Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Nietzsche's Empedocles

I here undertake to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an echo of Empedocles’ esoteric Katharmoi or Purifications via the once extremely popular Lucian of Samosata. A 2nd century satirist, Lucian was famous for his style as an exemplar of the very same ‘satyra menippea’^{Footnote 1} Nietzsche declares that he admires.^{Footnote 2} Lucian foregrounds the eponymous Menippus of this brand of satire in a number of his dialogues, rather after the fashion of Plato's Socrates, such that we are led to take Menippus as Lucian's double (and, just as with Plato and Socrates, scholars differ in their valuation of Lucian as compared with Menippus).^{Footnote 3} At the very least, Lucian's parodic style is at its ‘high’ or earnest best with Menippus – and it can be supposed that his depiction of Menippus may have inspired Lucian's own reputation as one who tells the truth by lying.^{Footnote 4}

Lucian was seemingly uniformly read in the past and it is important to emphasize this universality because his work (even his name) has become increasingly unfamiliar to philosophical scholars today. This unfamili]arity holds across the philosophical board as it were: analytic, continental, historical. Thus writing from the perspective of analytic or mainstream history of philosophy, the late Annette Baier can observe with respect to David Hume that and although Lucian was widely read in Hume's own day, ‘the overlap between readers of Hume these days, and readers of Lucian, seems to have been almost nil.’^{Footnote 5} Similarly – despite what one might think would be the very important detail that Nietzsche was a classicist citing Lucian and indeed qua classical philologist (i.e., both beginning with The Birth of Tragedy and towards the end of his writerly life in ‘What I owe the Ancients’ in his Twilight of the Idols which title is itself very Lucianic) – the connection between readers of Nietzsche and readers of Lucian seems to be a comparably spare set.

As Baier thus rightly points out, Lucian is far from a philosophical commonplace and again the point has to be emphasized because Lucian's readers once included a wide and disparate range of European authors: from Erasmus, who writes in Latin,^{Footnote 6} to Goethe and Schiller among others in a German context. In French, we may note among others: Rabelais, Voltaire,^{Footnote 7} Diderot, as well as de Bergerac, Montaigne, and of course Fontenelle with his New Dialogues of the Dead (1683) – as quoted by Nietzsche in The Wanderer and His Shadow, §214 (two very Lucianic titles). In English and in addition to Thomas More, there is Lucian's influence on Shakespeare and beyond his literary influences on Milton as on Swift and Sterne as well as Joyce – Lucian also influenced philosophical authors like Hume in addition to Marx and Hegel (for whom Lucian is the rather exactly not to be admired ‘Syrian Greek’) – all in addition to Nietzsche.

In this diverse sense, Lucian turns out to have been many things – here, one almost feels compelled to add, too many things – to many readers. Which also means, and not unlike Nietzsche, that Lucian is hard to pigeonhole: an elusive complexity rendered still more complicated in the case of a satirical author. Thus Carlo Ginzburg in his analysis of the influence of Lucian on More's Utopia, attempts to unpack the particularities or dissonances of this influence, observing that from ‘1550 onward, Lucian was to many people all over Europe (including John Calvin) a synonym for atheist, unbeliever’ (Reference GinzburgGinzburg 2000: 12; cf. 11ff). And to be sure, the idea of the parodic author, the very notion of satire (be it Menippean or otherwise) is commonly taken as sufficient to constitute enlightenment as disbelief, which is also part of the ahistorical or presentist (i.e., and to contextualize the term, a ‘whiggish’ or ‘Whig’ notion of history, as Herbert Reference ButterfieldButterfield (1951) speaks of it), that is to say, a habit of reading a staunchly Protestant and even atheist vision of the enlightenment back into Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, but also Plato and Socrates and above all Aristotle, all of whom are routinely argued (with indictments and convictions to support the case) to have been more, rather than less, skeptical with regard to the Greek deities.^{Footnote 8} Given Lucian's avowedly ‘atheistic’ credentials vis-à-vis both the so-called pagan gods and the Judeao-Christian God, Reference GinzburgGinzburg (2000: 12) refines the question, asking for his part: ‘what had Lucian meant to Erasmus and More a few decades earlier?’^{Footnote 9}

I shall be arguing that an ironic parallel may be drawn between Lucian's satirical hyperanthropos and the serious or high ideal of the same as it has been exceedingly non-ironically received in our own conception of Nietzsche's Übermensch.^{Footnote 10} I find this irony illuminating just where it is characteristic of both Lucian and Nietzsche to mix things up. Similarly, Reference GinzburgGinzburg (2000: 13) underlines Erasmus as praising Lucian's talent for ‘mixing serious things with jokes, jokes with serious things, (sic seria nugis, nugas seriis miscet).’^{Footnote 11} Lucian's hyperanthropos is a highly metonymic concept that includes above and below in its original parsing, to wit as the over-human above the merely human, as apparent superman, with all the trappings (by their fruits you shall know them becomes by their kitchens you shall know them), of the higher man.^{Footnote 12} In Lucian, this supposed higher man, here the tyrant Megapenthes, as he is distinguished in life, i.e., in the world above, is tracked in his reluctant ‘translation’ or passage to Hades or the underworld. This is his ‘downward journey,’ for a passage placing him among the shades, as the Greeks counted the afterlife: a dark, lightless domain, not altogether dissimilar to sunless pit of the Hebrew She’ol.

