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IX. Zarathustra (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>> The second reason he had to take Zarathrustra was that Zarathrustra was considered to be not only the man who brought the dogma of good evil as absolutes into the world, but that he was also the first to make a decisive distinction between body and spirit -- A dualist -- the first great dualist, and Nietzsche hated dualism, because he had found after a long experience of Christianity that as soon as we introduce the concept of sin into the world, and then, by making the distinction between body and spirit identify sin with the body and spirit with the good, that then we are decidedly lost. He was right there, but once again he was wrong as far as Zarathrustra goes. Zarathrustra never made such a distinction. Rather he was like all of the other thinkers we are considering here and that includes Jesus of Nazareth (although it is a case that is hard to make but nevertheless it can be made). They did not accept the distinction between body and soul, or between body and spirit. When they talked about the soul they meant the human person. They didn't mean any spiritual energy which inhabits as a divine element the dirty body of man. They did not think that the body of man or the body of nature was dirty, and they did not think that nature (or the body) was the house of sin or evil. They thought that man's person is the creator of good and evil, not the house. We will look into Zarathrustra's so called theory of good and evil, but first there is a third point in which Nietzsche showed his splendid instinct for taking the figure of Zarathrustra, because he identified with him without knowing it, in one decisive respect. Nietzsche as Heidegger has said, and rightly so, concluded the whole metaphysical development of the west by finding, as the central concept of western metaphysical thinking, the concept of the "will". Nietzsche's last work, The Will To Power, tries to show that the will to power, in its naked form, rules and governs all of humanity, and that this is by no means an accident. That all of the cosmos, the "whole" in all of its parts, is nothing but this will to power, and that man is nothing but the highest development of the will to power. This is a merely energetic concept, and it is set against the concept of Hegel, that other great metaphysician of the nineteenth century, who believed that everything is spirit, that the "All" is only the different transformations, the "becoming" of spirit. Nietzsche put against this the will, and this "will" is a modern scientific concept that is very low indeed. He ran into biology, into all of those modern scientific factors, and he became distracted from his main purpose, nevertheless the concept of the will itself is absolutely decisive. When Nietzsche took it up it was in order to show that man has no free will, that all will is blind, and that it is blind because it is only the will to power, to mere energy. It is simply the will to have more energy, and that means to have more effect, to have more of what I would call performing power, power over others, power over things, and so he creates a theory of violence without having wanted to do so. He tried to overcome that theory of violence by a marvelous trick. The trick is that he, being a Christian (and Nietzsche was very much a Christian) re-introduced the concept of self-overcoming. Now, he believed, the will of a man could stand against this cosmic will, could overcome it and purify it by this act of self overcoming, with the consequence that Nietzsche fell back into what he really wanted to destroy -- namely, Christian morals. But the decisive point he envisaged was that there might be in the will an element that gives us a lead toward creative power, that there might be a lead in the concept of will that would bring us into a deeper insight into human creative capabilities, and creative powers for him were only artistic powers, because he couldn't see any others in the nineteenth century. The businessmen had stopped being creative, let alone the politicians, and so only the artists could be considered to be creative and perhaps the scientists, though he chose the artists. He tried to overcome that theory of violence by a marvelous trick. The trick is that he, being a Christian (and Nietzsche was very much a Christian) re-introduced the concept of self-overcoming. Now, he believed, the will of a man could stand against this cosmic will, could overcome it and purify it by this act of self overcoming, with the consequence that Nietzsche fell back into what he really wanted to destroy -- namely, Christian morals. But the decisive point he envisaged was that there might be in the will an element that gives us a lead toward creative power, that there might be a lead in the concept of will that would bring us into a deeper insight into human creative capabilities, and creative powers for him were only artistic powers, because he couldn't see any others in the nineteenth century. The businessmen had stopped being creative, let alone the politicians, and so only the artists could be considered to be creative and perhaps the scientists, though he chose the artists. So that was what Nietzsche rediscovered, and this was the original discovery of Zarathrustra. Zarathrustra's concept of will however, is quite different. He is talking about free will. "We thank thee for having given us a free will and a discriminating mind". What is this