SPEP Issue 2011-Babich

Babette Babich

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE VOLCANO

ON THE ANTIQUE SOURCES OF NIETZSCHE’S ÜBERMENSCH

SPEP Issue 2011

Philosophy Today, Vo. 36

(Summer 2011): 213-231

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE VOLCANOON THE ANTIQUE SOURCES OF NIETZSCHE’S ÜBERMENSCH

Babette Babich

Happy and blessed one, you shall be a godinstead of a mortal.

Empedocles

It has traditionally been observed that the fig-ure of Empedocles is key to Nietzsche’sZarathustra. But the nature of this significance isless commonly detailed: in part this is Nietz-sche’s fault, for and although he includesEmpedocles in his notes for the Pre-PlatonicPhilosophers, Nietzsche excludes Empedoclesfrom his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of theGreeks—both of which were unpublished. Simi-larly unpublished and a bit less widely known areNietzsche’s drafts of the Death of Empedocles,which tend to interest Germanists who are them-selves usually more interested in Hölderlin’s sub-stantially more developed drafts for his ownDeath of Empedocles. For my part in what fol-lows, I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as an echo ofEmpedocles’ as orator or speaker but also interms of Empedocles’ esoteric Katharmoi orPurifications. This means that I read Zarathustrain terms of the eternal return of the same as theteaching of going to ground, that is: death and re-birth (and I argue that death is present at the startand already at work in the section entitled TheAdder’s Bite: indeed, I show that this is explicitlyat work in the parodic teaching of the overman).For Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us, likeEmpedocles, that the human being is somethingthat should be overcome, and thus it makes a dif-ference that we hear Zarathustra proclaim thisteaching as the tightrope walker begins hisdoomed dance over the marketplace and thatZarathustra’s fate, at least immediately, concernsthe downward fall of this overman overcome bythe danger of his calling. This same teaching con-joined with Zarathustra’s diagnosis of ubiquityof the will to power, especially among the weak-

est, also underlines an arch or parodic turn andeven mockery.

Hence and in order to get to Empedocles, I ar-gue that it is necessary to read Nietzsche’s ThusSpoke Zarathustra as Lucianic or Menippean sat-ire, as Nietzsche refers to this. Inasmuch as thesatires attributed to the cynic Menippus ofGadara happen to be lost, I read Nietzsche’s ThusSpoke Zarathustra via the second century ADLucian’s “high” or serious, i.e., truth-purposing(as the ancients described it) kind of parody1—where Lucian relates to Menippus, at least insome part, as Plato does to Socrates.2

In addition, it is useful to note that there areobvious parallels between some of Nietzsche’smore characteristic loci and Lucian’s favorite im-ages, including Nietzsche’s references to truthand Lucian’s True Story [Ale\the\ Die\ge\mata],which includes the paradoxically Cretan claimthat “not a word” he will utter is “true,” and thatwhat makes his account distinctive is solely thathe will be a more “honest liar than his predeces-sors.”3 Thus we read Lucian’s preface to thereader: “I too have turned to lying—but a muchmore honest lying than all the others. The one andonly truth you’ll hear from me is that I am lying.By frankly admitting that there isn’t a word oftruth in what I say, I feel I am avoiding the possi-bility of attack from any quarter.”4 Lucian couldnot make his claim any plainer: “I am writingabout things I neither saw nor heard of from a sin-gle soul, things which don’t exist and couldn’tpossibly exist. So all readers beware, don’t be-lieve any of it.”5

The tonality is not Nietzsche’s to be sure, butthe point is hardly foreign to Nietzsche, who fa-mously wonders about our preference for truthrather than lies. Where, so Nietzsche argues,some truths are deadly, we survive or live bymeans of life-saving illusions or lies.6 In additionto Nietzsche’s reflections on the language of

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206 © Depaul University 2011

“laws” in nature and in science and on the kind ofphilosopher who is impressed by physicists,there is also Nietzsche’s satirical comparison ofhuman beings to insects at the start of his OnTruth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense ,where theperspective view from atmospheric heightsabove the earth is indebted not only to the Stoics’cosmic or higher perspective but also to Lucian,who is also important for Nietzsche, as it has longbeen argued that Lucian’s Kataplous is thesource for Nietzsche’s term Übermensch oroverhuman. Literally hermeneutic translation,the Kataplous addresses the representation/per-ception of the uJperavnqrwpo" [hyper-anthropos]in the here and now by contrast with the afterlifeor underworld.7 Thus the context of Lucian’sKataplous or Downward Journey, including itsthematic focus on the tyrant in the underworldcontrasting with this life and the perspective onhuman glory and its inevitable reversals, offers acontextualization of Zarathustra’s teaching thatthe human being is something that ought to beovercome.8 But for this reflection on death, as onbirth and rebirth, there is a needed reflection onEmpedocles, inasmuch as the doctrine of recur-rence is Empedoclean, articulating an older Or-phic tradition that also inspires Heraclitus, Py-thagoras, Parmenides, and Anaximander.

By proposing such a reading, I join thosemany scholars who argue that Nietzsche’sZarathustra is parodically modeled on some-thing9—be it the Bible, or Plato’s Republic, orWagner’s Ring. Although I think there are intrin-sic limitations to all such parallels and I am by nomeans seeking to reduce Nietzsche to eitherLucian or Empedocles for that matter, I do ar-gue—rather radically as we shall see—that inNietzsche’s case Lucian is no less relevant for hisown picture of Empedocles but also for his satiresor parodies.10 Thus we note Nietzsche’s empha-sis in Twilight of the Idols of the enduring impor-tance of satire for his own style from the start ofhis writerly life and throughout (TI, What I Owethe Ancients §1).

