GENIUS FORUMS

The following is the very opening of the 'thus spake zarathustra prologue. I have bolded the sections that confuse me, numbering them A, B, and C.

'C' I find the most puzzling. But without clearly knowing what he means by A, B........then C should remain a mystery.

Thus Spake Zarathustra - Prologue

-1-

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,--and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:

A) Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!

For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent.

But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow and blessed thee for it.

Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.

B) I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.

Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evening, when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the nether-world, thou exuberant star!

Like thee must I GO DOWN, as men say, to whom I shall descend.

C) Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

Bless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss!

Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again going to be a man.

Thus began Zarathustra's down-going.

I don't see any point in reading anyfurther than this, until I'm clear about what Nietzsche is saying here.

Can we come to a consensus about the meaning of A?

If so, then we shall be able to discern B, and C much easier.

In A, he mentions the great star.

Is that a metaphor for God? If so, then why does he say that god has happiness?

When reading this it's important not to get too caught up in the words and their literal meanings. This dialogue he seems to be having with the sun is actually just a metaphorically written internal dialouge. In the first part he's wondering what to do with the wisdom he has gained and debating whether or not he should share it with others. In the second part he realizes that it is not only his wisdom to lay claim to. So he decides that he must share it with the rest of the world. In the last part he is understanding that it will be no easy task to turn others on to the Truth. Hoping God will keep him faithful in his enlightened reasoning along the way.

CP wrote:n A, he mentions the great star.

Is that a metaphor for God?

No, he compares his wisdom and its enlightenment with the sun and its light. And so he sees similarity in how the sun is caused to 'go down', shine on the whole surface of the planet with no exclusions. The brighest wisdom is caused to have the widest reach?

The event is mostly meant to describe the way Nietzsche sees his calling to write and publish, apart from the (twisted) references to the life of Zoroaster the sage who caused one of the first religions based on the written word. Something Nietzsche is planning to undo. Why setting your sights low?

Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

I don't understand the latter part of this sentence. It seems illogical and probably is.

I know I am envious of seeing others show joy, but that isn't what he means. Is he talking to himself, to his enlightened centre, asking for strength or is he saying the universe will act to destroy happiness - nahh, neither.

Actually I get it now - he is just saying that even the enlightened are caused or forced to act, to intermingle with others and he rues that in order to promulagate wisdom he has to go down to the enlightened level in order to communicate and this will cause a lessening of his "greatest happiness".

diebert wrote,

No, he compares his wisdom and its enlightenment with the sun and its light. And so he sees similarity in how the sun is caused to 'go down', shine on the whole surface of the planet with no exclusions. The brighest wisdom is caused to have the widest reach?

It's funny and almost vain how Nietzsche writes about wisdom/enlightenment. As some sort of force apart from himself.

For example:

For ten years you (wisdom/enlightenment) have climbed into my cave: you would have wearied of your light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent.

When you think about how indifferent the sun or a star is to life on this planet, it makes you wonder if using the sun for a metahpor was such a good idea.

Nietzche makes it it seem like 'the great star', 'the sun' (enlightenment/wisdom) is not only motivated by the awareness that their are beings 'out there' who can benefit from its power --- but also that the sun gets weary, bored and flagging unless it has someone to benefit, inspire and serve.

Is that the state of an enlightened/wise person? Weary and flagging when there is noone to shine down upon, touch, and effect?


And what does he mean by himself, his eagle, and his serpent?

He, for reason I don't understand, divides himself up into these metahpors.

And then he speaks to his wisdom:

We awaited you every morning, took from your overflow (overflow of what?) and blessed you for it.

You see, this just sounds like vain, pretentious wankery.

Noone wonder I meet so many Debauch crazed lunatics who love Nietzche.

Is it just me or has Nietzche become a really 'trendy' philosopher?

And is it true that Nietzche had premonitions that his life's work woud have an exceptionally malign impact upon humanity? I forget where I read that.

I can understand how that is so. He has a very unwise, flamboyant, almost feminine style of writing that makes it relatively easy for immature readers to get excited and deluded about.

Schopenhauer, Kierkguaard, Lau-tsu, and many others seem to have had a much better impact on humanity - they have a style of writing that is much harder to exploit foolishly.

Nietzsche on the other hand....

Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

I'm not sure I agree Jamesh.

