of metaphorical language with the aim at clarity and a univocal sense said to be found in philosophy or science. Depending upon one’s valuations, the contrast may work to the advantage of either party. Poetry’s rich and varied meanings may appear as abundance or vagueness; the universal meanings of philosophy and science are clear or sterile. The contrast is too simple, for even the hardest-nosed and toughest-minded philosophers are hopelessly addicted to metaphor. But the hybrid characterization of some texts—including Nietzsche’s—as metaphorical philosophy is not much more penetrating. To view Zarathustra as metaphorical could mean one of several things. It might be a way of cautiously praising the work for richly suggesting a variety of insights, while keeping it at arm’s length. Alternatively, it is sometimes connected with an attempt to show that Nietzsche carried out in his writings some of his programmatic remarks about the non-referential, musical, and self-contained nature of language. Even those who take the second approach, however, usually fail to come to grips with such messy details of the text as Zarathustra’s writing on the walls, horse’s feet, and eagle’s stomach.

To understand Zarathustra is to see how it situates itself in regard to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. In that conflict it is not simply an object to be classified, captured, or reluctantly surrendered to the enemy; it demands to be read as one of the more self-conscious reconsiderations of the struggle itself. In this connection it is useful to realize that the book’s apparent indulgence in the poetic mode is at least partially balanced by a criticism of poetry. In the chapter “Of Poets,” to which I will return, Zarathustra criticizes poetry in terms of two fundamental rhetorical dimensions. The poets are said to fail in the realm of thought and feeling by their penchant for vague and indefinite metaphorical constructions—that is, they are deficient in the use of and self-consciousness regarding the tropes or figures of speech. They are also criticized for their excessive vanity which leads them to strut like peacocks for an audience of buffaloes. Whether this extravagant comparison violates Zarathustra’s first stricture is an intriguing question which must be postponed. What the two criteria taken together suggest is that a successful text, such as Zarathustra is presumed to be, will exhibit a careful handling of tropes and an attention to the nature of its audience, the latter being sufficiently cultured and aristocratic that the writer need not humble himself to be understood. One consequence is that we ought to be cautious in assuming that the peacock’s tail of Zarathustra’s metaphorical texture is simply identical with the poetic or literary aspect of the text.

Confronted with this apparent contradiction, a number of interpretations are possible. Nietzsche might be accused of careless self-contradiction, except that the very same chapter (as we shall see) invites us to think out what such contradictions mean and imply. Like Jaspers we might take the alternation of views and emphases to be signs of Nietzsche’s own restless philosophical activity which avoids the danger of resting content with any singular propositional form of the truth. This seems closer to the spirit of the book. But where Jaspers sees a restless, driven activity which he attempts to illuminate by means of Nietzsche’s life, I tend to see the deliberate work of an author. As I have already suggested, referring to Nietzsche’s life to explain his writing is a tricky procedure indeed, since Nietzsche views his own life in terms of his writing career. Now it is an elementary lesson of literary criticism that we ought not to identify the viewpoint of a character in a book, or even that of the narrator of a book, with that of the author or of the book as a whole. If Zarathustra contradicts himself or expresses a certain view or is foolish we should treat these matters in the same way as we do the contradictions, views, and foolishness of Captain Lemuel Gulliver. As Nietzsche says, “I am one thing, my books are another.” If this sounds too simple it is because we expect a philosophical book to take positions and make claims in a more determinate way than a literary text must. Yet in this case we are dealing with a book which deliberately questions our expectation of finding a single view, an authoritative voice, or a systematic teaching.

The literary structure of Zarathustra should remind us that we are dealing with a book which is acutely concerned with its own nature as a written document and its place in the textual histories of both literature and philosophy. Here I want to recall some of the remarks made earlier about the Socratic-Platonic problem of the written versus the spoken word and the distinction between oral and written media. If we are going to read Zarathustra as a literary work (keeping in mind that this does not make it a non-philosophical work), then we should be clear about the kind of literary work that it is. In his comprehensive study of Zarathustra, Harold Alderman has interpreted the book as essentially dramatic, comparing it to the Platonic dialogues; and he takes the chief theme of the book to be one which is appropriate to drama, the search for those possibilities of the human voice which are appropriate to the philosophical life. I think this approach to the book is a significant improvement over those interpretations which would seek Nietzsche’s doctrines without regard to the context of his writing, alleging his fragmented style as a reason for providing a structure lacking in the books themselves; nevertheless, it is misleading and I think it will illuminate the present reading if I explain why it is misleading. It seems unexceptionable to say that:

For Alderman this coincidence of literary and philosophical structure is more than minimal, for he concludes his book by reminding us that “Zarathustra is then the teacher who teaches the need to explore the full range of the human voice.”³ Again, an apparently unexceptionable observation. Yet the literary analogies used here are questionable and produce misunderstandings of some of the philosophical concerns of the work. Zarathustra is not written for the theater; and the reason for this is more than a reluctance to compete with Wagner on the latter’s own turf. In literary terms the book is a narrative, not a drama; it is not just the words of Zarathustra and the other characters which are presented but descriptions of situations, actions, and settings. It is a very complex narrative indeed, replete with echoes and parodies of the Bible, Goethe, and a rich variety of texts. This is more than a stylistic quibble; in any case Nietzsche regards questions of style as of great philosophical importance. The comparison with Plato may also be misleading for a number of the important dialogues such as the Symposium, the Theaetetus, and the Parmenides are told from the standpoint of a narrator who either participated in the discussion or heard of it from another. In The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche is concerned with sorting out a variety of artistic genres, he says that “Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel” (BT, 14; 1, 93-94).

Let me now suggest some of the ways in which the decision to read Zarathustra as drama, narrative, or some more specific variety of text is not a philosophically innocent one. The critical categories which we adopt to discuss the drama or other literary genres themselves have a philosophical origin, often obscured, in such thinkers as Aristotle and Hegel. Hegel would agree with Alderman’s assumption that the drama is the form in which philosophical and literary form come to coincide most closely and his reasons would be philosophical ones having to do with the way in which drama, by privileging the human voice, provides the greatest possible communication between the author and the audience of a work of literary art. For these same reasons Hegel takes philosophy, that is, a philosophy which abandons literary form and moves in the pure medium of the concept, to be an even better form of communication.⁴ But because Nietzsche rejects the possibility of such communication and some of its philosophical presuppositions, he writes a nontheatrical text. Zarathustra, and other of Nietzsche’s writings after the Wagnerian extravagances of The Birth of Tragedy, suggest that the theater is a place which produces the illusion of common understanding.

In drama, the central organizing principles are (as Alderman and Aristotle both testify) the plot and the human voice. To read Zarathustra as a drama would then involve an implicit commitment to look for consistent characters and a plot with a recognizable pattern of development. But notice how such concerns seem to conflict with some of the book’s most obvious concepts. Zarathustra is not a humanist but one who proclaims the Übermensch, not a superior or higher man, but one who transcends man. The notion of eternal recurrence is at odds with the idea of a linear, intelligible sequence which is involved in the usual conception of dramatic plot. Later I will suggest that in the context of Zarathustra these two themes of Übermensch and eternal recurrence taken together imply the dissolution of a consistent sense of self or character—another of the mainstays of drama. Finally, to take the text as a drama rather than as a book to be read and reread is to deemphasize the role of that active interpretation which Nietzsche so often demands of his readers. And, as I will also suggest later, the failure to emphasize the role of such interpretation (Auslegung) in respect to Nietzsche’s books may also lead us to ignore it in the case of his ontology in which reading, text, and interpretation are central notions.