I cannot explore this here beyond a firstsketching but we may also note the relevance ofLucian’s The Dead Come to Life or the Fisher-man, a dialogue in which the original and centu-

ries dead Athenian philosophers gain a reprievefrom the underworld for a single day to return tolife in order to harry Lucian for his mockery: “Lethim reap the fruit of his revilings” cries the tem-porarily resurrected Socrates.11

The satirical parallel illuminates the perplex-ing “Honey Sacrifice” that introduces the pa-tently parodic and “fourth” book of Thus SpokeZarathustra, originally only for private circula-tion (and so much was Nietzsche opposed to pub-lication that he subsequently sought to reclaimthe printed copies from his friends to have themdestroyed). Here the coincidence betweenEmpedocles and the “honey sacrifice” invoked inNietzsche’s Zarathustra-text could not be moreevident as Empedocles writes of sacrifices in anoriginal or “golden age” as follows:

Among them was no war god Ares worshipped northe battle cry, nor was Zeus their King . . . butCypris |Aphrodite| was queen . . . propitiated withholy images and paintings of living creatures . . .pure myrrh and sweet scented frankincense,throwing to the ground libations of yellow honey.(Empedocles, Katharmoi, DK 128; KRS 411)

As we know, the doxography details thatEmpedocles was known both for his high stand-ing or family wealth and for the nature and kindof his donations to the public benefit, including alarge ox made of barley cake, figs, and honey.Nor was this necessarily received as a “goodthing” for an ancient Greek public that tended toexpect certain gifts from the noble classes in theclassical form of a decent barbecue or “animalsacrifice,” if only because ancient Greek culturewith all its problems with bloodshed made itmore than ordinarily difficult to simply shedblood at will, that is: one needed to practiceslaughter not only “with a prayer” (Empedocles,Katharmoi, DK 137; KRS 415) but a veryspecific ritual.

The Empedoclean language of the honey sac-rifice also has an echo in Zarathustra’s Prologue:“Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a beethat has gathered too much honey; I need handsoutstretched to take it,” but the parody I trace herecorresponds to Lucian’s language in his Piscator,where Lucian cites baited fish hooks as a means


207© Depaul University 2011

to test the waters for the appropriate fish, as itwere, and particularly for its reference to Zara-thustra’s “golden fishing rod.”

Parodying the fate of his own parodies in theface of the philosophies he puts up “for sale” inhis related dialogue of the same name, we en-counter the “fishing rod” baited appropriatelyand proving the mettle of philosophers, as atouchstone for sounding them out and for findingthem true or not, and, obviously, mostly not, be-fore the judgment of the personifications of Truthherself and of Philosophy herself as well as thereanimation of the plain speaking and plain-liv-ing, Diogenes of Sinope. Lucian’s comparison ofa “test” is instructive in a Zarathustran context:

young eagles are supposed to be tested by the sun,our candidates have not got to satisfy us that theycan look at light, of course; but put gold, fame, andpleasure before their eyes; when you see one re-main unconscious and unattracted, there is yourman.12

The problem with philosophers as one findsthem is indeed that, although “professing to de-spise wealth and appearance,” they

take pay for imparting” what they teach and “areabashed in the presence of the rich, their lips waterat the sight of coin; they are dogs for temper, haresfor cowardice, apes for imitativeness, asses forlust, cats for thievery, cocks for jealousy. They area perfect laughing stock with their strivings aftervile ends, their jostling of each other at rich men’sdoors, their attendance at crowded dinners, andtheir vulgar obsequiousness at table.13

Thus to test the true from the pretended claimantsto philosophy (note again in the presence of Phi-losophy and of Truth, in the flesh as it were), thedialogue proceeds:

—“if the priestess will lend me the line I see thereand the Piraean fisherman’s votive hook,”—“You can have them; and the rod to complete theequipment,” baited with a “few dried figs and ahandful of gold.”

The first so-called “fish” caught in the sight ofDiogenes, the original Cynic, is

—Salmo Cyniscus: good gracious what teeth . . .why the hook is bare; he has not been long assimi-lating the figs, eh? And the gold has gone downtoo.14

The Cyniscan fish is followed quickly by aPlatonist, a sham Aristotle, that is to say: an Aris-totelian, and so on—all “fishes” summarilyjudged as lacking by the same original philoso-phers themselves who had initially returned tolife to give Lucian what for, but who find at theend that his denunciations perfectly fit the philos-ophers philosophizing in their names.

Like Lucian, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra com-bines or mixes the language of classical literatureand classical gods with the language and the sin-gular god of the New Testament with Nietzsche’sown paradoxical, parodic, musing touch with re-gard to his own search for those to whom hemight speak, for readers, for human beings:

Especially the human world, the human sea:—to-wards IT do I now throw out my golden fishing rodand say: Open up, thou human abyss! Open up, andthrow unto me thy fish and shining crabs! With mybest bait shall I allure to myself to-day the strangesthuman fish! . . . Until, biting at my sharp hiddenhooks, they have to come up unto MY height, themotleyest abyss-groundlings, to the wickedest ofall fishers of men. (Zarathustra IV, The Honey Sac-rifice)

“Mocking Lucians”

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche character-izes the ancient satirists as “the mocking Luciansof antiquity” [spöttische Luciane des Altertums](BT §8), satirists faute de mieux, grasping after“discolored and faded flowers” long scattered tothe winds, grasping that is to say in the wake ofthe “final effulgence” [letzten Aufglänzen] thathad been the origin or birth of the Dionysianspirit of musical tragedy (BT §10).

Thus by the time you get to Lucian in the sec-ond century AD, tragedy, as Nietzsche speaks ofit, has already long perished by its own hand (thisdeath begins for Nietzsche in the third centuryBC with Socrates and Euripides and indeed theNew Comedy). Although commentators,whether these be theorists in a philosophical or



philologist’s/classicist’s modality, almost uni-formly fail to advert to this emphasis, Nietzsche’spoint, for his own part, in his discussion of the“Origin” of the tragic artwork was a sustained de-tailing with the consequences of the transitionfrom spoken or sung performance to the writtentext.15 This same emphasis had also inspired hisinaugural lecture in Basel on the famous Homerquestion and his several public lectures on musicand tragedy in Basel, an emphasis that has simi-larly gone unheard (perhaps because we continueto be impressed more by Wagner, whom we as-sume we understand, than by Aeschylus orSophocles when it comes to reading Nietzsche’sfirst book on tragedy).

We would seem to be on different groundwhen we ask: Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?For we are then thinking of Persians not Greeks,yet let us not forget the Syrian Lucian (or the Syr-ian Christ). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is first andforemost a speaker and above all we should bearin mind that the tale of Zarathustra is a tale ofdown-going. Both the language of a speaker,Heidegger says “an advocate [ein Für-sprecher],”16 along with Zarathustra’s tempera-ment, parallels Empedocles as orator, with all hisown moodiness and Hölderlinian impatience.And the teaching Empedocles comes to teach, es-pecially as articulated in his Katharmoi, is theteaching of death and that means for mortals theteaching of birth and rebirth: i.e., the eternal re-currence of the same.