As I emphasize above and elsewhere, Nietzsche was not merely coincidentally educated in classical philology. One of the best of his day, Nietzsche was a consummate classicist and I have argued that philology remained his vocation throughout his life.^{Footnote 13} Nietzsche not only knew his Lucian^{Footnote 14} – and not just because every classicist would know Lucian – and there are obvious parallels between some of Nietzsche's more characteristic loci and Lucian's favorite images, beginning with a shared penchant for demystification.^{Footnote 15} Thus we may compare Nietzsche's famous reflections on truth and lie with Lucian's Alethe Diegemata or True Story, which last includes the paradoxically Cretan claim ‘I am not telling a word of truth’ and the claim that what makes Lucian's account distinctive is that his ‘lying is far more honest than’ other reports (Reference HarmonLucian 1913–67, vol. 1: 253). As Nietzsche will later do (to the enduring frustration of analytic philosophers), Lucian too overtly declares his own prevarication as an express and therefore superior variation on the otherwise traditional lies used by other historians in this True Story (which is accordingly sometimes rendered as True History):

And inverting Plato as he does, and given Lucian's reference to the philosophers (‘lying […] was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy’: ibid.: 251), it ought indeed to be difficult to overlook the nicely epistemological point of Lucian's warning: ‘Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others – which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them’ (ibid.: 253).

Lucian's tonality here is not of course Nietzsche's yet the epistemological issue is common to both as we recall Nietzsche's famously frustrating (to analytic philosophers for the most part) declaration contra the very value of truth where he begins his reflections in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by wondering ‘Granted that we want the truth: Why not rather untruth?’ (‘Prejudices of Philosophers,’ §1). If this initial supposition may seem merely casual rather than central (a worry for some where his preface begins: ‘ Supposing truth to be a woman – what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women …?’), Nietzsche, very systematically – and this is noteworthy given that Nietzsche is a philosopher who is not only commonly taken to lack a system but who also explicitly opposes what he calls the ‘will’ to the same – applies the same reflections to the logicians and again to the mathematicians and thence to theoretical physicists (or cosmologists) by arguing that their valuations, or estimations, namely ‘that the definite [Bestimmte] shall be of greater value than the indefinite [Unbestimmte], appearance of less value than the “truth”’ (Beyond Good and Evil, §3) can be seen as ‘no more than superficial valuations [doch nur Vordergrunds-Schätzungen], a certain species of niaiserie’ (ibid.) If we note that today's turn to evolutionary epistemology was already at work in the nineteenth century, we find Nietzsche arguing that the sheer circumstance that ‘without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification [Fälschung] of the world by means of numbers, the human being could not live’ (§4) does not change the character of these falsifications. Beyond the formal and the ideal, Nietzsche contends that he would not be the only one (here we mention only Poincaré or Mach)^{Footnote 16} to suppose ‘that physics too [dass Physik auch] is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to us, if I may say so!) and not an explanation of the world’ (§14) As I have argued elsewhere with regard to Nietzsche's philosophy of science, Nietzsche's consistency in this regard is striking for its philosophical rigor and Nietzsche emphasizes, not unlike Xenophanes, not unlike Heraclitus and Epicurus, but above all, not unlike David Hume: ‘it is we alone who have fabricated causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose’ (§21) which Nietzsche then articulates specifically contra Kant, arguing that when ‘we falsely introduce this world of symbols into things and mingle it with them as though this symbol world were an “in itself,” we once more behave as we have always behaved, mythologically’ (ibid.). It is in this very systematically sustained context that we may perhaps begin to read Nietzsche's intensification of the same point, which he now frames by speaking of himself as an ‘old philologist,’ in order to challenge the arch-scientific projection of ‘nature's conformity to law’ of which, as Nietzsche teases here, ‘you physicists speak so proudly’ (§22). For Nietzsche, such law-like ‘conformity’ is the product of interpretation, ‘it is not a fact, not a “text,” but rather only a naïve humanitarian [naiv-humanitäre] adjustment and distortion of meaning,’ (ibid.). Thus Nietzsche only too happily concedes that anyone may counter his argument with the challenge ‘that this also is only interpretation’ (ibid.). As it is, and which would be his point: ‘– well, so much the better’ (ibid.).^{Footnote 17}

* * *

In what follows, I focus on a particular dialogue: Lucian's Kataplous (which is variously translated as The Downward Journey, Journey into Port or Journey into the Underworld) just because Lucian's ύπεράνθρωπóς in this same dialogue is – as has long been argued – the source for Nietzsche's Übermensch, the super- or over-human.^{Footnote 18} Beyond this very conventional attribution and its reception, I argue that the context of Lucian's Journey, including its thematic subtitle: or The Tyrant, precisely as it is a dialogue examining the fate of many souls, specifically the tyrant in the underworld and as contrasted with the world up above, as a meditation on vanitas and its inevitable reversal, exemplifies the eternal or ultimate context of the ‘ought’ in Zarathustra's teaching that the human being is something that ought to be overcome.