Zarathustra is sometimes playful, but Zarathustra is always a play, a rhetorical Spiel which plays with serious affairs of the understanding. It speaks without authority, and so we will be hopelessly confused if we see it as a new gospel and not as an anti-gospel (Nietzsche said once that the gospels should be called dysangels or bringers of bad news.) A few of the poles of this rhetorical play can be specified. We have already encountered the play between philosophy and poetry in which there is a ceaseless alternation. Another is the play between poetry and prose. This may at first appear anomalous, for rhetoric is thought to be concerned with prose rather than poetry, and Nietzsche sometimes describes it so in his writings on rhetoric. Yet even there he notes how Kunstprosa (literary prose) can take on an indefinite number of poetic features. More to the point is that there is a larger rhetorical organization which governs the varying textures of the work—which can be designated (in part) as parable, poetry, song, teaching, and silence. The distinction between immediate texture and larger structure appears, for example, when we try to ascertain the role of metaphor in Zarathustra. The book’s immediate texture is no doubt highly metaphorical. Many of the recent studies of Nietzsche by the followers of Jacques Derrida tend to see all of Nietzsche’s works, including Zarathustra, as a Spiel der Metaphern.⁵ Metaphor however can be taken in either a broad or a narrow sense in which it designates, respectively, either any deviation from some linguistic norm or a particular figure of speech which can be contrasted with others. This is a significant distinction because the book is organized around four figures of speech or tropes, which rhetorical theory has tended to recognize as relatively central: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. This organization makes the book surprisingly traditional in certain respects. But the book’s structure is not simply a mechanical way of giving a semblance of order to aphoristic writing. Each of the major parts has a dominant tone or mood whose plurality suggests the necessary plurality of language by providing variant contexts for the treatment of themes, situations, and ideas.

In traditional rhetoric such subjects are called topoi. Zarathustra achieves much of its effect by ringing the changes on a number of recurrent topoi. Of these the most intriguing for my purpose is that of language itself; but before turning to that topic it will be useful to sketch the sequence of the book’s main parts. The following reservations are to be kept in mind, however. As the later chapters of this study will show, the form of Zarathustra is not typical of Nietzsche’s works; he says in Ecce Homo that each book has its own distinctive style. On a more enigmatic note it should be mentioned that the sorting out of these four parts is not only a temporal or narrative sequence; to whatever extent the book is informed by the idea of eternal recurrence, which attempts to overcome any linear conception of time, it ought also to be opposed to any special temporal priority being accorded to any of these general approaches or perspectives.

The Vorrede of Zarathustra precedes the main text in a logical as well as a chronological sense. In it Zarathustra attempts to teach the superman to those in the marketplace, but can represent him only as a distant goal. For his audience of contented townspeople he can produce only vague intimations of what lies totally beyond. This is symbolic or prophetic poetry (in Hegel’s sense): the vague adumbration of a transcendent or distant object which can be suggested at best indirectly by a negation of the actual and the present. Symbolic discourse, because of its inadequacy to its subject, is in a sense prediscursive; accordingly the action of the Vorrede revolves around Zarathustra’s failures to communicate to the crowd and their ridicule of him.

Part one of Zarathustra consists of a series of metaphorical discourses. The Vorrede spoke of man as a bridge, as something to be overcome for the sake of the superman. This talk was starkly abstract, full of plays on übergehen (going over, passing beyond) and untergehen (going down, perishing), suggesting a sheer up or down movement with little sense of a concrete goal. In part one Zarathustra begins by giving some metaphorical content to the projected notion by teaching the three metamorphoses of the spirit—camel, lion, and child. Metamorphosis—change into another species—is very close to the idea of metaphor as transference of meaning. Childhood is of course an almost unavoidable romantic metaphor for regained innocence and spontaneity, but other parts of the metaphorical complex are more novel. Traditional virtue is sleep, longing after heaven is burying one’s head in the sand, and reading and writing are matters of blood and violence. Zarathustra, aware of his own poetic energy, urges his listeners to join him in making new metaphorical identifications: body will be spirit, peace should be victory, the state is a cold monster. The creation of new metaphors and the destruction of old ones is the activity of transvaluation itself, for “all names of good and evil are images [Gleichnisse]” and “he who has to be a creator always has to destroy.” The richness of metaphor in part one could be detailed indefinitely; Zarathustra’s remarks (often confused with Nietzsche’s views) about war and women can be seen as metaphorical identifications of freedom and dependence. Yet as Paul de Man suggests, such a rich cluster of imagery “is itself a sign of divine absence, and the conscious use of poetic imagery an admission of this absence.”⁶ God is absent from the very beginning in Zarathustra; but by the time of the extended series of metaphorical discourses in part one, the superman is also absent and there is a frenzied effort to fill his place with poetry. In terms of “The Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit,” part one consists of a heavy burden of metaphorical baggage which the camel must bear to prepare it for higher things. The end of this apprenticeship is signaled in the last chapter of this part, “Of the Bestowing Virtue,” in which Zarathustra gives a lesson in the hermeneutics and creation of metaphor; the lesson will prepare the reader for the more active tone of what follows and for the greater demands to be placed on the reader’s powers of interpretation.

The tone of part two is reductive. The idea of will and will to power are prominent and are employed to set up a series of dualities which present clear choices to the will. The will is said to be the cause of all things and in a stronger sense things are said to be nothing but will. This reduction of effects to causes is metonymical as is the sharp series of contrasts which the will must confront. Paradigmatic for this series is Zarathustra’s teaching “On the Blissful Islands”: “But to reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods (Z, 110; 4, 110).” The inference is not logical but tropological. When all is reduced to the will, experience becomes a series of oppositions and dichotomies between the will and all of its possible impediments. Some of the polarities are philosophically familiar—god and man, self-denial and self-affirmation, permanence and becoming—but they are given a new twist by the will’s repudiation of the traditionally privileged members of these pairs. Other dichotomies are peculiar to the focus on the will. For example, one must choose between revenge (rationalized as justice) and life as continual self-overcoming. Revenge may at first appear to be a strong exercise of the will but in its dependence on the object exciting the revenge it reveals a weakness. Moreover, one of the dichotomies facing the will is apparently ineluctable and seems to condemn the will to a cycle of revenge:

It is appropriate to the trope of part two that the dichotomy is not resolved. There are similar dichotomies which appear in the treatment of poetry and interpretation (even the interpretation of dreams) in this part. The dichotomous structure is even carried into the relation between Zarathustra and his auditors: here there are more questions and problems posed by the listeners, and Zarathustra often abruptly shifts from external address to inner soliloquy.

Part three has often been taken to be the philosophical heart of Zarathustra because it contains the idea of the eternal recurrence. This philosophical valuation of part three is a consequence of the governing trope, which is synecdoche, understood as thorough parallelism of microcosm and macrocosm. Synecdoche has normally been the privileged philosophical trope because it produces a sense of totality and comprehensibility—it is not subject to perpetual shifting, as is metaphorical identification, nor to the overly simple reductions and frustrating dichotomies of metonymy. Plato’s Republic enjoys most of its pedagogical prestige just because of its synecdochic series of concentric circles linking political and individual justice, social and personal psychology, and, of course, the true, the beautiful, and the good. That the concept of the eternal return can be seen as a this-worldly version of Platonic longings for eternity has been perspicuously shown by Heidegger, among others. Yet it is perhaps the synecdochic suggestion of totality which, in general, produces the sense of eternity. In the notion of eternal recurrence, each moment is “baptized in eternity,” it brings with it the whole train of past and previous moments. The eternal thing in this perspective is just the eternal ring of becoming itself, so to talk or think about eternity is to be brought back to the cycle of particular moments. Nietzsche himself, in Ecce Homo, calls the eternal recurrence the fundamental conception of Zarathustra. This may well be, but to read the book in a search for its basic conceptions is already to have privileged the synecdochic and philosophical troping of part three. In the same Ecce Homo sections Nietzsche also makes some extravagant claims about the significance of the poetry of Zarathustra, but philosophers have seen little reason to take this as a fundamental clue to the book’s meaning. Yet to read Nietzsche either from the perspective of his self-interpretation or from that of his literary accomplishment would seem to require an emphasis on both of these aspects of the book as well as others. If Zarathustra is a more or less straightforward philosophical book, then an emphasis on part three is in order; but the status of philosophical doctrines and arguments is constantly at stake in the book; as a text, Zarathustra simply does not privilege the philosophical trope. An emphasis on the trope of part three, however, does bring to light other synecdochic motifs which surround the famous idea. Zarathustra’s homecoming is a return to origins in which language becomes totally adequate, leaving no residues or accidents. The weighing of the world and the handing down of a new set of law tables amount to a totalistic revaluation in line with the concept of the eternal recurrence.