Where Heidegger observes that “Zarathustraspeaks on behalf of life, suffering, and the circle”(NII , 212) , we also find ourselves onEmpedoclean ground, defined as Heidegger de-fines all three as “the selfsame,” invoking thesolid circle (in similarly Hölderlinian terms) asthe ring-dance of love, as the wedding dance.Thus Heidegger echoes Empedocles’ sphere:“‘Circle’ is the sign of the ring that wrings its wayback to itself and in that way always achieves re-currence of the same” (NII, 213). ForEmpedocles, who emphasizes the sunevceia, thatwhich conjoins the disjoint, the “wheel-shapedSphere is held fast in the close obscurity of Har-monia, exulting in its joyous solitude” (On Na-ture, KRS 358; DK 27; trans. modified).17

This same wheel-shaped sphere correspondsto the golden ball Zarathustra throws, as the yearthrows the leaves (or the birds as Rilke says), sea-sons of life. Hence Nietzsche’s Zarathustrateaches that the “human being is something thatshall be overcome” (Z I: Prologue §3), proclaim-ing: “What is great in man is that he is a bridgeand not an end: what can be loved in man is thathe is an overture and a going under” (Z I: Pro-logue §4), a claim followed with a string of meta-phors for death and perishing: “Life itself con-fided this secret to me: Behold it said I am thatwhich always overcomes itself . . . where there isperishing, a falling of leaves, behold, there lifesacrifices itself—for power” (Z II: On Self-Over-coming). This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s willto power which he finds, so Zarathustra tells us,everywhere, even in the smallest, even in theweakest, and indeed, especially there.

In the Katharmoi fragments as gathered to-gether (an editorial tradition, Nietzsche tellsus,that goes back to the Alexandrian grammari-ans), we have the perfect (and perfectly literal)rhetorical topos. Thus Empedocles addresses hisaudience:

w\fivloi, oi} mevga a[stu kavta xanqou' jAkravganto"/ naivet ajn ja[kra povleo" (Ye friends who dwell inthe mighty city along the yellow Acragas, hard bythe Acropolis). (KRS 399; DK 112)

Thus beginning, O friends, Jw fi vloi —Empedocles goes on to tell of himself, to offer hisown transfiguration as exemplar, saying I:

ejgw; d ^uJmi'n qeo;" a[mbroto" . . . (But unto ye I walkas god immortal now, no more as a man, On allsides honored fittingly and well, crowned bothwith fillets and with flowering wreaths). (Ibid)

Thus spoke Empedocles. Literally, and thismatters for Nietzsche’s as we have noted his em-phasis on the spoken and written tradtion in TheBirth of Tragedy, thus Empedocles writes, thushe tells us himself.

It is as rhetorician, as a speaker, that one firstattends to Empedocles and this same speaker’s,orator’s, rhetor’s element characterizes AlsoSprach Zarathustra. Nietzsche begins his inau-gural lecture in Basel on “Homer and Classical



Philology” by noting the critical importance ofthe person both in antiquity and as it persists as anissue in the themes of then-current scholar-ship. But where Empedocles is engaged in “self-presentation,” like the philosophers we citedabove as Lucian mocks them in his Philosophersfor Sale, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra masks himself.

The overhuman can be the man who walks asdoes Empedocles, as a mortal no more, and theoverhuman is also and at the same time in Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra very much the image ofLucian’s “hihger” man, the tyrant before his owngoing to ground.

Death of Zarathustra and Nietzsche’sSketches for the Death of Empedocles

Nietzsche planned to write a drama on themodel of Hölderlin’s several drafts of the Deathof Empedocles.18 Nietzsche’s project followsHölderlin’s, composing several drafts which hedoes not bring to fruition.

In a section titled, “The Philosophers of theTragic Age revealed, the world as tragedy” (KSA7, 527), Nietzsche sketches “The tragic humanbeing,” outlining three acts of his plan for the“death” of Empedocles; the parallel withZarathustra, even at this early stage, is patent.Both Empedocles and Zarathustra are comparedwith the divine and both are simultaneously ab-sorbed with mortality. Indeed, Empedocles ac-cedes to divinity by dying, whether elected or“staged” as such (his refusal of kingship is part ofthis accession), as he had already characterizedhimself as an outcast in these terms, “Of these Itoo am now one, an exile from the gods and awanderer, having put my trust in raving strife”(KRS 401; DK 115).19

David Allison and others have reminded usthat Nietzsche’s original plans for his Thus SpokeZarathustra also included Zarathustra’s literaldeath. But one might go still further, as I do, evenbeyond the figurative and, as already suggested,take the Lucianic reference to Zarathustra’sdowngoing in Zarathustra’s Prologue as an-nouncing the literal eventuality or “fact” ofZarathustra’s death in the first book of the pub-lished text where Zarathustra succumbs to a

snake bite under a fig tree (nothing like one meta-phorical cliché after another): “‘Your way isshort the adder said sadly, ‘my poison kills’” (Z I,The Adder’s Bite).

The bitten Zarathustra has the adder “takeback” his poison (nothing like successfullyteaching the will to will backwards). Thus weread that the adder falls upon his neck a secondtime. But the point is that the lesson of teachingthe will to will backwards, adders do not “takeback” their bites however we may will such a re-play or taking back of the past and however muchwe may imagine it. But if the second bite is fan-tasy, part of the delirium induced by the adder’svenom, the entirety of Thus Spoke Zarathustrabecomes a dream before dying—another philos-opher’s dream to be added to the array of suchand the interpretation of the same.

