Zarathustra - Page Two

IX. Zarathustra (1954)

Now Zarathrustra seemed to have-been aware of this and like Kant later he seemed to have been aware of another thing -- that if we lose the idea of an Absolute and make our relations in such a way as they are not directed towards this idea of an Absolute, then we lose the best capabilities of our reasoning. This seems to be a merely logical fact, but it is existential and can be shown to be existential. We see, for instance, in all clinical cases in modern psychopathology, that as soon as the capacity to establish relations has been lost within a given mentality, then the Absolute has been lost in that mentality. It is the same thing in the case of another polarity; cases like those in the first world war-- clinical cases -- such as the brain injury of a man who seemed to be absolutely normal but who could not do one thing. If one was sitting with him, and the sun was shining outside and one asked him "Say the sun is shining outside" he would say "It is raining outside". He was unable to make the switch from a true statement to a false statement. That was his brain injury. Other brain injuries showed that relations could not be made as soon as the Absolute wasn't there.

On the other hand, we have also seen that as soon as the Absolute rules relations absolutely, then all touch with the world and with reality is gone so that only the idea of the Absolute remains, and then relations are developed out of the Absolute towards the world rather than from the world towards the Absolute, resulting in the absolute loss of contact with reality and insanity -- the full capability of developing relations out of an idee fixe. This idee fixe is unmovable and is, mentally speaking, nothing but a mirror reflection of this idea of an Absolute. The insane person has no ideas. He is incapable of having ideas. This idee fixe is his substitute for the idea of an Absolute and it rules him and it rules all of his thinking, so exactly, so to speak, does this mechanism which governs the real relationship between our idea of an Absolute and the relative work.

To have then, the concept of divinity that the Hindus have had, that all myth has had, that we in the west had again with Spinoza, and that most of us have without knowing it, means to mix up the concept of God with creation, to make an actual infinity out of relative phenomena, which is exactly what the creation is if we truly look at it. We do not even know that the creation is One -- we haven't the slightest idea that it is. It is a mere speculation of ours and we cannot even prove that the creation is thoroughly related. What really comes before us as true relations, meaningful relations in the world, are relations that we have established ourselves. Of all other relations we know nothing as soon as we haven't established them. So the metaphysical idea that the creation is a whole, a "one", that it is thoroughly related, one thing to another, and that this whole is an Absolute, means really to mistake an infinite mass of phenomena and their relations for the Absolute, and every mixing up of this kind makes man lose his freedom, because then he becomes merely one function in an infinite bundle of relations which he cannot overlook and yet which he doesn't even know.

That was the tragedy of all mythical thinking, and it is ours too, because we are only modern mythologists without even knowing it. I mean the believers in those modern ideologies like naturalism -- if it is called naturalism or supernaturalism, idealism or materialism, it is all the same thing, the same medal from the other side. Only Kant's operation and Socrates operation, and basically Zarathrustra's operation -- namely, to say we do not know and cannot know the Absolute -- that the Absolute is something completely separate from the world of the relative -- only this can keep us on the right track of a development of straight and fruitful reasoning. We will see later that Heraclitus took this position up. We don't know whether he got it from Zarathrustra or not, but this position was not taken up by the whole Greek world with the exception of Heraclitus and later Socrates. All other Greek thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with this proposition of the absolute separation of what we here call God and creation.

Making man aware of this absolute separation also means another thing. It means to take God out of the realm of power. Power, in our sense, is not might. Let us not call that power, because we are after the sources of human power, and we mean by it something other than what is meant today. In order to distinguish it from force and violence let us go back to the two kinds of power I mentioned before -- namely, performing power and creative power. Performing power is not really power. It is energy. Real power is something absolutely different. It is that which can direct energy -- quite a different quality. Power then, in this sense can only be the possession of the One transcendental God who does not need to do anything but direct energy by thinking, and thinking taken here, is not itself energy (as it is taken, for instance, by the Hindus as the highest spiritual energy). Even in Christian thinking it is sometimes taken for energy, let alone in modern western thinking. Thinking does not know what thinking is. It only knows that it is and that it can direct. As soon as, we try by thinking to define thinking as a certain material or natural quality we have already fallen back into the concept of energy, and as soon as we think in terms of energy we are back into a world in which Creator and creation are mixed up with one another, that is, we are back into a merely scientific scheme. We do not transcend any more, and that means that we lose the highest capability of thinking by thinking wrongly about thinking. That sounds so complicated but it is all really very simple. It only means what all free philosophers have meant, the few who have existed in the whole development of the world, and that is that philosophy starts with one thing -- namely, never to pretend to know anything that you do not really know. And of thinking and reasoning and the human being, the human person we can only say that we know that it exists. We can also say and find out to a certain extent how it exists, but we certainly do not know what it is. We cannot answer the question as to its essence. What it is we do not know and so we should not pretend to know, because if we could know what it is then we would have the truth, and then we would have lost freedom already. It would mean that then we could direct thinking, we would be gods so to speak, and we are not gods. We cannot know what it is we have here. We only know that we have it, that, it is "here", the "das", the "that" which modern existentialists call existence. I do not call it existence, because I think that existence is just the what, but this is a matter of terminology and we won't go into it here. Their proposition is, in the end, a mere psychological one. It is not a real ontological proposition and that is what we are talking about here.