Perhaps he believes that wisdom (the sun with a tranquil eye) is so supremely happy(or contented, blissful, superior, whatever) - that it cannot be envious, no matter what happiness it percieves in others. Nietzche would then be making a case for a state of invincibility....a state that Nietzsche seems to think he ought to divide himself from, to deviate from, in order to go down and influence the people.

What do you think Diebert, Jamesh? Or anyone else for that matter.

I never liked TSZ, though part 1 was OK. I liked Human, All Too Human and Nietzsche: Writings from the Late Notebooks. Haven't read them all yet.

I don't read things like Nietzche with a studious mind that tries to work out what he is saying, rather I read them just to see where my mind leads me. Trying to interpret aphoristic stuff just for an ounce more knowledge is irritating for me - it leaves too many uncertanties. If you look at the buddhists their aphoristic stuff is often full of shit - they contradict themselves all the time.

Regardless of this I think Nietzche is the deepest of past philosophers (which just means I find his views closest to mine).

We awaited you every morning, took from your overflow (overflow of what?) and blessed you for it.

I realize the question 'overflow of what?' is kind of dull.

Wisdom is an abudant body of water ---- and Nietzsche merely takes from the overflow of this water and runs with it, rather than 'being' the overflow.

But all in all --- on a more positive note - this sort of cryptic, methaphorical, and terse style of writing makes one think. He doesnt just hand you the answers. He makes you work for it. So in that regard, Nietzche, and TSZ is good.

Ultimately I feel that having a fixed opinion or criticism of a work like TSZ is kind of futile and vain. I will keep reading, rather than coming to too quick of a judgement. I'll just put my mere opinions in suspension and continue to read. It should be interesting to see what sorts of question and criticisms are provoked by the next few passages......

Cory Patrick wrote:Ultimately I feel that having a fixed opinion or criticism of a work like TSZ is kind of futile and vain. I will keep reading, rather than coming to too quick of a judgement. I'll just put my mere opinions in suspension and continue to read.

In particular, I think you try not to have an assumption about the character of Zarathustra.

Yes, he is coming down from the mountain to dispense his wisdom... But is he really wise, or is he full of shit? Or maybe he is wise in some ways, but is still a human with certain delusions and blind spots - maybe he is more than just a cartoon character labelled "sage"? Maybe when he is talking to the sun, he is just a crazy old coot talking to the sun? Who knows?

You may eventually come to a conclusion on that, but you might do well to try not to start with an assumption about it, but come to a considered judgement about it.

I haven't read the book since the 1980's, so my recollection of it is vague at best. But Neitzsche is notorious for being tricky, sometimes saying almost the opposite of what he means (relying on context to point in the direction of what he is actually saying). For some reason, he thought that was great fun.

CP wrote: It's funny and almost vain how Nietzsche writes about wisdom/enlightenment. As some sort of force apart from himself.

Yes, and just like his 'imaginary' sage Zarathustra! Which you have to read like a description of a 'force' apart from himself, and at the same time there are a lot of similarities between Nietzsche and his created Zarathustra, just like there are similarities with Jesus and religious prose in general. All on purpose.

CP wrote:When you think about how indifferent the sun or a star is to life on this planet, it makes you wonder if using the sun for a metaphor was such a good idea.

This perceived indifference and detachment is actually one of the best reasons to use the metaphor but at the same time there is a great involvement, unavoidable. Actually there's not much difference between 'life on this planet' and the star pouring its light on it.

CP wrote:Is that the state of an enlightened/wise person? Weary and flagging when there is noone to shine down upon, touch, and effect?

What is wisdom without there being any foolishness around? I think Nietzsche hints here at dualism and causality, and how it even effects our 'pure' concepts of wisdom.

CP wrote:And what does he mean by himself, his eagle, and his serpent?

The eagle refers to that where eagles always refer to: the higher state, the keen eyesight, the distance, the speed and the ruthlessness. The serpent is the wisdom of the earth, our nervous system, the body, shrewd, hidden, cold blooded and ancient. Two aspects that Nietzsche sees as driving parts of the wisdom of a sage. Another dualism.

CP wrote:

We awaited you every morning, took from your overflow (overflow of what?) and blessed you for it.

You see, this just sounds like vain, pretentious wankery.

Keep in mind Nietzsche comes often close to worshipping nature just as it appears to us, life with all its powers, blessings and strengths, as opposed to the anti-life that religion promoted for thousands of years. This is why perhaps Zarathustra is not the easiest book to get in to without having understood the thinking in earlier works.

