Abstract
Socrates’ famous last words in the Phaedo − ‘O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster’ (118a) − refers to the Athenian custom of sick people making a sacrifice to the god of healing. For Nietzsche, this remark reveals that Socrates regarded death as a cure for the long illness that is life (Gay Science, §340): or in other words, ‘Socrates wanted to die’ (Twilight, ‘Problem’, §12). By contrast, Zarathustra’s death is an affirmation of life: and that Zarathustra dies affirming life is the central thesis in Paul Loeb’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophical masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But that Zarathustra dies at all has hitherto escaped the attention of all commentators, and this is what makes Loeb’s argument so startling, so original and so significant.
Loeb takes at face value Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo that the ‘fundamental conception’ of Zarathustra is the thought of eternal recurrence, ‘the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things’ (‘Zarathustra’, §1; ‘Birth of Tragedy’, §3). Taking issue with the critique of the notion of eternal recurrence advanced by Georg Simmel and others, Loeb offers a detailed reading of The Gay Science, §341, where the doctrine is first announced. He analyses closely the links between this passage and Zarathustra’s encounter with the dwarf-like spirit of heaviness at the gateway called ‘Moment’ in ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’. In the second half of this enigmatic chapter, the vision of the young shepherd from whose mouth a large, black snake hangs, Loeb detects a number of allusions to Wagner’s Siegfried (overlooked even in Roger Hollinrake’s groundbreaking study of Zarathustra and The Ring), that link this episode back to his dialogue with the dwarf. On Loeb’s account, Zarathustra’s death takes place at the end of Part III, beginning in the chapter ‘The Convalescent’, for ‘the convalescing Zarathustra is in fact a dying Zarathustra who never did recover from his confrontation and ensuing redemption’ (p. 76) − his confrontation, that is, with his ‘most abysmal thought’ (of eternal recurrence) that is associated with the ‘great noon’ (see p. 102). The ‘Seven Seals’ song (or ‘Song of Yes-and-Amen’) is thus literally Zarathustra’s swansong, ironically confirming Socrates’ claim that dying swans sing more loudly and sweetly than ever before (Phaedo, 84e; see p. 81). At the same time, numerous biblical allusions (see pp. 49, 51, 104−5, 179) announce Zarathustra’s death as equal in momentousness to the Crucifixion.
So where does this leave Part IV? For Loeb, while the events narrated here chronologically precede the end of Part III, they do not logically precede it; rather, the function of Part IV is analogous to that of the satyr play in Aeschylean tragedy as analysed by Nietzsche (p. 92), or to internal analepsis (in the sense proposed by Gérard Genette) (pp. 94, 114). Disagreeing with Heidegger’s reading of the chapters ‘On Redemption’ and ‘On the Tarantulas’, and mindful of the third transformation (in the sequence of camel−lion−child, outlined in Part I), Loeb argues that backward-willing − das Zurückwollen − is not only possible (KSA 10, 18[45], 578), it is inevitable, given the fact of eternal recurrence. Loeb pushes his argument to its extreme when he argues that, at key moments in the Prologue, Part II and Part III, Zarathustra’s future redeemed soul visits him as a ‘ghost’ or ‘shade’ (p. 195), rising up from his subconscious to assist him in his progress to perfection (see pp. 62, 71−4, 82, 240). (If this all makes the plot of Zarathustra sound strangely reminiscent of the 2011 season of Doctor Who, Loeb might not disagree; he uses the ‘prequel’ films in the Star Wars franchise to illustrate the relationship between Part IV and the rest of Zarathustra. Ultimately, however, Loeb’s argument is less about sci-fi and more about psychology, inasmuch as Zarathustra ‘carries within his subconscious the buried mnemonic messages of his “dead” self’ (p. 195).) Having conceived of Zarathustra’s death at the end of Part III, Nietzsche’s problem was to provide the material leading to that point − as he wrote to his sister, ‘I must help my son Zarathustra to get his beautiful death, otherwise I cannot stop thinking about it’ (see p. 115). The events of Part IV (which cover three days), and even Parts V and VI (as envisaged in his Nachlass), narrate developments leading up to his moving affirmation of life and simultaneous death (to be precise, these events transpire after the chapter ‘The Home-Coming’ and before ‘The Convalescent’ in Part III (p. 101).)
Loeb’s knowledge of Nietzsche’s works, like his command of the vast secondary literature, is exemplary; and his intriguing argument, which will surely have a decisive influence on Nietzsche scholarship in years to come, prompts a number of questions. Is the midnight daimon of Gay Science, §341, a darker version of the daemonium meridianum, regarded in Patristic literature as an acute form of acedia? Do the two kinds of resurrection of Zarathustra made possible by the analeptical structure of the text − metaphorically, for us as readers, and narratively, for the higher men (and imminent disciples) in Part IV − correspond to the two kind of resurrection of which St Augustine speaks? And could the Faustian framework discerned by Loeb (pp. 7, 43, 79), like the allusion to ‘Prometheus’ (noted by Robert Gooding-Williams) (p. 124), suggest that the parallels between Goethe and Nietzsche, most recently highlighted by Pierre Hadot in N’oublie pas de vivre (2008), inform the symbol of the gateway as ‘Moment’ or Augenblick? Then again, how does the mysterious figure of Pana (who, in some Nachlass sketches, actually kills Zarathustra) fit in? Finally, the chief objection to Loeb’s strongly argued case is based on the textual genesis of Zarathustra: as we know, Nietzsche wrote the texts in the sequence we find them, initially believing that, with Part I alone, the entire work was complete: how, then, could he have written into the Prologue and Part II elements that only make sense with Zarathustra’s death in Part III? Yet perhaps even this compositional dilemma falls away, if one accepts that eternal recurrence, as Zarathustra teaches it and expounded by Loeb, might indeed be true.