Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra Is the Schizo Blog of a Terminally Single Guy
Table of Contents
It took me about two weeks to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I meant to write up my reading notes, but putting them into words was so hard that I ended up leaving it alone for about a week.
But I figured it would be a shame not to write down what I noticed, so here goes.
Overall Impressions
Nietzsche is a 限界独身男性 (genkai dokushin danshi, Japanese net slang for a single guy who has hit his limit, with no way out in sight), and Zarathustra is basically the schizo blog he wrote! Which, in a sense, made it very easy to read. Though part of that is also thanks to a good translation.
If Nietzsche were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d either rack up an explosive number of followers and haters, then drop an inflammatory take and vanish, or he’d be flinging crazy screeds onto Hatena Anonymous Diary (a Japanese anonymous blogging platform famous for exactly that kind of thing). The problem is that Nietzsche was a monstrously gifted genius and a man of great learning, so his bold ideas and statements ended up with a frightening predictive power.
Every attempt to summarize Zarathustra without contradictions or flaws is bound to fail, and I think it should fail. It’s like listening to ridiculously good music: you just can’t convert it into words and convey its charm. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t write my reading notes. So in this article, I’m not going to try.
I can’t help but feel sorry for Nietzsche. He warned us in no uncertain terms not to blindly follow Zarathustra and not to misuse his words, and yet that is exactly what has happened. At the very least, the theme of Zarathustra is not about getting strong or working on self-improvement… I think.
On the Eternal Recurrence
In Parts I and II, he does nothing but trash-talk the things Nietzsche hates, then at the end of Part II he drops some ominous hints, and in Part III the so-called “eternal recurrence” is finally spoken of (that foreshadowing reminded me of the end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. Maybe Zarathustra really is music).
Must not whatever can run its course of all things have run along this lane before? Must not whatever can happen of all things have happened, have been done, have run past before?
And if everything has been there before, what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before?
As for how he arrived at this idea, there was probably an argument like the following… or at least I think there was, but I couldn’t find the exact passage.
- Time is infinite.
- The universe (and the events that take place in it) is finite.
- Therefore, every event repeats infinitely.
And this is the ultimate point of nihilism. Acknowledging the fact of the eternal recurrence and still saying “I’m going to enjoy this world anyway!” is what the “will to power” amounts to. But I feel like a lot of people don’t really grasp how terrifying the eternal recurrence is.
It’s not simply a matter of “life has good things and bad things, but let’s affirm all of it.” I think it is a denial of free will in the broad sense.
Thinking of it in terms of a game makes it easier to understand. No matter what choices you make, they’re ultimately just part of a predefined scenario. And with a game, you can find meaning by saying “I took this lesson from the experience of this game back to base reality,” but unless you assume an afterlife, you can’t “take back” anything from base reality. That, I think, is what the meaninglessness of this world amounts to.
On this point, I thought the state of mind I wrote about earlier comes pretty close.
The dialogue options shown during conversations in Genshin Impact are notorious for being completely meaningless. If you’re lucky, the line right after changes a little, but whichever one you pick, it has absolutely no effect on the scenario that follows. Every player walks the same path through the same story.
And yet, the game still gives the player choices. Even if you can’t change the overall flow, you can have the Traveler say what the player felt in that moment.
On Optimistic Nihilism
There’s a concept that has held up my mind over the past few years: “optimistic nihilism,” introduced in the video below.
In short, it goes: “On the cosmic scale, whatever one person does or thinks is a rounding error. So we might as well enjoy life.”
However, you could say this is a watered-down version of Nietzsche’s way of facing nihilism.
In terms of scale, optimistic nihilism assumes finite time, while Nietzsche assumes infinite time. And as for how to face it, optimistic nihilism takes the stance of “since we’re here, let’s enjoy ourselves, and if you manage to achieve something that benefits humanity, that’s bonus points,” whereas Nietzsche says “accept the meaninglessness and laugh it off” (I think).
On Ressentiment
The other day, I was crossing at a crosswalk when a car didn’t stop and kept coming, and I almost got hit. That’s dangerous, damn it! If it had really hit me, what would I have done to the driver!? I seethed for a while, then realized that this kind of thinking is exactly what Professor Nietzsche would scold me for, and that this very seething might be the “nausea” Nietzsche talks about.
Maybe the closest concept to “ressentiment” is a “victim mentality.” Zarathustra demands that we be thoroughly active (or rather, that we never become passive).
Let me give an example. One topic I’ve never agreed with my friends on is bullying. I believe that “the responsibility for bullying lies 100% with the perpetrator, but that doesn’t mean the victim had no part in the cause.”
If the perpetrators were rolling dice to pick their target, that’d be a different story, but in most cases that isn’t what happens. Denying even the causal relationship by calling it “completely unavoidable” reduces the other person to a helpless victim.