In addition, one might well add Nietzsche's Lucian-inspired focus on the savors of the kitchen or cooking as such (and by metonymic extension: on the gut and on associated physiological aspects of nutrition such as digestion).^{Footnote 19} Even with reference to Nietzsche's discussions of food, a reading of Lucian will or should make it plain that Nietzsche's philological formation matters. Thus in the context of the fourth book added to Zarathustra, we note that the discussion of supper or ‘The Evening Meal’ includes the more refined or noble delights of the table, detailing, just to read Zarathustra's specifications here: lamb aromatically cooked with sage and served with wine (as contrasted with a vegetarian's meal of ground corn and water), and recommended in the context of gladness or delight – here we may recall that the historico-mythical figure of Zarathustra was said to have been born laughing – as opposed to moral superiority or advantage and without arguing for the moral virtues of such enjoyments (and eating meat always remains morally invidious). Thus this section, ‘The Evening Meal’ in the all-too-parodic fourth book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra not only sets the stage for the section entitled (what else?) ‘On the Higher Man’ but also includes a detailed allusion to nothing less Lucianic than the leveling equation of cooks and kings (‘With Zarathustra, to be sure, even a king may be a cook’ [IV, The Evening Meal]), which democratizing conversion also echoes the substance of Lucian's Kataplous or Downward Journey, including not only a discussion of the kitchen and the smells emanating from the same, but a dramatization of the reversal of circumstances for shoemakers (like Micyllus) and tyrants (like Megapenthes).

If the vocations in question (to speak of shoemakers and rulers) are allusions to Plato's Republic, Christian resonances also turn out to be important in Lucian.^{Footnote 20} Still more, I argue that the same array of allusions offers us a context for reading Zarathustra as an explicitly Empedoclean figure. Thus one can read the beginning of the Katharmoi as a listing of lives or roles that one must take on: prophet, poet, healer, in order to be, as a figure of free death, i.e., as one who goes to ground, a mortal no more. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the tale of Zarathustra's downward journey, told as the tale of one who dies, very paradoxically – but also very philosophically inasmuch as the task of philosophy is and always was the task of learning to die.

Just as Empedocles ‘speaks’ to his Agrigentians, teaching nothing less than the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra is likewise the teacher of the eternal return and of blessing life, teaching the lesson of the overman and self-overcoming beyond the barrel organ or music-box cycle of birth and rebirth to a standing eternity, amor fati, da capo.

By proposing to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra between Empedocles’ Katharmoi and Lucian's Downward Journey, I inevitably join with those many scholars who argue that Nietzsche's Zarathustra is modeled on something ^{Footnote 21} – be it the Bible, or Plato's Republic as I have also referred to both texts (just as Nietzsche does), or even of Wagner's Ring as we see in Ernst Bertram and others. And although I think there are intrinsic limitations to such parallels and although they by no means permit a reduction of Nietzsche's thought to the same, I will argue, rather like Ginzburg already cited above in his own historical reflections on More's Utopia, that we need such parallels in order to understand Nietzsche's thinking with regard to the themes advanced in Zarathustra, i.e., the overhuman, the will to power, and the eternal return of the same.

We need Lucian not only for his art of satire or parody but also as noted for his own picture of Empedocles, among other things. We thus need Lucian just because his work embraces the full range of Greco-Roman antiquity, its gods and its philosophers (and thereby also as argued above the range of enlightened modernity), both text and tale, along with, and this is essential: the new God of the New Testament, as it is with nothing other than just this new faith that the old Germanic belief, as Nietzsche speaks of it, that ‘all gods must die’ (Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA] 9, 128),^{Footnote 22} is ultimately, ineluctably fulfilled – consumatum est, it is finished.

From Lucian's Philosophies for Sale to Zarathustra's ‘Golden Fishing Rod’

Here, in a preliminary fashion underway to a discussion of Nietzsche's Empedocles, Lucian's The Fisherman or the Dead Come to Life also bears on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lucian's text tells the story of the reanimation of philosophers, all centuries dead,^{Footnote 23} ranging from the so-called Presocratics to Socrates himself and Plato and Aristotle and Diogenes the Cynic, all of whom gain a one-day reprieve from the underworld in order to return to the ‘overworld’ (i.e., life on this earth) for the purpose of taking revenge on Lucian for his mockery in the antecedent dialogue, Philosophies for Sale. Hence the dialogue begins in full couleur, venting the rage of the temporarily resurrected Socrates: ‘let him pay the penalty for his ribaldry.’^{Footnote 24}

This satire is an agonistic exercise and the contest in question is indispensable for illuminating what is an otherwise perplexing reference to Zarathustra's ‘golden fishing rod’ in The Honey Sacrifice of Book Four, not to mention that the metaphor of fishing and ‘bait’ is a recurrent one for Nietzsche. The importance of the metaphor of fishing is not itself in doubt, if it is also usually heard in terms of Christ as ‘fisher of men,’ as we can read Nietzsche's later musing in his Ecce Homo, ‘From this moment forward, all my writings are fishhooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone?’ (§1) Hence the fishing rod appears in the first section of the deliberately unpublished, fourth or final book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, followed by The Cry of Distress and Conversation with the Kings.