The focus on downgoing, the experience withthe tightrope walker, as we shall see, togetherwith the death-springing, ear-whispering dwarfand so on, is part of a constant engagement withdeath as background and theme throughout thetext. Indeed, we read in the section On FreeDeath of “the death that consummates,” whereZarathustra describes death as a “festival.” Andwe have yet another fairly explicit echo ofLucian’s True Story offered in the title of On theBlessed Isles, yet another allusion to Lucian andHesiod and Pindar as well as Plato and so on. TheLucianic references to death include figs. ThusNietzsche invokes the afterlife, where Zara-thustra describes himself as “a wind to ripe figs,”emphasizing that rather than salvation or re-demption or eternal life, it is “of time and becom-ing that the best parables should speak: let thembe a praise and a justification of all imperma-nence” (Z II: On the Blessed Isles).

Quite explicitly, now paralleling Empedocles,Zarathustra reflects: “Verily, through a hundredsouls I have already passed on my way, andthrough a hundred cradles and birth pangs. Manya farewell have I taken; I know the heart rendinglast hours” (ibid.; cf. DK 31). But “thus my cre-ative will, my destiny, wills it. Or, to say it morehonestly: this very destiny: my will wills” (ibid.).In addition, Empedocles’ teaching of rebirth ech-oes in the language of the “nuptial ring of rings,



the ring of recurrence” (Z III, The Yes and AmenSong).

Zarathustra teaches the Übermensch, as thetransition that is the overhuman and the eternalrecurrence of the same. But when he speaks ofthe human being as “a rope over an abyss,” Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra gives a sermon in the market-place against the backdrop of a dynamic tableau(the tightrope walker and his balancing act) ofwhich Zarathustra seemingly notices nothing un-til it crashes down around him. Thus Zara-thustra’s words are dramatized for his auditors,who see what transpires above and behind him. Itmatters indeed that the people to whomZarathustra speaks did not come to hear him, justas the Agrigentians seem constitutionally inca-pable of attending to what Empedocles teachesthem; thus the Purifications are addressed toPausanias and this is the earmark of the few andthe many, as Heraclitus complains: for the mostpart, those who hear a teaching are the same bothbefore they hear it and after hearing it (DK 1). It isthe fate of most teachings that they go in one earand out the other.

If Zarathustra begins his oratorical discourse,just as the tightrope walker “began his perfor-mance,” the staging renders the entirety of thespeech an inevitable (if also involuntary) com-mentary on that “performance.” We thus discern,and the Straussians have made nothing but hayfrom this depiction, a patent dramatization ofabove and below, esoteric and exoteric. It is inthis context, as the tightrope walker makes hisway above the crowd, producing a tension thatseemed (to Zarathustra) to offer the kind of atten-tion that permitted him to expand upon his ac-count, describing the human being as “a danger-ous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerouslooking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stop-ping,” that Zarathustra teaches the overhuman.Thus Zarathustra’s sermon on the “rainbowbridge” of life paralleled a life and death dramaproceeds above him, step by careful step:

I love those who do not know how to live, exceptby going under, for they are those who cross over.I love the great despisers because they are the greatreverers and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek behind the starsfor a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but whosacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earthsome day become the overman’s. . . . I love himwhose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanksand returns none: for he always gives away anddoes not want to preserve himself.” (Z I: Prologue§4).

Many readers take the point but commonly as-sume the reference to be nothing other than thatof the Christian teaching of dying to the life of theworld or the body.

Yet we also know that Nietzsche’s Zarathustrateaches the “great reason” of the body and urgesus to be true to the earth and to a self that “wantsto create beyond itself” (Z I: On the Despisers ofthe Body). Thus Zarathustra here affirms not onlythe “rainbows and bridges of the overman” (Z I:On the New Idol) but declares “I love him whowants to create over and beyond himself and thusperishes” (Z I: On the Way of the Creator). Thisteaching should remind the reader of Nietzsche’sshadow discourse in the book appended to hisHuman, All-too-Human, The Wanderer and hisShadow, where the shadow turns, vanishing as itdoes at the end. Thus Nietzsche writes of the hu-man being as a small overstressed kind of animal,which—happily enough—has also had its day;life on earth as such, the blink of an eye, a detail,an exception without consequence, somethingthat remains insignificant for the general charac-ter of the earth itself, like every star, a hiatus be-tween two nothingnesses, an event without aplan, reason, will, self-consciousness, the mostwretched sort of necessity; the stupid necessity”(KSA 13, 16 [25], 488). Like the great year of theancient philosophers, the great noon is the turn-ing to the new and it is also associated withHeraclitean fire and with the sun as a consumma-tion: “that is the great noon when man stands inthe middle of his way between beast and overmanand celebrates his way to evening as his highesthope: for it is the way to a new morning” (Z I: Onthe Gift-Giving Virtue).

Inasmuch as Zarathustra teaches what philos-ophy teaches—namely, the art of living—Zarathustra teaches the overhuman as “the mean-ing of the earth,” thereby teaching that the human



is “something that shall be overcome” (Z I: Pro-logue §3). The point is literal enough: the art ofliving, as we have recently required Hadot andothers to remind us, is the art of dying.20 The art,in Nietzsche’s words, of dying in the right wayand, indeed, for the right reason, “at the righttime” (Z I: On Voluntary Death).

“Love and Kisses to All the World”:On Meat-Eating, Encroachment, and

Purification in Empedocles and Nietzsche

This work is Lucian’s, who well knewThe foolishness of times gone by,For things the human race finds wiseAre folly to th’ unclouded eye.

Erasmus21

It is still common to assume that Nietzsche’sÜbermensch corresponds, more or less coinci-dentally, more or less historically, to Hitler’s fan-tasy, the evolutionary apex of human develop-ment: a superior human being (and that is also tosay, with Plato and Aristotle and even AlasdairMacIntyre, a superior warrior or perfect soldier):the fruit of science or at least good breeding, bywhich one means a family of a certain economicwherewithal, thereby heir to a certain “good” ed-ucation, nutrition, environment, travel, etc.22 In-deed, the whole of technologically oriented soci-ety via the fantasy of genetic engineering andassociated nano-fixes as well as the fantasy lifethat is the internet and the media in general—justthink of Kurzweils’supposedly incipient “Singu-larity”—presupposes the same vision of the hu-man as transhuman, as supreme, as other, as“higher,” in Nietzsche’s words. If Nietzsche op-poses Darwinism in one thing, namely in the con-viction that today’s species represent improve-ments or developments over past species, heshares the values of Darwin in associatinghumans and apes, here specifically followingPindar’s sardonic comparison (Pyth. 11).