free will? In order to find out we must first destroy the superstition that has been built around Zarathrustra -- namely, that he was a dualist who created two gods, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman The later Persian gods are two and the creation has been done by both. One is God, the other is the devil. In the later religion there is a bad God and a good God and men have the task of choosing between them -- either to join the army of the good God, or to join the army of the devil, and whoever comes to govern the world will be decided in this battle. All of this emerges in later Persian thinking. Later, the gnostics, in Hellenistic times, will refortify this idea, and also the Manicheans who will take over this theory of the two spirits, one good and one evil, which try to rule the world with man in-between, torn apart by them. So Zarathrustra was credited with being the inventor of the devil and the inventor of hell. (He did no such thing). What he really did do was to discover, quite clearly and philosophically, the demonic element in man. He did not say there are two gods. There is only one God, Ahura-Mazda, but the world, the creation, is ruled by two spirits. By spirits he does not mean demons in the Indian sense. These spirits (of which he speaks) are not mythological figures. They are not in the world. They are spirits only in the sense that is meant when we speak of the "spirit" of the American Constitution, that is, they are institutional. In that sense they are leading ideas. Man has two possible leading ideas within him and these leading ideas can rule the world. The one is the idea of the "better" and the other is the idea of the "bad". This is a very funny distinction. He is not talking about good or evil. He does not talk about the good, but rather, about the better, and he does not talk about evil. He talks about the bad. Why on the one side the comparative and on the other side the noun? Why? The good sounds like an Absolute -- the better is a relative. The statement is strange at first sight. We will fully understand it when we see what Socrates did with the same idea, because he developed it to the full understanding of human reason. Here we have to see first why they are not absolutes. The later Zarathrustrian religion is full of demons, and demons not in Zarathrustra's sense as spirits, as leading ideas, but spirits really as ghosts of all kinds, hundreds and thousands of them. Nevertheless, Zarathrustra is responsible for this misunderstanding. He was also thinking about an infinite army of demons, but demons created by man. He talked about the better and the bad and made a distinction we have come to understand in modern psychology -- namely, the automatism that sets in as soon as man engages in any wrong action with the wrong intentions. The bad is infectious. If I do a bad thing to you, a really mean thing, then you must be very strong and conscious of yourself not to take revenge upon someone else. That would mean to get infected with a bad action and just let it go on. It is just the opposite with a good action. That is why there is no good action or "Good" but only the better. We do the better and it is not infectious. The other one who also wants to do the better will have to do it out of his own power and make a decision for it. It is not infectious except in certain cases of love, where it is not really an infection but rather the interchange of goodness. That is what Zarathrustra meant by producing demons. Men, in doing bad actions with intentions towards the bad, set spirits into the world which possess other men, and so the bad spreads continuously and can be hemmed in only by the free decision of every single man to do actions for the better -- all of this is the eternal struggle, and the struggle goes on only in man himself and nowhere else. Man has the possibility to be a demon. More than that, he is a creator of demons -- that is his bad capability. Here we have an entirely new concept, a concept comparable to that of Lao-Tze and Buddha. It is a concept of free human reason. They conceive of the human person as being free within the world. They show a position that man can take, that he has a certain task in the World, but that he has no task with the world. Zarathrustra's, on the other hand, is a concept of a task that man has with the world, and it is the greatest of all that have ever been made. The Christian concept is nothing compared to it. The Hebrew conception is nearer to Zarathrustra's but Zarathrustra's is the purest of them, and here comes the great misunderstood myth of Zarathrustra. It is not really a myth. It is as little a myth as his idea of God is a religious idea. It is rather a clear philosophical concept. This concept has never really been considered in all western philosophy, and I think this is quite in order, because to consider it almost requires our present day knowledge of human power over nature which Zarathrustra by no means could have had. What did he know of human power over nature and what do we know about it? We know that we can almost destroy all of the basic propositions of nature, so great is our performing power. Zarathrustra envisaged a task of man with the world and "world" means here the creation. As soon as he had thrown God out of creation so to speak, and made him the Creator he made man free thanking Ahura Mazda for creating man with a free will and a discriminating mind. And then he took the next step -- namely, to say that if this is so, that