Lucian's Fisherman thus offers what can seem to be an ‘attempt at a self-criticism,’ parodying the fate of his own parodies in the face of the philosophies he ‘puts up’ for sale, as it were: the ‘golden fishing rod [goldene Angelruthe],’ appropriately baited as he emphasizes, describing its function to test the mettle of philosophers, as a scale for their merits, as true and not (mostly not), hauled up before the judgment of the personifications of Truth as well as Philosophy together with the plain speaking (and very plain living) Cynic himself: Diogenes of Sinope. Lucian's ‘frank’ comparison of a ‘test’ for the philosophic pretenders in question is instructive in a Zarathustran context as he puts the account of the test in the mouth of Philosophy herself who now says, addressing both Aletheia [Truth] and Parrhesiades [Frankness or Honesty]:

The problem with those who call themselves philosophers is precisely that ‘all their professions of despising wealth and appearances, of admiring nothing but what is noble, of superiority to passion, of being proof against splendour, and associating with its owners only on equal terms – how fair and wise and laudable they all are!’ but and instead, philosophers today ‘take pay for imparting them’ and what is even more significant,

To winnow the true from the pretended claimants to philosophy (nota bene: once again, in the presence of the perfected judgment of the incarnation of Philosophy and Truth and Honesty), we read Lucian's dialogical exchange on the rigors of the test as such:

Baited with ‘a few dried figs and a handful of gold,’ the first ‘fish’ to be caught before the eyes of the resurrected Diogenes is ‘a dog fish’ (ibid.).^{Footnote 26} The dogfish/cynic is followed by a Platonist, a sham Aristotle (i.e., an Aristotelian), and so on – ‘fishes’ who are in the course of the dialogue dully assessed as deficient by the same philosophers who had at the start of the dialogue returned to life just in order to persecute Lucian but who wind up by admitting that his denunciations did indeed apply to the so-called ‘philosophers’ of Lucian's times.

And one is hard pressed to claim that our own era is any different.

Where Nietzsche's Zarathustra speaks of ‘the best bait,’ he means it ‘as is needful for huntsmen and fishermen’ and where he refers to ‘a sea full of colorful fishes and crabs,’ he is talking in a similarly classical mode of bounty ‘for which even the gods might be envious, such that they would wish to fish in it and become throwers of nets: so rich is the world in wonders, great and small!’ (Zarathustra IV, The Honey-Sacrifice).

The language is Lucian's, mixing the language of classical literature and classical gods with the language of the New Testament, adding Nietzsche's parodic musing with regard to his own search for those to whom he might speak, for his readers, for his human beings:

Death of Zarathustra and Nietzsche's sketches for the Death of Empedocles

In a section titled, ‘The philosophers of the tragic age revealed, as tragedy, as world’ (KSA 7, 21 [16]: 527), Nietzsche sketches the relationship between Heraclitus ‘(art in the service of willing),’ Empedocles ‘(love and hatred in Greece)’ (ibid.) and the other Presocratics, and we note that Nietzsche also characterizes Empedocles as the ‘ideal-perfect Greek.’ (KSA 7, 3 [84]: 83) but also as exemplifying the ‘purest tragic human being’ (KSA 7, 5 [94]: 118), and we see an outline in three acts of his plan for the ‘death’ of Empedocles, concluding with ‘The great Pan is dead.’ (KSA 7, 5 [115]: 125). Even here, the parallel with Zarathustra is patent.

Both Empedocles and Zarathustra are compared with the divine and both are simultaneously absorbed with mortality. Indeed, Empedocles accedes to divinity by dying, elected or ‘staged’ as such (his refusal of kingship is part of this accession), as he had already characterized himself as an outcast in these terms ‘Of these I too am now one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving strife’ (KRS: 401; DK: 115).^{Footnote 27}

David Allison and others have reminded us that Nietzsche's original plans for his Thus Spoke Zarathustra also included Zarathustra's literal death. But one might go still further, as I do, even beyond the figurative and as I have already suggested, one may take the Lucianic reference to Zarathustra's downgoing in Zarathustra's Prologue as already announcing the literal eventuality or ‘fact’ of Zarathustra's death in the first book of the published text, where Zarathustra succumbs to a snake bite under a fig tree (nothing like one metaphorical cliché after another): ‘“Your journey is yet short,” said the adder sadly; ”my poison kills,”’ (Zarathustra I, On the Adder's Bite).