So Zarathrustra's concept of God is the most pure way of saying something about an unknown absolute factor which is always in the awareness of the human mind as being possible -- yes, being highly probable -- but it is not known and it is not knowable by the human mind. It can only be described in negative terms. If human reason attempts to describe this phenomenon of which it is aware that it might exist then it can do no more than to describe it in a philosophically negative way -- the Absolute separate One, the well or good-thinking One -- and then finish. No more. Communication with it is possible only in thinking, because it gives the awareness of thinking Itself. In this sense Zarathrustra develops the first concept of a transcendent God-Creator whom we do not know and whom we will never know, but of whom we will always be aware as soon as we follow our human reasoning purely to its limits. Here, in this Zarathrustrian thinking, as well as later in Kant's thinking, a discovery is made which for us is most important in our course -- namely, a way is shown which was dimly perceived by Pascal when he said "All knowledge leads away from God; real knowledge, the best knowledge, leads back to God". That means not to an understanding of God or to a knowledge of God, or to a foundation of any religion or any concept of God, but rather to go to the limits of human reason, to really try out nihilism in all of its consequences and then go through it, because nihilism is one of the bitterest consequences of human reason, and when you have done; this you will be exactly at this borderline of reason and faith.

So this relation, this funny relation, that man can never conceive of a real position for himself in the world, can never learn anything basically new about himself without having created, at the same time, a new concept of divinity, has a certain profundity to it, because both factors are permanently related to one another in human thinking and in human experience. This concept of the transcendent God is really; if we want to be critical of it, also a picture of God. Later the Hebrews, and especially Abraham, will tell us that we shouldn't make a picture of God, although they also made one. They hadn't yet refrained from it. But this Zarathrustrian concept is also a picture. It is a symbol. God is conceived, though Zarathrustra says we can never know anything about Him. Nevertheless He is conceived as an absolute mind, and a mind is something. We have a mind too, and our own mind becomes the absolute mirror reflection into the unknown of the concept that we make for ourselves of God. It is the most abstract and the most pure concept of God ever made, and the most sober one, yet it is still a concept of God and not merely a factor that we could call divinity or the Absolute. It is, as I mentioned before, also a symbol, but the most philosophical symbol ever to be invented and used in speculations like these. It enabled Zarathrustra to attain this knowledge that lies at the borderline of human reason, enabled him to find out a few things about the human mind that had not been seen up to his time, and that have since been entirely forgotten.

When Nietzsche chose Zarathrustra as the hero of his main work Thus Spake Zarathrustra he did a very remarkable thing. He was perhaps the first modern philosopher to become aware of the strange fundamental significance of pre-Platonic thinking, who already, as a young man in his early twenties, tried to give his students at Basel a picture of the significance of the pre-Platonic philosophers, and who was able to interpret the only saying that we have left from Thales -- "Everything is made of water" -- in such a way that it later became the foundation of all modern western philosophy. He showed how this one sentence could never have been possible before Thales, and why. He was truly concerned with those figures and he was the first to be concerned with them. For his whole life through he both hated Socrates and loved him -- it was an ambiguous affair all of the time, an ambivalence, and he had to write about him again and again and again. Another man he hated (and he took him for a man as we do in this course) was Jesus of Nazareth, whom he wanted to destroy, because he thought he was one of the originators of all the evils in our time because of his moral concepts. Nevertheless, he was so fascinated by him that he always turned back to him. He said "He was so young, this Hebrew, when they crucified him, and he was so noble. If he had only grown older like me and had really seen the world he would have taken back everything that he said. He was noble enough for it".

The third man he was concerned with was Zarathrustra. He knew little about Zarathrustra, because at that time he did not have any of the critical apparatus necessary to go deeply into the Zend-Avesta texts, let alone to find the few rocks that are lying at the bottom, and which we analyze today. So he made a big mistake about Zarathrustra, and that means he made the same mistake that everybody has made about him, and that is still made today -- namely, to believe that Zarathrustra was the inventor of good and evil. That he was the man who brought into the world the distinction between good and evil, and this does not mean that in Indian or mythological thinking people did not talk about this thing being good, or that thing being evil. Rather it means good and evil as absolute criterias of human life, as absolutes, and Nietzsche used his Zarathrustra in order to show how bad it is for the world to take morality, to take good and evil, as absolutes that become the judges of human life. That human life is destroyed by this moralism, and that we have to attain a position beyond good and evil. In this wanting to go beyond good and evil he thought he could do best by taking the figure of Zarathrustra whom he loved, because of his sayings, and whom he made contradict himself. He made Zarathrustra the Jesus who repented, who really could say now, after having learned better about the world, the opposite of what he formerly had said. That was his reason for taking Zarathrustra. The most remarkable thing about it is that he was deeply mistaken. If he could have read Zarathrustra's original statements about good and evil he would have had to realize that Zarathrustra's thinking was far beyond his own. That Zarathrustra really had discovered the right relation of human reason to what was later called good and evil, and that lie developed them not as absolutes but as the relative human creative capacities, almost already in the Socratic sense, which Nietzsche hadn't understood either, because he didn't want to. He had other purposes in mind.

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