Part four has been something of a puzzle for Nietzsche’s interpreters because of its apparently radical change of tone. Some have suspected, on the basis of its private publication subsequent to the bulk of the book, that it is not a real part of the whole; others have thought, despite Nietzsche’s subtitle—“Fourth and Last Part”—and conclusion—“The End of Thus Spoke Zarathustra”—that the part must be transitional to others which were never written.⁷ Yet tropologically this part is completely in order by contributing to the planned disorder of rhetorical play. The governing trope is irony here, as Zarathustra struggles with his pity for higher men. His answer to a cry of distress leads to the assemblage of a motley collection of guests and petitioners; when the whole gathering (including the last Pope) is about to engage in an ass festival which parodies the Last Supper, Zarathustra parodies the community of god and man by his refrain “Truly, you may all be Higher Men but for me—you are not high and strong enough.” Each higher man embodies a misunderstanding or oversimplification of Zarathustra and his teachings, from which Zarathustra distances himself by ridicule. Zarathustra finds all of the praise directed at him by his would-be disciples misplaced and misdirected. When he finally expresses some pleasure in his visitors it is to instruct them regarding their asinine festival: “And if you celebrate it again, this ass festival, do it for love of yourselves, do it also for love of me! And in remembrance of me!” (Z, 325–26). Surely the ass suggests the absence of God or of anything which could properly take his place. Zarathustra does not want to be worshipped himself, and he will be remembered only by continual dance and play which by its very nature must avoid any centering of a privileged object or person. Even the notion of eternal recurrence is treated playfully in a number of ambiguous references to the confusion of times. That a play upon the tropes should end with irony makes the fact of play itself unavoidable, but it does not leave much standing in the way of straightforward doctrines or teachings—just as the higher men must surrender their desperately gleaned fragments of doctrine to take part in Zarathustra’s dances.

The four tropological perspectives of Zarathustra are not merely rhetorical devices which present a fixed content in various ways. Each of the major ideas of the text is associated with a distinctive trope. The Übermensch is a metaphorical concept, the idea of that which lies beyond man, or past man, and which therefore can be characterized only by figures of speech which reach for what is not yet present. The will to power is a metonymical notion, involving the opposition between any instance of that will and the resisting world or the conflict with other wills. Eternal recurrence is a synecdochic doctrine in which each moment and the entire cycle of becoming become mutually representative, as in the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm. The irony and carnivalization of the fourth part have not usually been thought to play such a systematic role as do the ideas of the superman, will to power, and eternal recurrence, although they are obvious enough features of its thought. Seeing that they are given a position of equal importance with the thoughts traditionally identified as philosophical may help to show that they are not merely aspects of style in some narrow sense, but are part of the basic structure of the work.

This sketch of the structure of Zarathustra may seem opposed to the still-common view of the book as formless, bombastic, and enthusiastic but it does agree with Nietzsche’s own standards of literary integrity. Clarity, order, coherence, and esprit are the criteria of excellent writing which Nietzsche constantly employs. Two remarks from The Gay Science are appropriate here, although they are ostensibly contradictory:

Philosophers too often operate with a presupposed and therefore unclarified notion of clarity. Yet as Nietzsche recognizes, the nature of clarity is itself a philosophical problem which in the case of a written text involves rhetorical and generic considerations. A genre is rhetorically determined by its inclusions and exclusions; it does not only generate an audience but functions as a conspiracy of “the happy few” to keep the deeper nature of the text unprofaned by outsiders. A work may be intrinsically clear but initially puzzling to its proper audience and a perpetual possibility of misunderstanding to any others. This describes the form of Nietzsche’s writing, especially that of his works from the time of The Gay Science on. The rhetorical Spiel of Zarathustra, with its reverberations of the aristocratic Greek audience willing to savor the troping of topics, is just such a Janus-faced genre. To stop at the level of an aphoristic and epigrammatic reading of Nietzsche is to see the decentered nature of his discourse but to ignore the playing field within which makes such decentering possible and delightful.

II

Like Odysseus, that wisest and most playful of the Greeks, Zarathustra is polytropos. Almost every topic that emerges in the book becomes the occasion for ringing the changes through the succession of parts. This is especially interesting in the case of discourse itself. The nature of writing, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, the value of the poetic tradition, the referentiality of language are constant preoccupations in Zarathustra. To see what the text does with these themes and to determine in what sense Nietzsche has any final views or positions about them, it is necessary to see how they are handled in a variety of places. I wish to examine several of these places, keeping in mind their situation within the rhetorical structure of Zarathustra.

“Of Reading and Writing,” in part one, is the first chapter of Zarathustra primarily devoted to discourse. It captures the predominant metaphorical tone of that part by a rapid series of images connecting reading and writing with violence, sexuality, and a dancing god. But its rhetorical stance is also metaphorical. It is presumably addressed, like many of Zarathustra’s talks in part one, to a vaguely defined group of listeners in the town called The Motley Cow. As a figure of the narrative, Zarathustra is concerned only with the variations of oral discourse—speech, song, and silence. By his speaking of reading and writing, especially aphoristic writing which is done in blood, the chapter refers us back to the text itself. It need not be addressed to anyone in particular because metaphorical, symbolic discourse operates on the assumption that its images are concrete universals which are universally accessible. When the topos reappears under the other tropes, the nature of the speaker’s relation to his audience is much more determinate. Just as metaphorical theories of poetry dispense with rhetorical considerations, the metaphorical presentation here achieves an image of universality by being indeterminately addressed to all and none. The metaphorical chains of the chapter trace the decline of reading and writing while projecting their rejuvenation. Zarathustra’s play on the Incarnation gives a capsule history of literary decay: “Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.” Augustine, the first great Christian literary theorist, abjured his own rhetorical training in the high and noble style in order to espouse the “holy humility” of the gospels. The Incarnation is a figure for the possibility of spirit entering into the everyday. Hegel and his follower Erich Auerbach have written progressive histories of romantic or realistic literature in which the Incarnation is the watershed after which literature can portray ever larger areas of human experience and can aim, like the Bible, at speaking to all. For Zarathustra this is a degeneration to the reader as the “last man”: “He who knows the reader, does nothing further for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink” (Z, 67; 4, 48).

We who are reading these texts are invited to step outside the modern rabble to become part of a drastically narrowed circle of readers and writers. This leap from indeterminate universality to conspiratorial isolation is made possible by the elastic nature of the metaphorical discourse which we are reading. The reader, left on his own, will either meet the challenge or fall back into the mass of “reading idlers.” Zarathustra himself makes this connection between the difficult form of the writing and the strength of its readers: “aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.” What this height consists in is spelled out by a series of images which may seem to shift radically away from the topos of discourse, but which should be read as expansions of it. The successful reader will understand what’s written in blood and rejoice in the danger and thin air which accompanies it. Danger calls up the image of the warrior: “Untroubled, scornful, outrageous—that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior (Z, 68;4, 49).” When we read this reflexively it is reading and writing which are violent assaults. The warrior Nietzsche has in mind is at the opposite pole from Sartre’s engaged writer: “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause” (Z, 74;4, 59). To explore this chain of metaphors further we would need to look at the other discourses in this part on woman and the warrior: to see that these are already metaphorized in the discourse on reading and writing immediately helps to dissociate them from the crude readings of the idling reader who sees Zarathustra or Nietzsche as a simple misogynist and warmonger.

Although God had been sublimated in the descent of writing, he now reappears as a dancing god. The indefinite article and the play of the dance suggest an answer to Nietzsche’s problematic: How can one write a sacred book when God is dead? The problem of authority in a book that has surrendered both theological guarantees and their realistic substitutes cannot be solved, but only dissolved within play itself. When Zarathustra invites us to “kill the Spirit of Gravity” by laughter he traces an ascent to the dance which is the reversal of the descent to the mob of readers:

Surely the repeated “now” (jetzt) secures the metaphorical identification of Zarathustra’s discourse and our reading with the dance.

Passages such as this certainly tend to provoke the view that Zarathustra is a metaphorical book. Contemporary philosophical usage is poorer than that of traditional rhetoric and poetics at this point, for philosophers now tend to use “metaphor” to designate language which is distinctively literary, poetic, or figurative. Zarathustra is metaphorical in this wide sense. Surely Aristotle, who initiated the rhetorical and philosophical discussion of metaphor, uses the term in a broad sense to designate any transference or displacement of meaning. This is significant since I will later suggest that a crucial passage in Zarathustra is intended (among other things) as an Auseinandersetzung, a confrontation with the Aristotelian conception of metaphor. It is perhaps indicative of the problematic nature of metaphor itself that the attempts in later rhetorical and poetic theory to narrow the concept by distinguishing it from other tropes or figures of speech have fallen into neglect; these attempts, which usually try to tie metaphor down to a concern with similarity or resemblance, have been replaced by a neo-Aristotelian account which again makes central the notion of transference or displacement (or, in terms of contemporary transformational grammar, “semantic deviance”).⁸ Nietzsche himself is conversant with both traditions; he uses metaphor in the wider sense in “On Truth and Lie” and in the narrower sense in his lectures on rhetoric. I have already suggested that Zarathustra is not a predominantly metaphorical book in the narrower sense of metaphor; the analysis of the later parts of the book should provide more evidence that it is not and that metaphor proper is only one of a number of figurative devices employed in the text.