man is free, then the creation cannot be thoroughly determined, because if it were and man were only in creation, then man himself would be determined and there could not be any freedom. This could not be a cosmos. So this is a working proposition for man -- this idea of "the world". When I first took this idea up, before I even heard of Zarathrustra, man was beginning to claim that for the first time he could not prove that the world is a cosmos, and we can see in the natural view of today that we can only handle an infinite mass of more or less related phenomena, but that this is not a world in the human sense. What we mean here by world, or the creation, is only a possibility for a world. It means that God has created a creator of a world, and a creation which this creator can handle in order to make it a world. Zarathrustra was the first to conceive of this idea. The idea of man, not as a conqueror, though he came from a conquering people, but rather the absolute responsibility of man for Being -- not only for himself, but for Being. He approached this with the idea that man is a producer, a creator of demons. That means that man can make the world intolerable, and by god we have learned in our century that man can make the world intolerable by creating those demons of whom Zarathrustra spoke. But man can also bring the world into a cosmic order and that means to make things move the right way, the better way by his free thinking and decision if he is only ready to take over the responsibility. All of this is contained in one myth of the Gathas. After Ahura-Mazda had created the
world, the soul of creation, To take care of the creation of God as man's task in the world -- to take care -- this idea had come to me quite independently of Zarathrustra and I tried to develop it and then forgot it. Then I made another astonishing discovery -- namely, that another philosopher of our time, Martin Heidegger at Freiburg, who also had been shocked by this tremendous event was starting to think along the same lines. To ask the question "Is there any capability in man to take care of the world"? And after that I went on to discover that neither of us were so original as we might have believed, because Zarathrustra had already developed exactly the same idea in 500 B.C. Man's task is to take care of creation, and in taking over this responsibility he becomes free. This is the price he has to pay for his possible freedom, because freedom is only this basic possibility. Man is not born free. Man can only become free. Free will does not mean that man is free. Free will means only that man can become free if he uses his will rightly, for the better, and not for the bad. That is his only way to freedom, to becoming a free person, a free personality, and he can do it only at the price of taking over the responsibility for what God has done with the world, and understanding that God might have created the world to give him this opportunity, and that he should be thankful for it. The great joy of Zarathrustra's message (and we have talked about the fact that all of these messages we have been considering are messages of joy) was to discover this great basic possibility of man. It is the center of all man's creative capabilities and also the center of man's possible freedom, hence, we have both the basic distinction and also the basic unity of his message with that of Asiatic thinking. It is certain that although Zarathrustra had not known anything of Buddha or Lao-Tze he did the same thing. He tried to break the iron framework of the human mind that was myth, to break out of this iron cage, and to put man on his own feet, on his own ground, through free reason and through the consciousness that each human being can have of himself and his own possibilities. By doing so he could almost have drawn the same conclusions that Buddha and Lao-Tze drew. He could have concluded that man has the possibility of isolating himself from Being as Buddha did, by drawing all of Being into himself, into his own mind in order to reach Nirvana (which is only the fullness of human awareness and thinking and living within), or he could have identified man with the great possibility of benevolence as Lao-Tze conceived of him, like a gardener of Being, a gardener of other men, of plants, of animals, a benevolent one. But both of these possibilities of freedom are related only to man himself and not to the world. Zarathrustra relates man's capability of absolute freedom not only to man but to the world. He says, so to speak, "The world, the creation, needs man and man's freedom. He is not only the dear child of creation. Rather he is the one who is needed by creation, because, to put it in modern terms, otherwise the creation wouldn't make sense." Being has no meaning in itself. If this being is to have a higher meaning this higher meaning can only be reached by man. That is Zarathrustra's main idea. Man is here to put meaning into being, and that means to create the better, to bring meaning into being by making out of this being a world. This Persian world conqueror coming out of a race of nomads who conquered the greatest empire in the east was really the man who overcame the lust for conquest. That is why we so bitterly need to reconsider his thinking, because all of our development since the Renaissance has been nothing but a lust for the conquest of nature, of nations, of ourselves, of everything, and a lust for power as energy. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>> |