Of course, I think the perpetrators should be properly punished for assault or whatever applies, but that aside, denying that there might have been a route where the victim could have avoided becoming one is, if anything, a hopeless and far crueler thing to do (but not many people understand this argument…).
The above is an extreme example, but anyway, I basically don’t think things ever go well by becoming passive and saying “there’s nothing I can do about this.” And going further: only once you hold the awareness that “I have power, and I am always the perpetrator toward the world” can you move on to the question of how to live! That’s what I took to be the Nietzschean teaching.
On the Gift-Giving Virtue
The sun appears at both the beginning and the end of Zarathustra. The sun embodies “the bestowing virtue” (the gift-giving virtue).
When you give something to someone, Nietzsche approves of it taking the form of “my strength was overflowing, and it spilled out onto those around me.” The sun gives energy to the Earth, but the sun itself isn’t conscious of that. It just happens to be undergoing nuclear fusion, the energy overflows into its surroundings, and as a result the Earth gets warm.
This is interesting to compare with love of one’s neighbor, which Nietzsche apparently hates, and with Kant’s moral law.
Christian “love of one’s neighbor” starts from lack and oppression: “sacrificing yourself for others.” From Nietzsche’s viewpoint, this is just a variant of ressentiment: “I have nothing, so I want to prove my worth by serving other people.”
Kant stresses the motive behind an action, in the form of “I do it because it’s my duty.” From Nietzsche’s viewpoint (and as Fromm later criticized as well), it’s ultimately just internalizing the absolute God who was supposed to be dead and keeping him around as a zombie.
I like the Nietzschean way of thinking best. Let’s consider a concrete example. Say I make music and the people around me love it. In that case, my power was overflowing, and I gave music as a result of it spilling out onto those around me. That’s the practice of the “gift-giving virtue.”
There’s absolutely no intention in there to make it for someone, or to prove that my worth isn’t zero. It’s more like: I have the power, I wanted to, so I did it, and apparently other people enjoy it too, but who cares! I think that’s what art is truly supposed to be.
It makes sense that Nietzsche hated Kant so much. It’s like musical differences: for Nietzsche, they’d walked the same road up to the point of “killing God,” and he probably couldn’t forgive Kant for arriving at the exact opposite conclusion from there.
On the History of Thought
Nietzsche apparently called himself dynamite. And indeed, it does feel like most of the thought up to the present day is just people picking up the fragments of the God that Nietzsche blew up.
Fromm’s Escape from Freedom reads to me like a serious rewrite of exactly the phenomenon described above: “they finally killed God, but then set up another god.”
In Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he preaches that we should think not about what we expect from life, but about what life expects from us. This merely lowers the bar from Nietzsche’s “the world is meaningless, accept that and enjoy it” to “the world has meaning, so the question is how to find it.”
Flip that around, and Frankl would say “there’s definitely meaning, so live and find it,” while Nietzsche’s stance is more like “if you don’t have the capacity to take in the meaninglessness and laugh, then hurry up and die.” Naturally, you can’t just prescribe that as-is at Auschwitz.
“Life is only suffering,” other people preach, and they do not lie. Well then, see to it that you, the ones preaching this, cease! If life is only suffering, then see to it that life ceases!
That’s from Part I, On the Preachers of Death.
And here’s the exciting part: it seems the lineage of ideas runs Nietzsche → Freud → Jung → Joseph Campbell. I think Nietzsche is even cited directly in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (couldn’t find it, though).
Professor Nietzsche’s Greatest Hits
Nietzsche would probably be furious that I’m doing this, but be that as it may, there were a ton of razor-sharp lines. Everything he says is basically a quotation. Here are the ones I liked especially.
On the Flies of the Marketplace
Where solitude ends, there the marketplace begins; and where the marketplace begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies.
(snip)
Flee, my friend, into your solitude, to where a rough, strong breeze blows. It is not your lot to be a fly-swatter.
Part I. This might be close to the gift-giving virtue story about art I mentioned above.
On Shit
The world too has a rear, insofar as it resembles a human being. That much is true!
The world is full of a lot of shit. That much is true! But that does not make the world itself a monster covered in shit!
There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells foul. Nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers (the ability to sense springs)!
Part III, On Old and New Tablets §14. I just want someone to sing this over a heavily effected guitar.
Flirting with Lady Life
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “but you also know that. —” And I whispered something into her ear, in the middle of her tangled, yellow, foolish hair.
“You know that, O Zarathustra? Nobody knows that. —”
And we looked at each other, and looked at the green meadow over which the cool evening was just then running, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. —
Life is personified as a girl with yellow, foolish hair, and he whispers something to her (presumably the secret of the eternal recurrence). And then Part III ends with him shouting his love for eternity seven times. No wonder the publisher refused to print it, but the poetic beauty is off the charts.