Nevertheless, metaphor proper does play a large role in Zarathustra and nowhere more obviously than in this first part. We have seen Zarathustra making a number of metaphorical identifications in his attempt at transvaluing received values. Sometimes these metaphorical identifications are stated as imperatives, as in “May your peace be a victory” (Z, 74; 4, 59) or “Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine like a precious stone illuminated by the virtues of a world that does not yet exist” (Z, 92; 4, 85). The general principles behind this kind of metaphorical discourse about the virtues are also stated by Zarathustra. In an important passage which will soon be discussed at length he says “All names of good and evil are images [Gleichnisse].” (Zarathustra employs a number of words in such contexts to describe the creation of images, metaphors, parables and the like—Gleichniss is the most prominent of them; later I will suggest some reason for thinking that we can treat them all as metaphors.) Such imaging or making of metaphors is often described as the creation of meaning, not only in art narrowly conceived but in the production of value, so that when Zarathustra says that “evaluation is creation” and “He who has to be a creator always has to destroy” (Z, 85) we may take him to be describing his own metaphorizing in the discourses of part one.

Still, Zarathustra’s metaphors often cry out for interpretation: Take the chapter on “War and Warriors,” for example (Z, 73-75; 4, 58-60). Initially we might wonder whether Zarathustra is actually praising organized military combat, or some metaphorical analogue of such combat, or both. The two kings in part four who repeat some of Zarathustra’s sayings from this chapter take them all too literally, and this probably shows that it is dangerous to put Nietzsche into the hands of kings who are not both philosophers and poets. Surely war is conceived metaphorically and Zarathustra seems to supply the key when he says “if you cannot be saints of knowledge, at least be its warriors” (my emphasis). Yet this only opens up more problems of interpretation. For Zarathustra suggests both that war is for the sake of something (“you should wage your war—a war for your thoughts”) and that it is for the sake of battle itself (“it is the good war that hallows every cause”). And if we seek consistency by supposing that it is war for thoughts—any thoughts—which is being praised, we immediately run into another impasse. For the warrior is told both to fight for his own ideas and also that his highest virtue is obedience—and Zarathustra has no hesitation in commanding his “brothers in war” to follow the idea that he gives them: “Man is something that should be overcome.” In the text we read:

No doubt one might seek a reading which would transcend this apparent contradiction. Or one might simply stop here, resigning oneself to Nietzsche’s penchant for the paradox and the contradiction. In fact, while Nietzsche, hating (in Zarathustra’s words) “the idling reader,” leaves us to admire or puzzle out the provocative discourses on war, woman, and other matters, he does provide us with something like an overview of metaphorical discourse itself which may be of use in our own reading and interpretation. At several crucial points in the book Zarathustra himself turns aside from his role as a speaker and creator of meanings to become for a time a reader and interpreter of his own and others’ language. Continuing to think of part one of Zarathustra as heavily committed to metaphor proper, such a reflective discourse on the metaphorical principle itself appears, appropriately, in its last chapter “Of the Gift-Giving Virtue” (Von der schenckende Tugend) (Z, 99-104; 4, 97-102). The dramatic setting is significant. Zarathustra is about to take leave of those who call themselves his disciples, so that they will not always be disciples but may use their experience with Zarathustra to discover themselves. In Zarathustra’s last address to the disciples in this chapter he declares:

I want to suggest that Zarathustra’s urging his disciples to become independent of him, here explicit, is also a major motive of his first address to them in the same chapter. Ostensibly, that address is concerned with a farewell gift which he has received from the same disciples. It is a familiar kind of occasion, especially for academic audiences, in which students honor a departing or retiring teacher. Beyond expressing his gratitude, however, Zarathustra goes on to suggest a way of interpreting metaphorical discourses of the sort which he has been giving to his disciples up until now. In going beyond particular acts of interpretation to provide a hermeneutical framework he offers his disciples a great gift of his own: the chance to be (in Aristotle’s phrase) “masters of metaphor” themselves.⁹ Such mastery will involve their being able to see the point or meaning of Zarathustra’s metaphors (although as we shall see this meaning will not be a reduction to the nonmetaphorical); more important, it will encourage and prepare them to be creators of such discourses themselves. In narrating this lesson, which encapsulates the ancient quarrel of philosophy and poetry, Nietzsche shows that he is not blindly opting for a poetic mode of writing philosophy but that his writing is sufficiently reflexive and dialectical to give an account of itself. Taken in conjunction with the idea of metaphor developed in Zarathustra’s discourse, there is a challenge to the whole rationalist attempt either to subsume poetry within philosophy (as being a deviant or ambiguous way of making prosaic statements, for example) or to exclude it altogether from rational discourse (on such alleged grounds as its emotive character).

Let us see whether Zarathustra’s discourse justifies these general claims. The farewell gift is a staff “upon the golden haft of which a serpent was coiled about a sun.” The gift is itself a response to Zarathustra’s challenge at the end of his last discourse, “Of Voluntary Death.” Zarathustra foresees his own death as a consummation of his teaching and hopes that his friends will continue what he has begun:

After showing his delight in the staff by leaning on it, Zarathustra proceeds to interpret its meaning, beginning with the gold orb:

Here we have an elementary hermeneutic situation. Something is given to the interpreter, as we say, and Zarathustra is grateful that there are always such givens susceptible of interpretation. In this case that which is given is suggestive of the activity of giving itself. As a teacher Zarathustra’s interest in method is of at least equal importance to his interest in substance. It is not only the content of the interpretation which concerns us, but the fact that an interpretation can be given at all, and the principles by which it is achieved. We might think of the staff as a difficult case, one of those troublesome questions which students sometimes pose without quite knowing what they are doing; for it is a visual image rather than an overt piece of discourse. Yet Zarathustra, the master of metaphor, can master even such a difficult case, treating it as if it were possible to interpret it in the same way that one would interpret a bit of language. For he proceeds to give a linguistic account of its meaning and to link his explication to the “names” and “images” (Gleichnisse) which are parts of overtly verbal discourse about virtue. The somewhat ambiguous status of the visual image—between nature and language—may suggest that although Zarathustra’s disciples have learned enough to be grateful for, they have not yet become strong and independent enough to present their master with the gift of discourse itself (for example, they’re not yet able to produce a Festschrift). Zarathustra uses the expression in Gleichnisse reden—to speak in parables—several times in this address. This is a clear reminiscence of Jesus’ speaking in parables; but in Nietzsche’s anti-Bible the disciples (or the readers) are to be encouraged to interpret such parables themselves and to have the strength to produce parables of their own.

The gold orb is reminiscent of the sun which Zarathustra praises at the very beginning of the book for its ever-renewed power to give. The gold orb suggests the bestowing virtue, being a metaphor of such virtue. So the staff is not only a gift but a metaphor for gift-giving itself. Zarathustra had begun his speech in the Vorrede by a metaphorical identification between himself and the sun; in recognizing that association his students show an understanding of at least one crucial metaphor in their teacher’s discourse. By taking possession of the orbed staff, and even more by his interpretation of it, Zarathustra shows himself to be the master of metaphor. Now the particular image of the staff leads to a reflection on selfishness and giving in general. Giving is a virtue in the Greek sense of arete or the Renaissance virtu; it is a power, to be contrasted with the protective selfishness characteristic of a weak or sick body.