Quite explicitly, now paralleling Empedocles, Zarathustra reflects: ‘Verily, through a hundred souls I have already passed on my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs. Many a farewell have I taken; I know the heart rending last hours’ (ibid.; cf. DK: 31). But ‘thus my creative will, my destiny, wills it. Or, to say it more honestly: this very destiny: my will wills’ (ibid.) In addition, Empedocles’ teaching of rebirth echoes in the language of ‘nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence’ (Zarathustra III, The Seven Seals (Or: the Yes and Amen Song)).

Zarathustra teaches the Übermensch, as the transition that is the overhuman and the eternal recurrence of the same. But Zarathustra describes the human being as ‘a rope over an abyss.’ (Z I, Prologue §4), here embodied by the tightrope walker. If the entirety of Zarathustra's speech is thus an inevitable and involuntary commentary on the ‘performance’ of the tightrope walker and his own downgoing, we are confronted with nothing but a very patent dramatization of above and below: esoteric and exoteric.^{Footnote 28} It is in this context, as the tightrope walker makes his way above the crowd, producing a tension that appeared to Zarathustra as being the kind of rapt attention that permitted him to expand upon his account, thus he describes the human being as ‘a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping’ (ibid.), as Zarathustra teaches the overhuman. In this way, Zarathustra's sermon on the ‘rainbow bridge’ of life is offered as a life and death drama proceeds above him, step by careful step:

Many readers take the point but commonly assume the reference to be none other than the traditional Christian teaching of dying to the life of the world or the body.

This teaching should remind the reader of Nietzsche's shadow discourse in the book appended to his Human, All too Human, The Wanderer and His Shadow, where the shadow turns, vanishing as it does at the end. Thus Nietzsche writes of the human being as a small overstressed kind of animal, which – happily enough – has also had its day; life on earth as such, eclipsed in the blink of an eye, a detail, ‘an instant, an accident, an exception without consequence […] the earth itself, like all the stars, as a hiatus between two nothingness [ein Zwischenfall, eine Ausnahme ohne Folge, … die Erde selbst, wie jedes Gestirn, ein Hiatus zwischen zwei Nichtsen],’^{Footnote 29} ‘an event without design, reason, will, self-awareness, the most wretched sort of necessity, the stupid necessity … [ein Ereigniß ohne Plan, Vernunft, Wille, Selbstbewußtsein, die schlimmste Art des Nothwendigen, die dumme Nothwendigkeit …]’ (KSA 13, 16 [25]: 488–489; cf. KSA 12, 10 [34]: 473).

Inasmuch as Zarathustra teaches what philosophy teaches – that is, the art of living – Zarathustra teaches the overhuman as ‘the meaning of the earth,’ thereby teaching that the human being is ‘something that shall be overcome’ (Zarathustra's Prologue). The point is literal enough: the art of living is the self-same art that it is to die. The art, in Nietzsche's words, of dying in the right way and, indeed: for the right reason, ‘at the right time.’ (Zarathustra I: On Voluntary Death)

Da Capo: Nietzsche's Übermensch and Lucian's hyperanthropos

It remains common to assume that Nietzsche's Übermensch corresponds, more or less coincidentally, more or less historically, to Hitler's fourth Reich fantasy: this would be the evolutionary apex of human development.^{Footnote 30} The Übermensch has thus been assumed a superior human being (and that is also to say, with Plato and Aristotle and even Alasdair MacIntyre, a superior warrior or perfect soldier) or at least good breeding, by which one means a family of a certain economic wherewithal, thereby heir to a certain ‘good’ education, nutrition, environment, travel, etc. Today's Übermensch emerges as the promise of science. This last scientific ideal was at the time of Hitler conceived in terms of eugenics and genetic and other kinds of social planning; today the science has shifted more than once, first to genomics and since this is largely a related science, thence to cybernetics. Indeed the whole of technologically oriented society via the fantasy of genetic engineering and associated technologies – just think of the enduring enthusiasm for cyborgs, now considered in their latest incarnation as transhuman – presupposes the humanist's vision of the human per se and in general as supreme, as other, as ‘higher,’ in Nietzsche's words. If Nietzsche opposes Darwinism in the conviction that today's species represent ‘improvements’ or ‘developments’ over past species, he shares Darwin's habit of associating humans and apes. In other words, when Nietzsche's Zarathustra says ‘I teach you the overhuman. Humanity is something that should be overcome’ (Zarathustra's Prologue: 2), he is talking about overcoming today's humanity together with its ideals of superiority and attainment. Thus Zarathustra goes on: ‘You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and, even now, the human being is more of an ape’ (Zarathustra's Prologue: 3).