I believe the pretentious style was done on purpose, like later in his 'Ecco Homo', though after more than hundred years it hasn't gotten any easier to digest.

CP wrote:Noone wonder I meet so many Debauch crazed lunatics who love Nietzsche.

Is it just me or has Nietzsche become a really 'trendy' philosopher?

Yes, it's unavoidable for truth to attract the biggest of liars, to suck on it, to cover it up, to usurp it! It's almost a measure of truth!

CP wrote:And is it true that Nietzsche had premonitions that his life's work would have an exceptionally malign impact upon humanity? I forget where I read that.

He was afraid the Germans and anti-semitists with their 'Reich' aspirations would use his work. He wrote he wished he had written his work in French!

And he was aware his ideas were dangerous, in many ways.

CP wrote:I can understand how that is so. He has a very unwise, flamboyant, almost feminine style of writing that makes it relatively easy for immature readers to get excited and deluded about.

There's a dramatic sense, almost Wagnerian that catches the imagination. Also Nietzsche avoids complexity which invites the ones looking for an easy read.

CP wrote:Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Lau-tsu, and many others seem to have had a much better impact on humanity - they have a style of writing that is much harder to exploit foolishly.

Nietzsche on the other hand....

Too soon to tell perhaps? If Jesus was really an enlightened sage originally, then what happened to his impact on humanity? I believe that the more powerful the teachings are, the more exploited and misunderstood they'll become over time. Just an observation though; the effort becomes inhuman when one tries to gaze over the ages and discern all causes and effects.

I agree with Cory Patrick's translation and rest of y'all
nice poem it self

I don’t believe Jesus was supremely wise. He may have had glimpses of enlightenment, some good insights, he did say some great things, but I don’t think he was supremely, perfectly wise.

He wasn’t a sage. I would say he was more a mystic/revolutionary – but not a sage.

Nietzche had an interesting analyses of Jesus. Nietzsche said Jesus was most likely an hypersensitive Idiot savant. Jesus was probably a borderline moronic-savant as a child, probably over-protected by his mother, a disappointment to his father - - and thus he developed an intense inferiority complex combined with both an unusually auspicious autistic mind, and a preoccupation with God and goodness due to the influence of the memes forming his childhood. He may have been fairly charismatic as a young man as well. Thus, he may have went through a phase of debauchery and indulgence. This may have resulted in great shame and emptiness. Great shame, emptiness, a great sense of inferiority and mental inadequacy, alienation, autistic disposition = an unusual passion for unusual sensibilities of superiority.

Jesus was a man who wanted invincibility, greatness, god, immortality, and most importantly – self-esteem. Because of his inadequacies when it came to getting along with the ways of an undoubtedly vulgar and mundane culture – Jesus was compelled to invent ‘the kingdom of heaven’………and how do you get there? Only through him of course! The hero! But I’m not totally mocking Jesus – he was a great man, in that he came to great insights while living in very difficult conditions, but his flaws and lack of wisdom are apparent in the virulence of his influence historically.

Diebert wrote,

If Jesus was really an enlightened sage originally, then what happened to his impact on humanity? I believe that the more powerful the teachings are, the more exploited and misunderstood they'll become over time

I believe that the greater the teaching is - the less mania it creates in the mind of humanity.

Lau-Tzu, Socrates, Diogenes, Schopenhauer, Chang-Tzu, Kierkegaard, and The epic of Gilgamesh (obviously written by a sage) have served mostly as benevolent functions.

Jesus and Nietzsche are both great examples of what happens when an individual tries to change the world without using careful language, and by emphasizing their personal will, rather than excercising true wisdom.

For the most part, trying to change the world and particular people with brute will and/or pretentious metaphorical language just blinds people, angers them, or charms them and makes them stupid.

However, I have to actually read a whole book by Nietzche. I will continue reading TSZ and see if my opinions change.

CP wrote:Jesus was probably a borderline moronic-savant as a child, probably over-protected by his mother, a disappointment to his father - - and thus he developed an intense inferiority complex combined with both an unusually auspicious autistic mind, and a preoccupation with God and goodness due to the influence of the memes forming his childhood. He may have been fairly charismatic as a young man as well. Thus, he may have went through a phase of debauchery and indulgence. This may have resulted in great shame and emptiness. Great shame, emptiness, a great sense of inferiority and mental inadequacy, alienation, autistic disposition = an unusual passion for unusual sensibilities of superiority.