At this point there is a crucial transition in Zarathustra’s discourse. He has already passed from talk about the staff to talk about giving and finally to talk about virtue. One might wonder why he should continue, for he seems to have succeeded in showing how the metaphor makes a value vivid and present. Instead he proceeds to speak of the mind and the virtues as themselves images (Gleichnisse), thus opening up a whole new line of metaphorics:

There is a new metaphorical relation announced here: the mind and the virtues are metaphors of the body and its “advances and elevations.” Rather than interpret this particular metaphor (which is surely not an unusual thought for readers of Nietzsche) let me suggest that we should attend to the way in which it is linked to the previous one of the gold orb as metaphor of the bestowing virtue. The rapid juxtaposition of two metaphors is a rhetorical device recognized at least since Aristotle: the formation of a proportional metaphor. Here the proportion can be represented thus:

Gold is to the bestowing virtue as virtue is to the body. Now in such a proportional metaphor two pairs of things each exhibit the same relation; therefore (as the diagrammatic or mathematical representation indicates) the first may also be linked to the third or the second to the fourth. One of Aristotle’s clearest examples in the Rhetoric is “the cup is the shield of Dionysus”; just as the wine cup is the symbol of Dionysus, so the shield is the symbol of Ares.¹⁰ If Zarathustra is constructing a proportional metaphor then we should expect him to link gold with the body or the bestowing virtue with the mind and virtues in general. In fact, looking ahead to the end of Zarathustra’s address, we find him coming very close to stating one of these consequences of the proportion: “It is power, this new virtue; it is a ruling idea, and around it a subtle soul; a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge.” I say that Zarathustra comes “close” to making gold a metaphor for the body. In doing so he calls our attention back to the visual image which has of course been present to his disciples all through the talk (so far as we can tell from the text Zarathustra is still leaning on it). In this last statement, however, it is actually a new proportion which has been developed, namely:

Now by reinforcing the parallelism between power (clearly a bodily thing both in this passage and in much of Nietzsche) and the golden sun, Zarathustra by means of a new proportional metaphor draws out the consequence of the original one. Beyond this he demonstrates the indefinitely generative principle of metaphor and the powerful body themselves.

I have suggested that Nietzsche is in some way or other alluding to Aristotle’s conception of the proportional metaphor. But several differences between Aristotle’s principles and Nietzsche’s practice are evident. In what follows I intend to show that these differences can be elaborated in terms of Nietzsche’s critique of the Aristotelian conception of language, metaphor, and the relation of philosophy to poetics and rhetoric. Yet we might note initially that whereas Aristotle favors the compression of metaphorical discourse and of the proportional metaphor in particular, Zarathustra’s discourse is quite extended. Aristotle praises Pericles for his saying that the loss of the city’s youth during the Peloponnesian War was as if the spring had been taken out of the year; Pericles simply goes to the point. Zarathustra, in the pasage we have been examining, constructs and elaborates many of the kinds of thoughts which would, by Aristotelian standards, be brilliantly suggested in a single striking sentence. Yet this stylistic deviation has its own dramatic, rhetorical, and philosophical purposes. Zarathustra, let us remember, is a teacher who is giving his students (whom he will be leaving for a long time) a farewell lesson of great importance, one of which is designed to liberate them from their subordinate status as students and disciples. Such a lesson needs to be made relatively explicit.

But there are other and more powerful reasons for Zarathustra (and Nietzsche) to be so generous in the gift of metaphorical speech. For the discourse is not only an example of metaphor and a clue to the interpretation by others of Zarathustra’s metaphors; it is also an argument for the necessity of metaphorical speech and a critique of those views which would take metaphor to be ornamental or dispensable. One aspect of the proportional metaphor just elaborated can alert us to this. Whereas in the proportional metaphors cited by Aristotle the relationship between the elements in each pair is fairly straightforward, in Zarathustra’s proportion the relations are themselves metaphorical. So, for example, the youth of Athens and the spring of the year (in Pericles’ speech) are each the choicest parts; if I say “the camel is the ship of the desert” the relation between camel and desert or ship and sea is the straightforward one of being a standard or convenient mode of transportation. If a metaphor can be analyzed only into other metaphorical elements, this suggests (as Zarathustra also says explicitly) that metaphor is inescapable; and it offers the beginning of an argument as to why this should be so: because the metaphor cannot be grounded on a literal level of speech. Now if this were the case in a casual or peripheral use of metaphor we might not see it as having any great consequences. But in a context in which Zarathustra is both demonstrating and teaching the mastery of metaphor, the suggestion requires careful consideration.

As soon as Zarathustra has constructed the proportional metaphor which we have been examining he proceeds to a general endorsement of metaphorical discourse; in fact he claims that all talk about the virtues and other “spiritual” things is metaphorical. And for us there is the lesson that we ought not to avoid metaphor:

Now this thought is easily recognizable as one of the main ideas about philosophical discourse which give rise to Nietzsche’s problematic of philosophical communication. Its repetition in this context is methodical rather than gratuitous, for it is part of the lesson which Zarathustra is giving his disciples. In fact it is both illustrated in Zarathustra’s own metaphorical discourses (including this one) and it is the consequence of the proportional metaphor linking gold, virtue, and the body.

To see that this is the case we need to focus on the subject and substance of the proportional metaphor. Far from being simply an illustration of an Aristotelian rhetorical device, Zarathustra’s metaphor, taken materially as well as formally, is intended as a parody and inversion of a strong tradition about the nature of metaphorical language and its relation to literal discourse. According to one very powerful school of thought about metaphor, there must be one term or element within the metaphor which is itself non-metaphorical. Quite frequently this is believed to be something of the nature of thought or spirit, which is said to take on some bodily clothing.¹¹ Given the two notions of proportional analogy and of the material or bodily as the less intelligible form of the intellectual or spiritual, it is not a large step to construct something like a Thomistic conception of analogical language. Here the final term of an Aristotelian proportional metaphor would be that which is supremely intelligible and which makes everything else intelligible. In fact, as Nietzsche suggests in Twilight of the Idols (“How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth”) Platonism and Christianity are at one in positing the real world which is intelligible in itself as existing behind the scenes. Plato’s analogy of the sun and the Good differs from the analogical logic of Aquinas or of Dante’s Paradiso in so far as the former is “attainable now for the wise man” while the latter is only “promised” to the virtuous and faithful. The difference here is simply a greater stress on the limits of the human senses and intellect in relation to their ultimate intelligible goal. The development of European nihilism, Nietzsche might say, can be traced both in the realm of metaphorical conception and in that of the philosophical use and evaluation of poetic language. Now since God is dead, Christian poetry which points to an intellectual vision of God must be replaced by a poetry of the body. Or, to stress that the point has implications far wider than Nietzsche’s critique of religion, if there is no intelligible and rational ground of things, it is inappropriate to use a philosophical language which employs forms borrowed from the rationalist tradition. Rhetoric and poetics are not philosophically neutral; the remark “I fear that we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (T, “Reason in Philosophy,” 5) suggests the need for transformations of our linguistic praxis appropriate to the realization that the only world is that of the body.

To give thoughts a bodily guise is (in the tradition) to express them metaphorically. But to take the body as the final term of the metaphor is to suggest that that which occupies the traditional place of the most intelligible is precisely that which renders discourse metaphorical and incapable of a transparent rational elucidation or of any approximation to such an elucidation. It is important to note that Zarathustra is not implying that the body is really more intelligible than the mind; if he were, then he would simply be proposing to replace logic or onto-theology with physiology. The body is the ground or base of the virtues and of spirit and it is a key to their interpretation, since they are metaphors of the body; but it is not intrinsically intelligible (at least by the standards of traditional science and metaphysics). Elsewhere Nietzsche suggests that the body is itself a very complex social community of wills to power, so that the body as a single thing is a displacement (or metaphor) of something else (BGE, 19; 5, 32-3). And there is little reason to think that these wills to power could be understood through an intuition or reason purged of the figurative. They too are to be comprehended metaphorically.

At this point, however, it appears that by eliminating any contrasting concept for metaphor, Zarathustra (or Nietzsche) is himself saying something unintelligible. That is, the view put forward in Zarathustra’s address seems to be something like this: a metaphor is always a metaphor of another metaphor which in turn is a metaphor of another . . . ad infinitum. Nietzsche could very well accept this translation of his view, although he would have the style to do it in the spirit in which Zarathustra accepts his animals’ version of eternal recurrence by mockingly calling it a hurdy-gurdy song. Metaphor, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out in “White Mythology,” is not a philosophically neutral term but one which comes laden with the attempts of philosophy to comprehend and subordinate poetry or at least to exclude it from the domain of philosophy proper.¹² Rather than giving us a new theory of metaphor, it might be more accurate to say (following the usage of Heidegger and Derrida) that Zarathustra is placing the concept of metaphor under erasure. We cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and begin to speak a language untouched by the Western tradition; but we can use that language and the concepts embedded in it artfully, so as to suggest or evoke a different approach. This helps to explain why Nietzsche would deviate from the tradition only in a form which contains a complex critique and parody of the tradition itself. For he has Zarathustra use Aristotle’s favorite form of the metaphor to suggest the invalidity both of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor and of the views of language, mind, and body on which it is based.

