On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. The small crowd that gathered around him attracted Davide Fino, who had his lodger carried back to his room. After lying unconscious or at least motionless for a while on a sofa, Nietzsche became boisterous, singing, shouting, thumping at the piano. He probably thought he was clowning deliberately.… But the 'inspired clowning' which had already been hard to control by the end of November was now in unchallengeable possession of his mind. He wrote notes to the King of Italy ('My beloved Umberto'), the royal house of Baden ('My children'), and the Vatican Secretary of State. He would go to Rome on Tuesday, he said, to meet the pope and the princes of Europe, except for the Hohenzollerns. He advised the other German princes to ostracize them, for the Reich was still the enemy of German culture. Writing to Gast, Brandes and Meta von Salis, Nietzsche signed himself 'The Crucified', and writing to Burckhardt, Overbeck and Cosima Wagner, signed himself 'Dionysus'. The note to Meta runs: 'The world is transfigured, for God is on the earth. Do you not see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck and Stocker shot.' The note to Burckhardt starts: 'That was the little joke for which I condone my boredom at having created a world.'
Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a product of the Second Innocence of atheism, the new historical destiny created by the death of God. Man has been surpassed in Zarathustra, for Zarathustra has negated all previous history, and this negation is but the obverse of the deepest affirmation. As Nietzsche declares in Ecce Homo:
The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent—Zarathustra is a dancer—how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the "most abysmal idea," nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, "the tremendous, unbounded … Yes and Amen"—"Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of… saying Yes"—But this is the concept of Dionysus once again.
This is a free excerpt of 450 words. There are 6,961 words (approx.
23 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Friedrich Nietzsche: Critical Essay by Thomas J. J. Altizer Access Pass.