Rank ordering presupposes a developmentalprogression, but Empedocles also invokes a kindof evolution, if not a progressive one: dispersal intime, abandonment or expulsion, as expiation.Here we recall the ethical parallel with

Anaximander, for a crime, that is for the bloodyviolence of dealing death and eating meat.

When anyone sins and pollutes his own limbs withbloodshed, who by his error makes false the oathhe swore—spirits whose portion is long life—forthrice ten thousand years he wanders apart fromthe blessed, being born throughout that time in allmanner of forms of mortal things, exchanging onehard path of life for another. The force of the airpursues him into the sea, the sea spews him outonto the floor of the earth, the earth casts him intothe rays of the blazing sun. (DK 115; KRS 314–15)

Empedocles supposed that our age is the age ofextinction, the time of strife or hatred, preciselybecause of our creativity and diversity one fromanother but also because of the killing that wecannot seem to stem. If being born and takingform against and by contrast with the apeiron isan encroachment on other possibilities, as it is forAnaximander (and this is the reason Nietzschenames him the first ethical philosopher), thinkwhat it is to practice injustice actively, to kill or toshed blood? And we all do this, with our everybreath, our every step and in addition we havemade an industry of such injustice: we eat theflesh of animals, the beings we “care” for frombirth (this is “domestication”), and whom weraise in order to kill and to cut slices from theirbodies and limbs to roast and boil and steam,sometimes we eat them raw, sometimes beforethey are born. Wild animals or domestic, we killthem all . All this is unchanged sinceEmpedocles’ day:

The father lifts up his own son changed in form andslaughters him with a prayer, blind fool, as the vic-tim shrieks piteously, beseeching as he is killed.But he deaf to his cries slaughters him and makesready in his halls an evil feast. In the same way sonseizes father and children their mother, and tearingout life they eat the flesh of those they love. (KRS415; DK 137)

Empedocles is speaking, as Nietzsche wouldspeak (this is the ontological meaning of the willto power),23 of the fundamental relatedness of allliving things. We are not “other” than animalsand we are certainly not—consider only what wedo!—“higher.” The animal you barbecue is your



brother, physiologically, biologically speaking,not a one that could be in some spiritualist sense,your literal (i.e., human) brother, or son.24 Thisthat you do to the least of your neighbors, theleast of your brethren, this you do to the Christ.So we have heard from the man Nietzsche namedthe only Christian, the one who hung on the crossand who died for the things he said.

We have already noted the relevance ofEmpedocles’ purification thematic in our discus-sion of the metaphor of honey at the start ofNietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well aswith reference to the language of the “honey sac-rifice in Book IV. As Empedocles writes, theproblem is the problem of “defilement” and thusthe title of the poem, Katharmoi: “Their altar wasnot drenched by the unspeakable slaughters ofbulls, but this was held among men the greatestdefilement — to tear out the life from noble limbsand eat them” (KRS 411; DK 128).

Dwelling as commentators do on Empe-docles’ egregious egotism, they tend to dismisshis reflections on carnivorism. I find it useful toread Nietzsche’s own commentary for both itsdispassion and its precision:

Empedocles sought to impress the oneness of alllife most urgently, that carnivorism is a sort of self-cannibalism [Sichselbstverspeisen], a murder ofthe nearest relative. He desired a colossal purifica-tion of humanity, along with abstinence frombeans and laurel leaves.25

The need for a “colossal purification of human-ity” has to do with what is human, all-too-humanand in this case it is not simply, as Nietzsche in-terprets, a matter of prohibiting violence againstthose related to us by blood, but and beyond con-sanguinity it is a matter of, and here Nietzscheechoes Hölderlin, our relatedness with every-thing that is. This is key to the pre-PlatonicGreeks as Nietzsche reads them.26 In addition, wecan add Nietzsche’s reference to beans as theyare part of this same purification (and are amongthe Pythagorean’s taboos). Similarly, laurelleaves are associated both with Apollo and thetraditional victor as well as with tyrants. Settingaside the question of kingship, the Pythagoreanquestion of rebirth is common to both

Empedocles and Nietzsche in the doctrine ofeternal recurrence.

As Nietzsche, who always emphasized sim-plicity with reference to ancient doctrine, re-minds us, a good deal of what was regarded asmoral practice in antiquity is “currently treated asmedical” (KGW III/4 Fall 1873, 31 [4], 360),whether with regard to matters of physical or elseof mental health, and Nietzsche notes that wherewe often lack self-control, the Greeks regardedmoderation as part of “retaining mastery overthemselves” (Ibid., 361). And Nietzsche makes itplain that he prefers the ancient “care of the self”to “the talk of modern moral philosophers whotake the human being to be a marvelously spiritu-alistic essence; it seems almost indecent to themthat humanity should be treated thus nakedly-an-tique and to recount their many needs even in-deed their baser necessities. Their embarrass-ment goes so far that one would believe that themodern human being has no more than an appar-ent body [Scheinleib]” (ibid.). It is in this context,although this must be understood in connectionwith Nietzsche’s life-long scientific interest inphysiology and nutrition, that Nietzsche con-fesses: “I believe that the vegetarians, with theirprescription to eat less and more simply, havebeen more useful than all new moral systems puttogether” (ibid.).

It is thus, after speaking of the need for purifi-cation in the Empedoclean sense, that Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra asks: “What does your bodysay about your soul? Is your soul not poverty anddirt and a miserable ease. In truth, man is a pol-luted river” (ibid.), Zarathustra reflects on great-ness as opposed to the image of such. “What isgreat in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal;what can be loved in man is that he is going-across and a downgoing” (Z, Zarathustra’s Pro-logue, 4).

But like the people to whom Zarathustraspeaks, like the Agrigentians to whom Empe-docles speaks, his words are not for our ears.Hence Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans alikebelieve in the idea of the “overhuman” as a “supe-rior” being. And we also assume that we all are orthat we could be and indeed that we should beoverhumans, posthumans, or, to use the latest



language, transhumans, at least potentially. Afterall, think of the ressentiment of Nietzsche’s mod-ern moral philosophers: we are higher, we arebetter, than anything in nature. Or if not yet by or-dinary or natural evolutionary means, then cer-tainly on the model that some scientist must cur-rently be developing using the latest genetic orstem cell technology, further transforming us inthe same direction that we already find ourselvesgoing.