Let me suggest some ways in which the lesson contained in Zarathustra’s proportional metaphor bears on two sorts of hermeneutical questions which have already been suggested. These focus on the smaller and larger ends of the continuum of textual meaning. We want to know whether Zarathustra’s discourse about metaphor aids in the interpretation of some of the earlier metaphors of part one and also whether it helps to establish the claim that a Nietzschean text has an order and coherence arising from the problematics of philosophical communication itself. The first problem has a priority because if Zarathustra can aid in interpreting at least some of its own metaphors, it may also have a more thorough dialectical and self-referential structure.

Now it should be clear that Zarathustra’s discourse “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” shows that we should not expect a successful interpretation of his metaphors to yield a reduction or translation into non-metaphorical terms. So in the chapter on “War and Warriors” there is no literal base which can be used to ground the metaphorical complex of combat, risk, and obedience. Thought or idea (Gedanke)and knowledge (Erkenntnis) are themselves to be conceived as metaphors for elevations of the body and its activities, so that war is a bodily metaphor for intellectual struggle which is in turn a metaphor for something having to do with the body. No reduction of such a metaphor is possible because even the body is a kind of metaphor; just as, significantly, no reduction is desirable because the ability to speak freely in metaphor is itself a sign of the body’s desired heightening of power. But it may seem that this oscillation of bodily and spiritual meanings volatilizes the sense of the passage rather than rendering it more determinate. It may be a progress in understanding, however, just to be relieved of the necessity of finding either a spiritual or physicalistic interpretation of such passages. In fact the interpretation suggests the degree to which we must keep in mind that for Zarathustra it is only the metaphorical expressions of the body in spirit which have value and, conversely, his insistence that we cannot lose sight of the bodily ground of these values.

Like the staff given him by his disciples, the gift which Zarathustra gives them in return is a glowing collection of metaphors surrounded by a wisdom which encircles or is tied to the metaphorical itself. Jacques Derrida has elaborated upon this centrality of the golden orb or bestowing sun in the classical theory of metaphor and Bernard Pautrat has suggested its importance within Nietzsche’s imagery in a variety of his texts. Derrida’s aim is to show that philosophy fails in its aim of subsuming metaphor within the conceptual because the very terms in which it attempts to do this are parts of an obscured but ineluctable metaphorical complex. Whether or not this is true of the tradition, what Nietzsche is attempting here is an explicit inversion of that tradition which anticipates Derrida’s reading of the implicit deconstruction which the tradition is supposed to exercise upon itself. Nietzsche has found the language appropriate to the point which was made so much more awkwardly and inconsistently in the essay “On Truth and Lie.” Besides that, he has put metaphor in its place as one typical mode of language which needs to be supplemented by others in a comprehensive treatment of the possibilities of discourse. Such a play and array of linguistic modes unfolds in the other parts of Zarathustra.

III

As Nietzsche records in Ecce Homo and in his letters, each part of Zarathustra was written during a brief period of inspiration. Nevertheless the book was planned earlier and anticipated in the last sections of his previous book, The Gay Science. Each part was published separately, with one part appearing before the next was complete. Since the planning, composition, and publication of the book stress the importance of its division into parts the reader ought to be aware that each of these divisions may have a distinctive tone, purpose, and strategy. The opening of part two is different from anything which has preceded it and alerts us to the new emphasis which it gives to Zarathustra’s career. Having preserved his solitude again for “months and years” he awakes with a start from a dream:

While the first part began with Zarathustra’s metaphorical identification with the sun, the second begins with an image of self-division. Zarathustra has been split into two parts—one true and one false. Earlier he had narrowed down an indifferent audience for his teaching to a select group of students; but this selection has had the consequence of making him one thing for his students and something else for all the others. To have friends, Nietzsche often suggests, is also to have enemies, a fact which is mystified by all of those universalistic ethical views (such as Christianity, utilitarianism, and socialism) which do not recognize how crucial are such things as loyalty, affiliation, and opposition.

In this part of the book Zarathustra will be concerned with the will and the obstacles which it encounters in attempting to will itself. This is quite different from part one’s stress on the importance of creative valuation. Metaphorical and artistic efforts to produce a style of values are not sufficient by themselves; they are countered by such things as the “enemies” and so require acts of will. So Zarathustra’s interest in willing here is motivated by an experience which he has had in his career as a teacher. It would be a mistake, however, to see this shift as a stage in an irreversible temporal sequence; it is rather that Zarathustra’s wisdom which again pains him by its abundance is too great to be compressed into any single form of language. It has no single authoritative interpretation in the language of men, so there is a need to suggest its susceptibility to a variety of different turnings and readings. Or as Zarathustra says:

Who are Zarathustra’s enemies? Most immediately they are those denounced by name (or category) throughout this part of the book. While the first part of Zarathustra can be compared in some ways to the beatitudes of the gospels, this one recalls the condemnations of the Jewish prophets. The enemies include the priests, the rabble, the men of culture, believers in pure knowledge, famous wise men, and the scholars; they are not simply Zarathustra’s enemies but paradigms of what it is to be an enemy since their deepest motive is that reactive hostility which is elsewhere called ressentiment. Perhaps the clearest form of such vengefulness is described in Zarathustra’s talk “Of the Tarantulas.” The vengeful profess a concern for justice and equality; in fact they are frustrated seekers after power who, unable to directly impose their own will on others, have turned to a strategy which aims at insuring that no one can rise above their level.

Such a reaction may also be called envy (Neid), an attitude which Zarathustra had already encountered in “Of the Tree on the Mountainside.” There Zarathustra had come upon a youth who deliberately avoided him. Such avoidance, it emerges, is due neither to indifference nor to anger but to envy, which can be defined as hostility toward the good of another so great that one wishes the other’s good destroyed even if it will bring no gain (and even, possibly, a loss) to oneself. As Zarathustra explains, envy operates like the wind. Both forces are invisible, providing the spectacle of action at a distance. One avoids the object of envy only in a superficial way; envy which is not expressed tends to grow in isolation, just as the imagined grandeur of the envied one will grow in such conditions. Envy is the inverse and sometimes the consequence of noble aspiration:

If one wants to fly but compares oneself unfavorably with those who do, one’s envy takes the form of a fear (and hatred) of flying. (In the immediately preceding section, “Of Reading and Writing,” Zarathustra had boasted of his own agile climbing, flying, and dancing.) Now the youth confesses:

Zarathustra’s advice to the youth is reassuring. He throws his arm around him and takes him for a walk, telling him that he must not fear his own noble aspirations and suggesting that he still has the youth and energy to keep his highest hope holy (Z, 71).

Perhaps this rather simple solution justifies Walter Kaufmann’s calling this chapter “advice for adolescents” in his brief commentary. The forms of envy and ressentiment which Zarathustra encounters in the second part of the book are more strongly rooted and institutionalized, as their names suggest (e.g., “Scholars,” “Education,” “Famous Wise Men”). Moreover, all forms of envy are intensified by the death of God. While God lives (that is, while belief in God is still possible), envy can be minimized by insisting that all men are equal before God. In other words, the distance between all men and God is so great that any differences among us must seem very minor by comparison. Before God, as the saying goes, all men are equals or brothers. If God is dead, the only scale remaining is the one which measures differences among men and these are capable of being infinitely magnified by the envious eye or, more simply, “the evil eye.” In the first part of Zarathustra, Zarathustra is in all ways the opposite of the envious person. If the latter is comparable to a black hole which seeks to destroy all which comes within its range, Zarathustra is like the sun or the glowing orb which he praises in “Of the Bestowing Virtue.” Some people are simply stars, always radiating strength and expressing themselves fully in metaphor.