Gosh, for a moment I thought you were trying to describe the average Genius forum subscriber! But never mind that, we don't know anything for sure about Jesus' psychology or physical existence. This is also were Nietzsche erred or at least obfuscated the issue by assuming the scriptures left enough traces for him to work on. What he actually ended up analyzing was the caricature developed by later generations in a denigrated church. Here Kierkegaard has clearly a better grip on theology. Nietzsche's scriptural analysis in his 'Antichrist' is showing his limitations, or perhaps the start of a don't care attitude regarding 'historical' truths (or any factualism and literarism) compared to psychological truths. Guns blazing full barrels, no holding back!

CP wrote:I believe that the greater the teaching is - the less mania it creates in the mind of humanity.

Lau-Tzu, Socrates, Diogenes, Schopenhauer, Chang-Tzu, Kierkegaard, and The epic of Gilgamesh (obviously written by a sage) have served mostly as benevolent functions.

It would be interesting to know how to measure or demonstrate that. But as a side remark: there is budding research that is suggesting the Gospel authors might have been blatantly borrowing from Odyssey and the Iliad. I might post about it at some point in a separate thread.

CP wrote:Jesus and Nietzsche are both great examples of what happens when an individual tries to change the world without using careful language, and by emphasizing their personal will, rather than exercising true wisdom.

Well, Nietzsche was aware of that and wrote a great deal about the will and how it functions in regard to wisdom.

CP wrote:For the most part, trying to change the world and particular people with brute will and/or pretentious metaphorical language just blinds people, angers them, or charms them and makes them stupid.

How can I know that it were not the blind, resentful and angry people that started calling a valid teaching 'brute' and 'pretentious'? And how many times in the past have they tried to modify or eradicate it for that reason?

CP wrote:However, I have to actually read a whole book by Nietzsche. I will continue reading TSZ and see if my opinions change.

Take your time. Took me almost a decade before I got the finer points. Reading something about his life and friendships help understanding some passages as well. The brute with the hammer then appears as the dedicated one with a tuning fork.

Bravo! Diebert.

Diebert wrote,

The eagle refers to that where eagles always refer to: the higher state, the keen eyesight, the distance, the speed and the ruthlessness. The serpent is the wisdom of the earth, our nervous system, the body, shrewd, hidden, cold blooded and ancient.

That's a great, thought provoking interpretation.

I read a similar almost exact interpretation of Nietzsche's eagle and snake in a book called 'Irrational Man' by William Barrett.

(Anyone read that book?)

Diebert, how did you come to such a detailed and well, great interpretation?

Did Nietzsche himself elaborate on the meaning of the snake and eagle in another piece of writing? If not, well - - it's very interesting....

Overall, Diebert, I respect your responses so far. A good read. I'm going to read the next part of the prologue, and maybe I will post another fragment and we can push our analyses further.

There is almost no end to the ways Nietzsche's Thus spake can be interpreted; some of them philologically sound and well grounded, but also some of them more intuitive that can be fruitful in a broader sense.
First of all, this is not a book that can be grasped easily in one read: if it stays pertinent to your particular path and thought processes, it will still challenge you for years to come...

To me, one thing that attracted me the most about it is exactly this pattern of to and fro from mountain cave to the city where men live and dwell; I think it can be abstracted into
a wealth of metaphors which Nietzsche may or may not have intended: Heraclitus comes to mind for instance ( fragment 41 )
saying -this is well known- that one never bathes in the same river twice; Zarathoustra, in his back & forth between mountain
and city ( the vita contemplativa vs. the vita activa ) never experiments the exact same thing; everchanging, ever evolving,
the sage is always a new man coming down his path towards men, and a new man going back up to a new mountain, always coming ever closer in that process to the One Thought, His, One Thought...It is, in a way, an unending dialectic where one term - the life of a recluse - being confronted with a second one - life amongst men - always yields a new resolution, a new
paradigm on his way to the One thought. Zarathoustra seeks creative tension; he gets all riled up down there and this allows him I think to go back as a different man...It's a kind of sling shot effect in a sense that allows him to reach his speed of liberation...He is saying in a way - and this is again as close as you get to Heraclitus - that he needs all the strife and conflict of the phenomenal world in order to attain this One
thought, in Nietzsche/ Zarathoustra's case the merging into one entity of the eternal return of the same and the will to power.
Hope this opens new paths in your reading,

Pyrrho