The human, all-too-human is the overman.Disagreeing with both Nietzscheans and anti-

Nietzscheans, Nietzsche demurs, as I have said,suggesting that the overhuman, the human ideal,may be less than we suppose. To see this we needto take the classical scholarly “step back” just andinasmuch as such a backstep often changes one’sperspective.

Zarathustra’s Übermensch and Lucian’suJperavnqwpo"

Every Nietzsche scholar seems to know thatNietzsche’s Übermensch is a coinage taken orderived from Lucian, in particular, from theDownward Journey or Journey to the Under-world [KATAPLOUS H TURANNOS]. Everyscholar “knows” this because Walter Kaufmanntells us so and nearly every account I have readduly cites Kaufmann (the citation is easy to findand very simple, “Kataplous, 16”).27 Kaufmanndoes not offer a context, who does not cite hisown source, and this may have been because hewas simply interested in the coinage per se (andKaufmann’s interest would seem to have set thetone for the positivism of source scholarship tothis day). But Lucian’s A Voyage to the Under-world or the Tyrant28 offers an intriguing insightinto the notion of the “overman.”29

In his monograph on the ancient Greek noveland its antecedents, Nietzsche’s friend ErwinRohde emphasizes the importance and the oddsignificance of the idea or notion as such of “trav-elling in the underworld, for the sake of gainingphilosophical knowledge.“30 And this very sub-terranean undertaking appears in both Nietzsche(Zarathustra) and Lucian, and it is of course thetransfiguring point of Empedocles’ leap into the

Volcano. And we are familiar with the idea inDante as elsewhere.

Just as the dwarf leaps after the tightropewalker or “overman” at the start of Zarathustra,and then similarly threatens to drag Zarathustradown to hell, the story Lucian tells in his play onthe tyrant’s rather literal downgoing articulatesthe edifying, that is, the instructive morality taleof those who appear in everyday life in an appar-ent or supposed guise as “Higher-Men.” Lucian’sprovocative contrast in his Downward Journeyhighlights the superficial vision of the overmanor man of the power class, a wealthy, or “higher”man who towers above others regarded as lower,or lesser, in this life, and the self-same man oncetranslated or transposed into the afterlife, a con-trast illuminated, as it were, in the darkness ratherthan the light of eternity: “The ‘superman’[ JuJperavnqrwpo"] is the superior man, a kingamong men, a man of power like a tyrant.”31

These political attributes allow the speaker to re-gard the tyrant (and this is the subtitle of Lucian’ssatire) as “a superman in my eyes, someonethrice blessed, nothing short of an Adonis, a footand a half taller than the rest of mankind.”[ JuJperavnqrwo" ti" a jnh;r kai; trisovlbiov" moikatefaivneto kai; mononouci; kallivwn kai; uJyhljo[tero" o}lw phvcei basilikw'].32

But, so Lucian’s satire continues, “when hedied and had to take off his trappings, not onlydid he look ridiculous to me, but I had to laugh athow ridiculous I was. Imagine—I had stood inawe of that trash and had jumped to the conclu-sion that he was divinely happy on the basis of thesmells from his kitchen and the color of hisrobes.”33 And after the complaints of the tyrant inhell, Lucian goes on to mock the moneylenders,and so on (and on).

The notion of Zarathustra’s downgoing as atale of going to ground and as an account of Zara-thustra’s dream before dying, just as Empedoclesexplains that death itself is such a dream, as islife, entails that here are other parallels betweenEmpedocles and Zarathustra. Thus in Rohde’sPsyche, we read of “the method of Incubation, ortemple sleep,” by which questions might be put toa number of daimones and heroes. Rohde ex-plains that this mantic technique “was based on



the assumption that the daimon who was onlyvisible indeed to mortal eyes in the higher stateachieved by the soul in dreams, had his perma-nent dwelling at the seat of the oracle.”34 In thischapter on “Subterranean Translation,” follow-ing the previous surface or lateral “translation” to“The Isles of the Blest,” Rohde argues that theparticular “daimon” is yoked to a particularplace: “That is why his appearance can only beexpected at this particular place and nowhereelse. Originally, too, it was only the dwellers inthe depths of the earth who were thus visible indreams to those who lay down to sleep in the tem-ple over the place where they had their subterra-nean abode.”35 If David Allison, who for his partis not speaking of either Empedocles or Rohde,rightly remarks that Zarathustra spends an inor-dinate amount of time, counted in days ratherthan hours, sleeping “as one dead,”36 one can as-sume that Zarathustra’s “dropping off” echoesRohde’s language of the mysterious “incubation-oracles.”37

Beyond Rohde’s Psyche and beyond Lucian’santiquity (and note that it is not Rohde who em-phasizes the concept of the overman in Lucian),38

how are we to understand Nietzsche’s overman,as this notion is arguably one of the most popu-larly influential of all?

In its Aryan configuration, set into what someclaim to have been its original constellation inNietzsche’s Der Wille zur Macht (that infa-mously “invented” book), the idea of theÜbermensch is held to be the causal factor in notonly Hitler’s war but also the First World War.39

Talking about Nietzsche’s Übermensch, we seemto be talking about the philosophy that generatedthe language of the master-race, i.e., theÜbermensch as opposed to the Unter-Mensch asNazi terminology also speaks of it.

Nietzsche uses both terms. Yet the referenceto Lucian suggests that Nietzsche’s Zarathustraalso teaches the Übermensch in a parodic fash-ion. The overman is therefore (if it is not onlythis) a satiric notion. This does not mean thatNietzsche’s Zarathustra does not teach theÜbermensch—of course he does that—but it iseasy to fail to note (certainly even many sophisti-cated and sensitive Nietzsche scholars do so) that

the elusive doctrine of the eternal return, the doc-trine that Zarathustra comes to teach, theteaching that the over-human himself or herself ismeant to be the passage toward, is the eternal re-turn of the same. And this is Empedocles’“truth”of rebirth. Thus Nietzsche’s Zarathustra teachesthat the human is charged to overcome or to getbeyond or to get over the human.