Yet every black hole was once, however briefly, a star. This is the lesson that Zarathustra must learn when he confronts his own envy in “The Night Song” of the second part. There the teacher who had confidently accepted the gift which identified him with the glowing sun laments his own radiant brilliance. Being nothing but a star is too limiting; even such a sun can experience envy:

The truth of Zarathustra’s dream which opens part two is that he harbors enemies within himself. All limitation seems an excuse for envy and vengefulness.

After confronting his own enmity, Zarathustra goes on to sing “The Dancing Song” in which he confesses that he finds Life—personified as a woman—unfathomable, and Wisdom—also a woman—as perhaps even more seductive and elusive. Zarathustra is presumably shaken by the discovery of his own mutability and so hopes that Life, at least, will be constant despite her changing appearances. When she confesses her own mutability—“I am merely changeable and untamed and in everything a woman and no virtuous one”—Zarathustra refuses to believe her. Zarathustra’s Wisdom, or strictly speaking an unidentified voice within, prods him with questions: “Why? Wherefore? Whereby? Whither? Where? How? Is it not folly to go on living?” (Z, 133; 4, 141). Having acknowledged his own envy and enmity, finding no secure counter-balance in the constancy of life, Zarathustra wonders if there can be any point in living in a world that is so resistant to his attempts to understand it. He is unable to see that Life was merely speaking the truth about herself and that a mutable world can still be understood by means of the idea of will to power. Before he can see that, Zarathustra moves from the sadness which comes over him at the end of “The Dance Song” to a fuller form of despair. For the thought of death has propelled him into an elegy for those who are already dead:

It may not be immediately apparent just whom Zarathustra is mourning here. The dead ones are simply the moments (Augenblicke) of his own past, his “youth’s visions and dearest marvels” (Z, 134). To see one’s own past as a collection of dead friends is in keeping with the fragmentation of the self characteristic of this metonymical section of the book. Although Zarathustra and the moments “were made for one another . . . made for faithfulness like me, and for tender eternities” they have been stolen in a crime worse than murder. Why worse than murder? To kill a man is not, by itself, to produce an agonizing internal division for him. But to send the lovely moments of a man’s past to their graves, to render them irretrievable while the man still lives, is to produce a painful and inescapable split between the man’s past and his present.

Who are these enemies? Zarathustra does not name them here, and one might suppose that they are roughly identical with the catalogue of enemies denounced throughout part two. Yet it might be more accurate to say that Zarathustra is suffering from a generalized rancor against what he later calls “time and its it was” (Z, 161) which he will discover to be the source of all revenge. So while some of the responsibility for the death of the beautiful Augenblicke must be attributed to those who represent specialized vengefulness of one sort or another, he himself is also the enemy and the murderer to the extent that he has acquiesced in, moralized, and rationalized the simple binary division of time into the living present of experience and the dead time of the past.

In the chapter “Of Redemption” Zarathustra develops his thoughts about “time and its ‘it was’ ” in a series of speeches. They are addressed first to a hunchback, then to his disciples, and finally to himself; the whole sequence suggests how the problems of time and revenge are bound up with the search for the philosophically appropriate way of speaking to specific audiences. The hunchback challenges Zarathustra to make the cripples whole again, promising him their belief if he does. Zarathustra’s reply is concerned with the nature of fragmentation. The truly fragmented person is not the one who is missing a bodily part, but the one whose spirit (Geist) has been fragmented by the atrophy through disuse of some of its chief capacities. One who is spirtually nothing but a walking ear has less chance of being a great man than does one who is simply missing an ear. Turning away from the hunchback to his disciples Zarathustra attempts to explain why men are fragmented and confesses his own fragmentation. Men are everywhere “shattered in pieces and scattered as if over a battle-field of slaughter” and it is this painful sight which Zarathustra admits is his “most intolerable burden.” These visions of dismembered and fragmented bodies are emblematic of Zarathustra’s experience of opposition and self-division in this part. To “walk among men as among fragments of the future” is one way to overcome the burden of past and present. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the contrast developed by Melanie Klein between the acknowledgement of the whole body and the obsession with independent bodily parts. Yet even if one has such hopes for the future how can one redeem the past?

When the will comes up against the ineluctability of the past it becomes wrathful and ill-tempered. Even if all of the other occasions and excuses for revenge could be overcome, the will would still be so frustrated from its impotence over the past that it would seek revenge upon anyone who does not seem to share its own wrath and distemper. But not being able to admit its own vengefulness the will represents its own activities and time’s “perpetual perishing” (in Locke’s phrase) as punishment for some offense. Turning against itself—for it must recognize that it is as subject to the punishment of temporal existence as any other object of its revenge—it imagines the only possible redemption as the surrender of the will itself. “ ‘Except the will at last redeem itself, and willing become not-willing—’: but you, my brothers, know this fable-song of madness!” (Z, 162; 4, 181). Now Zarathustra will soon be immersed in a struggle with his most abysmal thought of eternal recurrence; that thought offers a way of transforming the obstinate “it was” into the creative “But I willed it thus!” We too will have to attempt to understand what eternal recurrence means for Zarathustra and for ourselves. At this point in the text, however, we are brought back to Nietzsche’s concern with language. The theme is made explicit by the hunchback; he has been eavesdropping during the long address and now asks why Zarathustra spoke to him differently from the way he spoke to his disciples.

Divided against himself by the will’s collision with time, Zarathustra’s speech is also fragmented. Zarathustra’s own account of this (which the hunchback has overheard) is that “It is difficult to live among men because keeping silent is so difficult. Especially for a babbler [für einen Geschwätzigen].” But to the extent that one is dominated by the binary oppositions with which Zarathustra is concerned here, silence may just not be possible. Zarathustra has been brought into polemical discourse with a whole range of purported forms of wisdom; these discourses illustrate the structure of duality essential to all revenge. Such talk will always be “talking at.” We might imagine Zarathustra as having been silent during this series of confrontations. But because he shares in the general structure of envy and enmity such silence would in fact be a two-sided conversation in need of external mediation in order to be brought to a more fruitful level of exchange. Such an internal duality would be like the one that Zarathustra himself has described in “Of the Friend”:

Zarathustra also knows that the desire for a friend may mask an inadequacy of our own; specifically we often “want only to leap over envy with our love.” It is better to work through and express that envy than to be torn apart through the dualities of the internal conversation or to seek a friendship for which one is not yet ready.

The language of internal division is articulated in two chapters which deal with two modalities of discourse: the contest between philosophy and poetry (“Of Poets”) and the interpretation of dreams (“The Prophet”). “Of Poets” begins as an elaborate and playful scholastic exercise on that old chestnut, the liar’s paradox: silence would have as its fruit an internal polemic between the different aspects of the self. The aggressive tone of this whole part of the book is inseparable from its leading thoughts and its rhetorical situation. In such a situation even Zarathustra is susceptible to revenge, and revenge will lead to the inadequate, world-denying language of priests, scholars, or poets. The language of internal division becomes even more prominent in two other chapters; in “Of Poets” Zarathustra confesses to being a poet who is at war with poetry while “The Prophet” presents us with a dream and its interpretation. Following Freud, we can read this last dream as a compact text which comments on the larger one.

“Of Poets” is an elaborate play upon the poetic version of the liar’s paradox: the poet, Zarathustra, says that poets lie, proceeding to parody the famous final chorus of Faust and to attack the metaphorical principle itself. This reductive treatment of poetry is startling when juxtaposed with Zarathustra’s earlier metaphorical attempts to empty himself of his wisdom, but it is thoroughly in keeping with the reductive metonymies in this section. Just as the will founders on the ineluctability of the “it was,” so the poetic principle collapses when interrogated through dialogue; its attempts to bridge the gap between earth and heaven are exposed as fabrications. This is Nietzsche’s version of the Platonic critique of poetry in the Republic; but Zarathustra, unlike Socrates, acknowledges that he himself is a poet. The structure of the chapter is itself dyadic: in the first part Zarathustra converses with a disciple and then, in the second, abruptly turns to the soul’s converse with itself. And the tone of both conversations is set by the larger Auseinandersetzung (confrontation) between Zarathustra’s discourse and Goethe’s poetry, which is taken to be representative of the whole poetic tradition.