When we hear talk of the overhuman, the superman, even of the transhuman, we often respond by wanting to be first in line. Moreover we are inclined to imagine ourselves already there, hence we are already cyborgs, we are already transhuman: we are the culmination of evolution, we are all overhumans already. Thus it is significant that both Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans alike share the defining definition of the overhuman as a ‘superior’ being, the question dividing those who are Nietzschean and those who are not being only whether one takes this to be a good or bad, and perhaps even a fascist thing. But and to the extent that we are advanced, technologically sophisticated scholars, we will also happen to know that we are ‘superior’ not necessarily because revelation guarantees this for us (although it does) but owing to science and its estimation of our value as the dominant species in comparison with the ape. And routinely, at least in a political context, we do take or assume our own culture/nationality/race superior to others. Overall and in any case, most of us do not need to be persuaded that evolution works in the direction of the overhuman. And if we have not yet acceded to this superior status by natural evolutionary means, or by default given the rapacity of our destruction or ‘use’ of natural resources (whereby we act fully as if we intend to be the last beings on the face of the earth, which is indeed one way to read Nietzsche's ‘last men’), we expect to be transformed (this would be a version of the technological singularity) into ‘overhumans.’ Disagreeing with both pro-Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans, Nietzsche himself, on my reading, would seem to suggest that the overhuman qua all-too-human ideal, may turn out to be less than we suppose. To see this we need to take the classical, scholarly ‘step back’ as such a backstep can effect – this is the point of perspectivalism – a change in one's perspective.

As we have noted, every scholar knows that Nietzsche's Übermensch is a coinage taken or derived from Lucian. Every scholar ‘knows’ this not because today's scholars read that much, but because Reference KaufmannWalter Kaufmann (1974: 307, footnote 1) tells us so and every account I have read on the topic dutifully cites Kaufmann (and here I am doing it again but the citation is a simple one: ‘Kataplous, 16.’)^{Footnote 31} Kaufmann himself offers no context and this may have been because he was simply interested in the coinage per se (and Kaufmann's interest would seem to have set the tone for the positivism of source scholarship to this day). In the first section above I have shown that Lucian's ΚΑΤΑΠΛΟΥΣ Η ΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣ^{Footnote 32} illuminates Nietzsche's notion of the ‘overhuman.’ The literary scholar, Northrop Frye had detailed the consequences of that kind of comparison for Anglophone readers, explaining in a section of his Anatomy of Criticism that

Note here that Nietzsche's friend Rohde in his own monograph on the ancient Greek novel and its antecedents, had already emphasized the importance and strange significance of the notion as such, namely of ‘travelling in the underworld, for the sake of philosophical knowledge.’ (Reference Rohde1900: 261). This subterranean endeavor appears in both Nietzsche (Zarathustra) and Lucian, and it is the transfiguring point of Empedocles’ leap into the Volcano.

Lucian's contrast in his Kataplous, ‘The Journey into Port,’ highlights the superficial vision of the over-human being as a man of the wealthy, or ‘higher’ power class, a human being man towering above others regarded as lower, or lesser, in this life, and the same ‘over’ human transposed into the lower-world of the afterlife: the ‘superman’ (ύπεράνθρωπóς), the tyrant, is a man of power: ‘he seemed like divinity to me.’ It would be these same power attributes that allowed Micyllus, our shoemaker, to report that the tyrant Megapenthes in life seemed ‘a superman in my eyes, someone thrice blessed, nothing short of an Adonis, a foot and a half taller than the rest of mankind’ (Reference Fowler and FowlerFowler and Fowler 1905: 16)’ (ύπεράνθρωπóς τις άνήρ καí τρισόβιός μοι κατεφαίνετο καí μονονουχí πάντων καλλίων καí ύψηλùτερος őλω̣ πήχει βασιλικῶ…).^{Footnote 33} ‘But,’ – and this “but” is the point of the satire – ‘when he died and had to take off his trappings, not only did he look ridiculous to me, but I had to laugh at how ridiculous I was. Imagine – I had stood in awe of that trash and had jumped to the conclusion that he was divinely happy on the basis of the smells from his kitchen and the color of his robes’ (‘The Journey to the Underworld,’ in Reference Fowler and FowlerFowler and Fowler 1905: 276).

Given this sense of Lucian's overman unmasked, or better said – as Lucian reminds his readers – stripped of everything, of position and possessions including all raiment, of one's bodily aspect, of one's flesh and blood: the passage from life to death means total democratization. The Greeks did not teach the consummate resurrection of the body (and getting to the resurrected body in the afterlife takes Christian convictions) but retaining the barest shadow of the self is already an extraordinary achievement:^{Footnote 34} the underworld is a world of shades. But and just by this token, Lucian has a great time with skulls and bones: displacing the beauty of a Helen, the warrior's prowess of an Achilles, for the gloom, as Lucian remarks, makes it hard to get to know one's neighbors.

And yet with the Übermensch we are talking about what is arguably the most influential of all of Nietzsche's philosophic notions – vastly more influential than the eternal return of the same, a notion even Nietzsche scholars find difficult to understand. Set into what some claim to have been its ultimate constellation in Nietzsche's Der Wille zur Macht (that infamously ‘invented’ book), the sheer idea of the Übermensch in its Aryan configuration may be held to be the causal factor in not only Hitler's war but also the First World War (which was itself also called, instructively, fatally enough, ‘Nietzsche's war’ by journalists of the day).^{Footnote 35} It is not accidently that George Bernard Shaw titles a play Man and Superman. Talking about Nietzsche's Übermensch, we inevitably seem to be talking about the philosophy that generated the language of the master-race: the Übermensch as opposed to the Unter-Mensch as the same National Socialist terminology also speaks of it.

