Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Tanner

Author:Michael Tanner [Tanner, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

It is a powerful passage, but for all its ponderable wisdom it is strange coming from a prophet. For prophets do not argue, they announce. And so by what methods are the disciples to discover what is true and what false in Zarathustra’s teaching? The refusal to accept homage that is not justified by independent checks on the truth is admirable, and clearly meant as part of Nietzsche’s running battle with Christ. But it leaves us in the dark as to how to cope with Zarathustra’s teaching, for decadent as we are, we are not in the best position to criticize.

The trouble with a self-doubting prophet, one who advises caution as to anything he says, is bad enough: we are in the presence of an incarnate oxymoron. But the dangers of being a poet, to which Zarathustra is not the first to alert us, only compound the problem of how to deal with a philosopher-artist, who seems more than incrementally suspect. All we can do, under these inauspicious conditions, is to try to share Zarathustra’s visions, and see to what extent they command our imaginations, always remembering that those are corrupt. But then if it turns out that the vision itself is vague and opaque, we shall have to do what in the end I am convinced is the only thing that one really can do with the book, which is to savour it in a picaresque way.

There are enough wonderful things, despite all the caveats I have depressingly entered, to make reading it a memorable experience. It begins impressively, with Zarathustra’s descent from his mountain, and what one might call his Sermon off the Mount is written with genuine inspiration. But Zarathustra soon gets on to his central theme: ‘Behold, I teach you the Übermensch. The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!’ (TSZ I, Prologue, 3). That introduces the first of Zarathustra’s three major concepts. And his injunction to be faithful to the earth is one of Nietzsche’s great recurring themes, and one with which I feel the greatest sympathy. But what we now wait for is some illumination about how the Übermensch is the meaning of the earth, what steps might be taken to bring about his arrival, and what he will be like when he appears. Unfortunately we get very little information about any of these matters. There are crude misunderstandings which can be quickly cleared up, such as that the Übermensch would be an evolutionary phenomenon. There is no reason to think that he will not be human in form, but that is minimally enlightening. He seems to be defined in large part in terms of the second of Zarathustra’s announcements, that of the Eternal Recurrence. The übermensch is the being who can joyfully embrace that doctrine, for doctrine, or dogma, is what it is.

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