Zarathustra’s initial remark seems to regard poetry as simply a collection of doctrines one of which happens to clash with his own reduction of spirit to the body:

The parody of the Faust chorus is continued through the chapter, and it parallels a more serious critique of poetry’s metaphorical longings for the eternal (“we desire even those things the old women tell one another in the evening. We call that the eternal-womanly in us”) and its vain desire for an audience. That Faust should be the basis of the critique shows that Zarathustra is ready to take on the big guns of poetry, as Socrates declared battle against “Homer and all his tribe.” Goethe is usually taken to be the supreme German poet and Faust to be his masterpiece; the final scene in heaven, ending with the mystic chorus, can be regarded as his last poetic testament. It records Faust’s salvation by stressing the priority of the eternal. Zarathustra aims at reducing such poetic metamorphoses to the pathetic fallacy and at exposing the surreptitious introduction of the eternal into poetry. Poets, says Zarathustra, imagine that their impressions when lying in the grass are nature’s speech to them; emboldened by these imaginary secrets they project their fantasies into the heavens: “we set our motley puppets on the clouds and then call them gods and supermen” (Z, 150). Apparent metaphorical unities can be reduced to the metonymic opposition of poet and nature, or poet’s fantasies and imaginary eternity. Metaphor (Gleichnis) is here connected with metamorphosis—but such metamorphoses must be only imaginary. If we first missed the point that the critique applies to Zarathustra’s own metaphorical chains, the self-critique is underscored by the lumping together of “gods and supermen” as “motley puppets.”

Zarathustra’s critique of unitary metaphor occurs in a dialogue with his disciple; in a play upon binary structures, his analysis of the poet’s vain need of an audience comes when he turns away from the disciple to talk to himself. Faust is still the appropriate example because of Goethe’s dramatic inclinations (even if Faust II is unactable). Richard Wagner’s universalistic aspirations are undoubtedly in the background; the Hegelian dialectic which sees drama’s universalism and its community of author, actors, and audience as the high point of all art and poetry may be there as well. Zarathustra’s deflation of such community takes place by means of images, mirroring his attack on metaphor through dialogue with another. The false unity of the poetic peacock with his audience of buffaloes (rhetorical fiction) is just the other side of those illegitimate metamorphoses (metaphorical tropes) which attempt to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. Zarathustra’s repeated exclamation of his weariness of the poets who can carry on such subterfuges continues the pastiche of Goethe by transforming his “Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde!” into “Ach, wie bin ich der Dichter müde!” (“Oh, I’m weary of doing” into “Oh, how weary I am of the poets”). If there is any hope for the poets it lies in their own weariness of themselves. Zarathustra prophesies the appearance of such self-conscious figures who will have grown out of the poets and calls them “penitents of the spirit” (“Büsser des Geistes”). This prophecy of poetry’s self-overcoming is still parody for it refers back to the penitents at the end of Faust. What the poets of the future are to give up are not earthly things but fictions of metamorphosis and common understanding with their audience. They are to turn inward, as Zarathustra has turned away from his disciple and as he will turn further inward in the next major section of the book (part three). Yet Zarathustra’s discourse here is not the self-consciously hermetic and difficult modernism which he sees coming; it is itself a play upon the opposition of prose and poetry which heightens their tensions. Much of Nietzsche’s Gay Science revolves around this same tension and helps to clarify “Of Poets.” The book’s very title is duplicitous, referring both to the Provençal term for the art of poetry and to the more prosaic idea of science only to set up another incongruity by the addition of gaiety or joy. The text itself alternates between poetic and prosaic passages. In one secton Nietzsche suggests the fruitfulness of the tension:

In “The Prophet” Zarathustra hears the melancholy refrain of nihilism: “Everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past!” (Z, 155). At odds with himself, since he has not resolved the will’s opposition to time, one side (at least) of Zarathustra is deeply affected by this speech. Feeling his own teaching in danger of being engulfed by the sadness of nihilism “Zarathustra went about grieving . . . in his heart; and for three days he took no food or drink, had no rest and forgot speech. At length it happened that he fell into a deep sleep.” (Z, 156). This is Zarathustra’s greatest experience of silence in this very dialogical and polemical part of the book, so we expect its product to be important. On awakening Zarathustra relates a dream to his disciples; his voice comes to them “as if from a great distance” indicating that his separation from himself has still not been healed. In the dream, which Zarathustra says is still obscure to him, he has renounced all life and become “a night-watchman and grave-watchman yonder upon the lonely hill-fortress of death.” Guarding the glass coffins of “life overcome” Zarathustra at first finds the silence terrifying, but eventually drifts off to sleep. Awakened by three startling blows on the heavy door he finds himself unable to open it.

Zarathustra was then sufficiently terrified to shriek himself awake.

Only in this part of the book does Zarathustra need another to tell him the meaning of his discourse. His talk here is a dream-story. One who cannot understand his own dreams is suffering from a self-division of some kind. This is also evident from the content of the dream which, if the disciples’ interpretation is to be trusted, represents Zarathustra as both death and life, the night-watchman and the raging wind with a thousand varied masks (we might think of Brueghel or Bosch here). Nietzsche has much to say about dreams which throws light on the dreams and visions which occur in Zarathustra. Although he regards dreams in general as paradigms of the confused causal thinking of everyday life, the successful dream is different:

Zarathustra’s dream, or at least the dream as told, consists of both symbolic scenes and images and a narrative poetic language. It is the dream of a philosophical artist representing his own spiritual condition to himself. In this case it is a dream eminently susceptible to a structuralist analysis, based as it is on those binary patterns so congenial to the structuralist method. Life and death, sleeping and waking, noise and silence, the open and shut door, darkness and the colorful profusion of the thousand masks all contribute to the main effect. The very dualities between sleeping and waking, between the dream and its absence are themselves prominent. As the night-watchman, Zarathustra falls into a dreamless sleep, only to be awakened by the noise at the door; once awake (so he dreams) he beholds the waking dream of the thousand masks. Then he awakens into the world which he shares with the disciples. All is unmediated transition in this symbolic expression of Zarathustra’s straddling the domains of passive and active nihilism and his inability to effect a continuity between the dead past and the living present.

This dream is thus an elaboration of that first dream of the hideous mirror image with which part two began. The concern with duality was never a matter of an opposition simply between oneself and one’s enemies conceived as substantial selves. As this latest dream shows, the war of hostile parts may occur within the “same” person (that is, one conventionally identified as the same); as the parable in “Of Great Events” confirms, many may also become one (in the state) in a spirit of opposition to that which is other (the individual as such or other states). The presiding theme on which Nietzsche has been playing variations is what Charles Peirce called Secondness—the sense of raw shock, clash, and opposition. Yet since this is the governing thought of only one part of Zarathustra it would be a mistake to found an interpretation of will or will to power on the tone of these passages alone; unfortunately too many of Nietzsche’s commentators have done just that.

Zarathustra’s disciple interprets the dream as a vision of Zarathustra’s life. His teacher is said to be “the wind with a shrill whistling that tears open the doors of the fortress of death” and the “coffin full of rotten wickedness and angel-masks of life.” Yet if this were the whole account of the dream, Zarathustra would not be as slow as he is “to leave his bed and his sadness” (Z, 158). When he finally does get up he jokes about letting the prophet drown in the sea. The difference between my interpretation of the dream and that of the disciple is that, on the view offered here, Zarathustra is closer to the prophet’s nihilism than the disciple realizes and so dreams himself as divided between the night-watchman of life and the vivifying wind. The disciple’s final words are thus a little too glib:

That Zarathustra has dreamed his enemies is true. But in the world of Thus Spoke Zarathustra dreams and visions are not to be dismissed as mere fantasies; they are as significant as any of our other experiences. To have dreamed one’s enemies gives one no automatic power over them unless one has power over one’s dreams. In order to gain such power Zarathustra needs a different orientation toward “time and its ‘it was’ ” and a transformation of his pity and disgust for mankind. What Zarathustra needs to do is to take a more active role in his dream life. Here he is the dreamer and another, his disciple, is the interpreter. In the next part of the book we see Zarathustra debating with a figure in his visions (the dwarf) and using these visions in order to rehearse his waking activities (the riddle of the shepherd and the snake). These performances require that Zarathustra become both dreamer and interpreter at once. In the last section of part two “The Stillest Hour,” Zarathustra is, not surprisingly, at odds with himself as to whether he has a teaching yet to be spoken and whether he is the one to speak it. The self-divisions that can infect language and the speaker have been explored in dialogue, song and dream; the reader should be ready now for a new mode of discourse.