Nietzsche uses both terms. Yet the reference to Lucian suggests that Nietzsche's Zarathustra also teaches the Übermensch in a parodic fashion. The overhuman is therefore (if it is not only this) a satiric notion and to say this is to offer a didactic clarification which in fact does little to clarify Nietzsche's meaning. What I am arguing does not make things simpler, I wish that it did. Hence I am not saying that Nietzsche's Zarathustra does not teach the Übermensch – of course he does – but it is easy to fail to note that the elusive doctrine of the eternal return, the doctrine that Zarathustra comes to teach, the teaching that the overhuman himself or herself is meant to be the passage toward, is the eternal return of the same. And this too is the heart of Empedocles’ ‘truth’ of rebirth. Nietzsche's Zarathustra teaches that the human is charged to overcome, that is to say to get beyond, that is to say to get over the eternally recurrent, and that we know is the human, all-too-human.

On Death: Zarathustra, the Isles of the Blest, and the Gateway to Hell

More than Empedocles’ caution against carnivorism, more than his cosmological cycle, it can be the tableau of the volcano and the philosopher's voluntary death that strikes us most powerfully. And then there is also the dramatic detail of just one bronze sandal, tossed up and back to the land of the living by the same volcano. Would it not have been vaporized or melted? And indeed, to Empedocles is attributed a foot of bronze, often noted together with Pythagoras’ golden thigh.

Still the question of the sandal remains. Why just one? Scholars suggest this is a sign.^{Footnote 36} And thus Nietzsche's own Diogenes Laertius reports the ‘dropped’ sandal as a sign by which ‘afterwards the truth’ might be detected. So too we recall that Jason also loses a sandal crossing the flood-surging Anauros, carrying an old woman across the river, who turned out indeed to be Hera herself (no small feat, and there are Norse and Christian myths of the kind reflecting on deities disguised as the least of the world who manage to have themselves carried over various floods). More saliently, recalling Lucian here, the loss of a sandal bespeaks a very particular translation in this context. Here the passage is over the Styx, the bronze of the sandal tossed up thus signifies a passage, a crossing over to the underworld. Hence the metal character of Empedocles’ sandals – we recall that Hermes’ sandals are variously said to be silver or gold, befitting a messenger who passes between the realms of the deathless and the mortal^{Footnote 37} – connects Empedocles to the underworld, as we recall that Hecate was specifically said to be associated with a single bronze sandal. All this then matters in connection with Lucian who reminds us that Diogenes the Cynic (here Lucian combines certain accounts), dies by the expedient of (that is to say: voluntarily) consuming Hecate's dinner – that would be dog meat – ah and of course, all of it at a crossroads. If this were a longer exposition we could take this to a reflection on the significance of the dog's howling in Nietzsche's Zarathustra and even the lice-ridden complaints of Nietzsche's ‘theocritical goatherd’ in the ‘Songs of Prince Free as a Bird’ appended to The Gay Science, on the sorrows of abandoned lovers, as Virgil has Dido curse Aeneas, before her own voluntary death, invoking Hecate and anyone with sympathies for abandoned lovers, sacrificing with one foot bare (Aeneid, IV).^{Footnote 38}

In Book Two of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we meet ‘the Isles of the Blest’ following the beginning of Zarathustra's withdrawal – a retreat that takes years – ending with the following words: ‘The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow.’^{Footnote 39}

We have already encountered the Homeric topos of the ‘Isles of the Blest’ as the subtitle of Wilhelm Heinse's Ardinghello, to which Heinse Hölderlin dedicated his Brot und Wein and which same vision illuminates Hölderlin's own novel Hyperion. The geographic contours of these two accounts, Heinse detailing the recollections of Ardinghello, a wanderer in Sicily, and Hölderlin's Hyperion, the hermit in an idealized vision of modern Greece, are essential for both and both point to a locative longing for place and a transfigured world.^{Footnote 40} In addition to the local ‘setting’ of German literature, there is also a metonymic association to be made to the darkly dramatic Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), Nietzsche's contemporary Basel inhabitant.^{Footnote 41} Although Böcklin also painted in 1888 a version of the ‘Isle of the Blest’, the Lebensinsel or Isle of Life, his most famous painting is the Toteninsel or Isle of the Dead, of which the painter created several variants between 1880 and 1886.