On Death: Zarathustra, the Isles of theBlest, and the Descent into Hell

Yet more than Empedocles’ caution againstcarnivorism, together with its reference to thedoctrine of birth and rebirth and of his cosmolog-ical cycle, it often seems to be the tableau of thevolcano and the philosopher’s voluntary deaththat strikes us most powerfully. And then toothere is the dramatic detail of a single bronze san-dal, tossed up and back to the land of the living bythe same volcano. Would it not have been vapor-ized or melted? This is so even where DiogenesLaertius begins with a veritable catalogue of thevarious ways Empedocles was said to have exitedthis world.40 Why just one? This is, so scholarsremind us, always a sign. One sandal, one bronzethigh, one eye.

But a sign of what and to whom, for whom?And what is the significance of the volcano?

C. G. Jung refers to an account of Nietzsche’sZarathustra in his lecture course on Zarathustrathat apparently echoes this constellation of death.Whether self-willed or not (and therefore an im-age of death in life, at least as set together withLucian’s Kataplous), Jung himself does not ex-plore. Jung’s own emphasis is reasonable enoughfor a psychoanalyst in a Zarathustran context. Ina passage that could not be more Empedocleanuttered in terms of Nietzsche’s reflected motiva-tion of the need to go beyond good and evil,41

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us: “Let us speak ofthis ye wisest ones, even if it is a bad thing” (Z OfSelf-Overcoming).42 And Nietzsche goes on, asJung emphasizes: “To be silent is worse; all sup-pressed truths become poisonous” (ibid.)43

This is a talking cure.Zarathustra speaks.



As his point of departure, Jung’s discussionengages “The Blessed Isles” and “Of GreatEvents” as these appear in Nietzsche’s ThusSpoke Zarathustra. We could have already en-countered the topos of “The Isles of the Blest” asthe subtitle of Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello, towhom Hölderlin dedicated the first section on“Night” of his longer poem Bread and Wine. Thegeographic contours of these two accounts, withHeinse offering the recollections of Ardinghello,a wanderer in Sicily, and Hölderlin of Hyperion,the hermit in an idealized and archaicized visionof modern Greece, are critical to both and bothpoint to a locative longing.44 In addition to the lo-cal “setting” of German literature, there is also ametonymic association to be made to the darklydramatic Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin(1827–1901), Nietzsche’s contemporary Baselinhabitant.45 Although Böcklin also painted in1888 a version of the “Isle of the Blest,” theLebensinsel or Isle of Life, his most famous paint-ing is the Toteninsel or Isle of the Dead, of whichthe painter created several variants between1880 and 1886.

Most of us will recall the Zarathustran pas-sage in question: it’s weird and not just becauseJung says so. Zarathustra scholars rarely remarkupon this wackiness, and I remember reading itfor the first time or for however many hundredsof times I have read it, but always without muchsense. But it is worth thinking about such things,especially with reference to Nietzsche, whospent his life engaged with oddities often unques-tioned by supposedly critical scholarship.46

When we consider the above reading ofLucian, together with the suggestion that Nietz-sche retells the purifications of Empedoclesalong with the death of Empedocles in his ThusSpoke Zarathustra (and I have been attemptinghere to make both claims), the constellation inquestion loses much of its oddness. To all this,Jung adds a ghost story.

In his seminar from 4 May 1938 Jung glossesthe account in Zarathustra as

the descent of Zarathustra into Hades. There is thevolcano and the fire underneath, the entrance to theinterior of the earth, the entrance to the under-

world—there is even old Cerberus, the fire dog—and Zarathustra is now going down into all this.Psychologically it would mean that, after all thatgreat talk, there is an underworld and down thereone has to go. But, if one is so high and mighty,why not stay up there? Why bother about this de-scent? Yet the tale says inevitably one goesdown—that is the enantiodromia—and when onegets down there, well, one will be burned up, onewill dissolve.47

Jung observes that Nietzsche would have had tohave recognized this as the locus classicus of theDorian city of Acragas but, as Jung reflects,Nietzsche’s Zarathustran account does not alludeto Empedocles. Nevertheless, as Jung rightly re-marks, the story “has a very peculiar ring.”48

It was so funny—the noontide hour and the captainand his men—what was the matter with that shipthat they go to shoot rabbits near the entrance ofhell? Then it slowly came to me that when I wasabout eighteen, I had read a book from my grandfa-ther’s library, Blätter aus Prévorst by Kerner, acollection in four volumes of wonderful stories,about ghosts and phantasies and forebodings, andamong them I found that story. It is called “An ex-tract of awe-inspiring import from the log of theship ‘Sphinx,’ in the year 1686 in the Mediterra-nean.”49

Jung’s reference to the Blätter aus Prevorst isto a collection of spiritualist, mesmerist, andmagnetic tales inspired by Erika Hauffe, the sub-ject of Die Seherin von Prevorst. Eröffnungenüber das innere Leben der Menschen und überdas Hereinragen einer Geisterwelt in die unsere,written by a Suabian poet, Justinius Kerner(1786–1862).50

Let us recall the passage from the section enti-tled Of Great Events,

There is an island in the sea — not far from theBlissful Islands of Zarathustra — upon which avolcano continuously smokes; the people, and es-pecially the old women among the people, say thatit is placed like a block of stone before the gate ofthe underworld, but that the narrow downwardpath which leads to this gate of the underworldpasses through the volcano itself. (Z, Of GreatEvents)



The passage could not be more obviously relatedto Lucian but (and this adds to its importance forunderstanding Nietzsche) not less to Rohde’sbroader constellation of his exploration into Psy-che: The Cult of Souls & The Belief in Immortal-ity Among the Greeks.51

The relevant bit from Nietzsche’s account inThus Spoke Zarathustra is as follows:

it happened that a ship dropped anchor at the islandupon which the smoking mountain stood; and itscrew landed in order to shoot rabbits. Towards thehour of noon, however, when the captain and hismen were reassembled, they suddenly saw a mancoming towards them through the air, and a voicesaid clearly: “It is time! It is high time!” But as thefigure was closest to them—or flew quickly past,however, like a shadow, in the direction of the vol-cano—they recognized, with the greatest conster-nation, that it was Zarathustra. (Z, Of GreatEvents)

Jung goes on to cite Kerner’s original text for hisstudent’s sake:

