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IX. Zarathustra (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Zarathrustra knew already that man can be much more than a world confrere.You conquer only worlds that are there. He can also be a world builder, a builder of worlds, and how he is this and how he can become this was the main concern of Zarathrustra'a thinking. Ahura-Mazda is outside of creation. Man is exactly within creation, but being within creation he also transcends creation. He is not entirely explained by it. He can transcend creation towards the Absolute and can therefore bring meaning to creation. He is needed by creation, and that is the basic thought that Zarathrustra took. It means to take man, not as he is taken by metaphysical philosophy, as a being of which we can say that he has a nature -- namely, the nature of man. The nature of man is something that pretends to say that we know what man is, and therefore can give a valid definition of what he is and what his possibilities are. Zarathrustra is the first who explicitly shows that we cannot know what man is, because if there is a transcendent Absolute, even if only as an idea in man's mind, then that means that man is at least a transcendent being. If he loses his capacity for transcendence he loses the center of all his creative capabilities. Therefore, he cannot be defined as a mere "what", a mere being. He has to be defined skeptically and very cautiously. If we want to define him as a being, then we must define him as a being who can be. It is his own capacity to be, or not. He can be, he can become, and that is the definition of becoming. Man is a becoming being. There is nothing else becoming in the world. There is no other becoming in the world. We can only show there is -ome other becoming in the world if we believe with the scientists, or with Hegel, that there is a cosmic process which we overlook and out of which comes a meaning. But we don't know any such process. The only thing that we know is that those masses of phenomena are in continuous change. That is all we know. We know of change, but this change is not becoming. Becoming we make within ourselves, because we are becoming beings. We can make ourselves by our life and by our reason and by our will into a continuous and consistent human being, and that we can or cannot lose that chance. By losing that chance we take hold of certain changes in the world, certain processes, and transform them into processes of becoming by giving them certain aims, by forcing certain aims upon them, and then, in an abstract sense, inferring continuous changing lines of occurrences which are again transformed into systems of events. Events and occurrences can distinguished by the fact that in occurrences we do not know of any meaning or aim, while in events, which we can produce ourselves with the help of occurrences, we turn the occurrences around in a certain direction, and we can know their meaning, because we provide the meaning. Man, in that sense, is not only needed by creation but he needs creation, because if there were no creation then he could not be what he is -- a realizer of world. To realize world, to make out of the elements of phenomena that are given, a meaningful world -- this is the real task of man in the world, and the seal of his freedom. Those are the modern implications of what Zarathrustra stood for, and upon looking back it seems almost impossible that a man of his time could have developed thoughts which are so far reaching and for us so entirely new. For the first time we see, if we look deeper into history, a historical phenomenon that has occurred very often not only in human, or philosophical thinking, but also in human actions, concepts, and plans. I think it was Voltaire who first rejected the idea of a continuous history saying that "I for my person think that the age of Pericles, though it was so short, is worth more than a thousand years of any other history." So, with the Augustinian age in Rome, and so he thought, with his own age. We are so prejudiced. By making a choice he was the first to break with the age-old European, Jewish-Christian superstition that there must be a sense or a meaning to history. Just because it flows in a certain way there must be a meaning, an over-all meaning, and this was the first breakthrough, to say there must not be. There are many meanings to history and the ones that are most worthwhile may be those that had formerly been defeated a few times. They might carry us further than all of those victorious opinions that have ruled us for two centuries. Don't overrate victory. There might be thoughts and concepts that turn out later to be more profound and to be more useful than all of those which have really lived in reality. Here we can see such an example. We have, and we will consider more such examples. People who have considered the fundamental possibilities of man which the men of their time could not yet make into realities, could not yet develop, because the conditions had not yet been given. Today, in the twentieth century, a whole mass of conditions have been given that have never been given before, and to those of us for whom such thoughts so not seem strange it is amazing how they can be so automatically rejected and overlooked, because they seem so crazy within the context of our time. So that is why this especially one fundamental thought of Zarathrustra than man is responsible for creation and that this responsibility is a precondition for his freedom, had to be discarded. But it also shows, as Goethe once said:
Here is something clever that has been thought by Zarathrustra. It shows us another thing -- namely, the craziness of the modern scientific mind that thinks, as John Dewey once said "Oh, those are all errors of the past." The superstition of people who, because they have been born into the twentieth century with all of those enlarged opportunities for knowledge, think themselves all to be more clever than Plato. They aren't. Even our best philosophers today cannot be compared with a mind like Plato's, let alone that we all should be more clever. There is a third thing to learn from it, and that is of the existence of the absolute capacity of reasonable thinking in the human mind, of any age. There is a deep justice to this because we may ask those people who have said "Poor Plato, having been born in that dark time when humanity knew so little and we, who are so bright, know so much" how did it come about that they did not despair at the idea that they did not live at the end of time, in the fiftieth century. What knowledge people might have then. It would be be a deep injustice, wouldn't it, if the profundity of experience and thinking about the essential things of life should increase with the accident of having been born a century later than another fellow? It goes against the basic equality of man. That every human mind is a mind, that every man is a being that can be, that every man has equal value not only before God but also I hope before every other man. So all those historical fantasies of progress and of how far we have proceeded, are, from a philosophical point of view, all sheer nonsense. The real question is how profound is our thinking and what can be done with the world. Up to now we have not shown that we can do better with the world than people of former ages. We have only shown we can do worse. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