On the Abyss
Do you have courage, O my brothers? Are you stouthearted? Not courage before witnesses, but the courage of hermits and eagles, which not even a god observes any longer?
Cold souls, mules, the blind, and the drunken, I do not call stouthearted. He has heart who knows fear but conquers it, who sees the abyss, but with pride.
He who sees the abyss, but with the eyes of an eagle; he who grasps the abyss with the talons of an eagle: he has courage. —
Part IV, On the Higher Man §4. The quintessential Nietzsche quote people often use is “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” (apparently this is from a different book, not Zarathustra).
But Nietzsche thoroughly hates passivity, so I figured there’s no way he’d say something like that… and then this passage turned up.
If you reframe it as a set, “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you. So glare right back and drag it out with eagle talons! That’s courage!”, doesn’t the meaning flip a full 180 degrees?
On Dancing
All good things approach their goal crookedly. Like cats they arch their backs, they purr inwardly at their approaching happiness; all good things laugh.
One can tell from his gait whether someone is already walking on his own path. Just watch me walk! But whoever approaches his goal, dances.
And truly, I have not become a statue, nor do I stand here stiff, dull, stony, like a pillar; I love to run swiftly.
And though there is also mud and thick sadness on earth, whoever has light feet runs even across the mud and dances as on swept ice.
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers, and better still, stand on your heads!
Part IV, On the Higher Man §17. Throughout the whole book, Nietzsche talks about how important it is to blast away the spirit of gravity and dance, and I think this passage expresses that most beautifully.
On Science
For fear, that is man’s inherited and fundamental feeling. Fear explains everything, original sin and original virtue. Out of fear also grew my virtue, which is called science.
(snip. In response to the above words of the “leech scholar,” Zarathustra says:)
What did I just hear? Truly, I think either you are a fool or I am. So I will turn your “truth” upside down in no time.
For fear, that is the exception with us. But courage and adventure and joy in the uncertain, in the unventured. Courage seems to me the entire prehistory of man.
From the wildest, most courageous animals man has envied and robbed all their virtues; only thus did he become man.
This courage, finally grown refined, spiritual, and intellectual, this human courage with eagle’s wings and serpent’s wisdom: that, it seems to me, is today called—”
“Zarathustra!” cried all those sitting together, as with one voice, and burst into great laughter.
Part IV. Against the Enneagram Type 5 style of thinking, “science is hoarding knowledge out of fear of scarcity,” he corrects: “science is courage and adventure that has become intellectual.”
Here too, if you think of it as “you don’t learn because the unknown is scary, you learn because the unknown is fun, and as a result the overflowing beaker might end up helping other people,” it overlaps with the gift-giving virtue from before.
Ad astra abyssosque
You look up when you desire to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted. Who among you can laugh and be exalted at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.
Part I, On Reading and Writing.
The more he wants to rise up into the height and the light, the more strongly his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep, into evil.
Part I, On the Tree on the Mountainside.
Where do the highest mountains come from? I once asked. Then I learned that they come out of the sea.
The evidence is written in their rock and in the walls of their summits. Out of the deepest the highest must come to its height. —
Part III, The Wanderer.
The higher the type, the more rarely a thing succeeds. You higher men here, have you not all—failed?
Be of good cheer, what does it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!
What wonder that you failed and only half succeeded, you half-broken ones! Is not that which is thrusting and crowding together in you the future of man?
Man’s farthest, deepest, star-high things, and his prodigious power: do not all of these foam together in your pot?
What wonder that many a pot breaks! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh! You higher men, oh, how much is still possible!
And truly, how much has already succeeded! How rich is this earth in small, good, perfect things, in things that turned out well!
Set small, good, perfect things around you, you higher men! Their golden ripeness heals the heart. What is perfect teaches hope.
That’s the whole of Part IV, On the Higher Man §15, excerpted in full.
Nietzsche says over and over that “if you truly aim high, you must look not only at the stars but first at the abyss.” In particular, I think the passage in On the Higher Man §15 is the most fired-up encouragement of all time.
I’ll keep quoting it as many times as it takes, but I think you could say Nietzsche’s claims don’t contradict in the slightest the words of a god who mocks the spirit of gravity and knows how to dance.
Traveler, as you set off on your journey once again, you must remember that the journey itself has meaning.
The birds of Teyvat, the songs and the cities, the Tsaritsa, her Fatui and the monsters… they are all part of your journey.
The destination is not everything. So before you reach the end, keep your eyes open. Use the chance to take in the world around you…
Aim for the stars and the abyss!
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Notes on games, radio and technology, translated from the Japanese blog.