Here the point with reference to Zarathustra concerns his own flight into the volcano (echoing the suicide of Empedocles) also located in a specifically Mediterranean locus. Most of us will recall the Zarathustran passage in question just because of its oddity, if and still more strangely, the majority of Zarathustra scholars – with the exception of Reference Jung and JarrettJung (1988: 1214) – rarely remark upon this wackiness. For my part, I remember reading it for the first time or for however many hundreds of times I have read it, but always without much sense. But it is worth thinking about such things, especially with reference to Nietzsche who spent his life engaged with oddities often unquestioned by supposedly critical scholarship.^{Footnote 42}

It is in this context that we turn to Of Great Events, prefaced by the section just to ensure that we do not miss it: On Poets, and beginning what can appear to be (if this were not Nietzsche's Zarathustra) a Platonico-Socratic mode teasing the poets for their lies, and affirming that ‘Zarathustra too is a poet’ (Zarathustra II: On Poets) Thus Zarathustra warns his disciple against belief, reflecting in a mode that we have seen above to be all-too-Lucianic, ‘if someone said in all seriousness the poets lie too much: he would be right’ (ibid.). As we noted at the outset, such a serious reflection on the poetic lie constitutes Lucian's epithet as the pretext for his True Story. For Zarathustra (as for Lucian here), ‘we know too little and we are bad learners; so we simply have to lie’ (ibid.).

Together with the above reading of Lucian, together with the suggestion that Nietzsche retells the purifications of Empedocles along with the death of Empedocles with his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the initial constellation or setting Of Great Events begins to lose a little of its oddity: this is the constellation of island and volcano, of the underworld, and ship with its captain and crew, the relevance of the cry ‘It is time! It is high time!’ and above all, Zarathustra flying through the air (along with the comment ‘there is Zarathustra descending to Hell!’) but also the interval detailed before his return on the fifth day, with anxiety ‘after three’ days ‘the devil had taken Zarathustra’ followed in good Menippean (or good Lucianic) fashion by the retort that ‘Sooner would I believe that Zarathustra had taken the devil.’

Let us recall the start of this section here:

This is patently related to Lucian if we are also aided by Rohde's Psyche.^{Footnote 43} In addition, we read further:

Here Nietzsche's story as he tells it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra repeats a popular ghost story published by the Suabian poet, Justinus Kerner (we may recall that Kierkegaard refers to him very generally), who indeed claimed that it had been originally been ‘channeled’ by a seeress in his Blätter aus Prevorst:^{Footnote 44}

Jung, who argues that such ghost ‘stories are recorded because they are edifying,’ explains that ‘[t]he two gentlemen from London were big merchants and evidently they were not quite alright, because they are painted with the colors of hell which express sinfulness, one is black and the other grey, whereas they should be wearing white shirts which is court dress in heaven’ (ibid.).

Grüselgeschichten, ghost stories, tales of the unhappy dead and of things we do not guess in this life – as is Lucian's Kataplous, in one vein, and Rohde's Psyche, in another – are comparably ‘instructive’ or edifying. The ghostly dimension of Zarathustra's witch-like flight, as the reference above to Lucian and to Rohde now makes plain, is literal rather than literary. If Gary Shapiro, who is one of the few scholars to write on this, is very right to point to the geological significance of this passage by contrast with the Isles of the Blest, he notes that here in Of Great Events Zarathustra ‘appears mysteriously on a volcanic island (where his Shadow seems to fly into the volcano itself),’^{Footnote 45} Shapiro, along with most other commentators does not note that Zarathustra's shadow, the shade in question, corresponds to the flattened dimensionality that is for the ancient Greek the only thing that remains of us after death.

Thus and with respect to the claim that it is, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra repeats, ‘high time,’ that it is therefore late – ‘it's time, it's time’ as T.S. Eliot calls – we are talking about death.^{Footnote 46} Thus Zarathustra teaches the overman and in ‘our loneliest loneliness’ (remembering that everyone must die their own death, which no one can die for you as Heidegger will tell us to great philosophical renown: as it is with being born, death is always only one's own),^{Footnote 47} and thus we hear the teaching of the eternal return of the same. And of this teaching we can say, as Nietzsche did, that whether you hear it or not, it is what you will do in any case: Du wirst es jedenfalls.

Coda

What Nietzsche takes from Lucian's Kataplous is the contrast between the values we have in our culture and our tendency to take these values, à la Herbert Butterfield's presentism, not only as universal but also as timeless. Writing that the human being is something to be overcome, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, asking us to consider not the immediate, be it economic advantage or pleasure, but the cosmos, as will to power.

Thus Nietzsche does not say The little businessman is will to power and nothing besides, much less The German nationalist is will to power and nothing besides, but The world is will to power and nothing besides – meaning thereby the collective whole of existence in the world (and indeed beyond the earth). In this sense, he has recourse to biological metaphors and from this same perspective he also emphasizes that the aim of life is expression not survival. It is only, he says, a bit unkindly, the Englishman who strives for life at any cost. But this is his general criticism of asceticism as anti-life. Life, as Nietzsche writes, is ‘continually shedding something that wants to die…constantly being a murderer,’ (GS 26) but also and always including death itself. Life is all about becoming, change, growth, reproduction, and death as Nietzsche denumerates these in his Twilight of the Idols contra the idée fixe of ‘“Reason” in Philosophy,’ all points to very Lucianic insights.

We may wonder what Nietzsche might have meant by inventing Zarathustra as a sage for a modern world and even more radically, by calling neither for salvation nor for a remedy but and to begin with: purification. But to understand this call we need to overcome the human all-too-human, and for that we need to learn to love life even beyond what we know of the human condition.