The four captains and a merchant, Mr Bell, wentashore on the island of Stromboli to shoot rabbits.At three o’clock they called the crew together to goaboard, when, to their inexpressible astonishment,they saw two men flying rapidly over them throughthe air. One was dressed in black, the other in grey.They approached them very closely, in the greatesthaste; to their greatest dismay they descendedamid the burning flames into the crater of the terri-ble volcano, Mt. Stromboli. They recognized thepair as acquaintances from London.52

Same story, Jung says, a surmise he duly checksby asking Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche, who con-firms that she and her brother found this book inthe library of their own “grandfather, PastorOehler.”53

In addition to Jung’s repeated invocation ofthis story as a demonstration of the workingpower of the unconscious—for this illustrativereason, the story was one Jung had been tellingsince his inaugural dissertation, published twoyears after Nietzsche’s death in 1902—Jungnotes that “such stories are recorded because theyare edifying.” In the case of Kerner’s ghost story,Jung explains that “The two gentlemen from

London were big merchants and evidently theywere not quite alright, because they are paintedwith the colors of hell, which express sinfulness,one is black and the other grey, whereas theyshould be wearing white shirts, which is courtdress in heaven.”54

Grüselgeschichten, tales of the dead, espe-cially the unhappy dead and of things we do notguess in this life, as is Lucian’s Kataplous in onevein and Rohde’s Psyche in another, are compa-rably “instructive” or edifying.

The ghostly dimension of Zarathustra’switch-like flight, as the reference above toLucian and now to Rohde makes plain, is literalnot literary. If Gary Shapiro is right to point to thegeological significance of the contrast of thispassage with the Isles of the Blest, whereZarathustra “appears mysteriously on a volcanicisland (where his Shadow seems to fly into thevolcano itself),”55 Shapiro, along with most othercommentators fails to note that Zarathustra’sshadow, the shade in question, corresponds forthe ancient Greek to the flattened dimensionalitythat is the only thing that remains of us afterdeath, especially presuming what Rohde calls a“subterranean translation.”

Hence with respect to the claim that it is, asNietzsche’s Zarathustra repeats, “high time,” thatit is therefore late—“it’s time, it’s time” as T. S.Eliot writes, as Gadamer once spoke of age as in-cluding so many “warning shots across thebow”—so, too, Jung explains that “this is the se-cret, this is the key to the meaning of that descentinto hell. It was a warning; soon you will go downinto dissolution.”56

We have already noted that there are numer-ous explorations of the meaning of the over-man.57 Given the context of Lucian’s Kataplous,it may serve us to consider yet another renderingof the overman as an ironic or else, in Jung’s ter-minology, “instructive” construct. At the sametime, the didactic purpose of Zarathustra’s“teaching” becomes more rather than less ellipti-cal and the overman rather less than an ideal to bepursued straightforwardly and per se.



Coda

What Nietzsche takes from Lucian’s Journeyinto the Underworld, or the Tyrant, is the provoc-ative contrast between the values we have in ourculture and our context and our tendency to takethese values, à la Herbert Butterfield’spresentism, not only as universal but as timelessor essential. Writing that man is something to beovercome, characterizing the human lifetime in adiscussion of artists of grand passion as constitut-ing “— hiatus between two nothingnesses—”(KSA 12, 10 [34], 473), Nietzsche points to aperspective beyond the here and now, one whichasks us to consider not the immediate, whether interms of economic advantage or personal delightor pleasure, but rather the scope or scheme of theworld.

Thus Nietzsche does not say The little busi-nessman is will to power and nothing besides,much less The German nationalist is will topower and nothing besides, but The world is willto power and nothing besides—meaning therebythe collective whole of existence in the world(and indeed beyond the earth). In this sense, hehas recourse to biological metaphors and fromthis same perspective he also emphasizes that theaim of life is expression not survival. Only, hesays, rather unkindly, the Englishman strives forlife at all costs.

Nietzsche’s own reference is to the cosmicUrkünstler, as Anaxagoras and Anaximandercalled Mind or nou\s. If Nietzsche himself drawsthe parallel between both Empedocles and “Dar-winian theory”58 with a certain materialism,Nietzsche might be aligned with those who arguefor intelligent design in the sense not of theJudeo-Christian God and not of Gaia, but anotherschema altogether, one that Nietzsche oncecalled aeon, reminding us that the child had king-ship, playing with chance, playing with “chanceforms” as he puts it in his notes on Empedocles,playing, “every possible random combination ofelements, of which some are purposive and capa-ble of life.”59

Recalling my own references to chance,60 it isworth noting, as Robin Small remarks, thatNietzsche returns to a reading of Lucian, albeit in

another locus, but recounting Heraclitus’s play-ful playing upon the kingship of the child, in theworlds and words of pais, paizo\n, pesseuo\n,sumpheromenos, diapheromenos: “A child play-ing, moving counters, gathering and scatter-ing,”6 1 Nietzsche reminds us that withEmpedocles—but let us also add with Newtonand with Bachelard too—science “basically dis-solves into magic.”62

Only the true believers will be dismayed tolearn this. For we need to go past the commonconvention that opposes science and magic (thisNietzsche never does, no more than he opposesreligion and science) to ask what Nietzschemight have meant by inventing Zarathustra as asage for a modern world and, even more radi-cally, by calling not for salvation or redemptionbut and much rather and just to begin with:purifica.tion

Fictitious Concluding Fragments

Tightrope walkers (overman above, undermen be-low)

Two devils, one to jump over you, one to drag youoff to hell

Widerwillens

German for: all of it against your will

Whereby any downgoing, any going to ground,counts as a descent into hell

To read Lucian, to read Dante, to read Sartre onHell

Will always be to read about other people.

Question for Eliot: how many would you say deathhad undone?

Cut to:

Nihilism

Nietzsche’s idea of “Dying at the Right Time”

Empedocles and the conflicting accounts of hisdeath

So very many postcards from the “edge,” likeNietzsche’s own.

Whereby Nietzsche’s little gloss



“love and kisses to the whole world”

would be what?

a suicide note?

before an assumption into heaven? to prefigure orto second-guess transfiguration?

Eternal return, everything, the same

No reserve; no exceptions

To give Empedocles the last word as a word onpurification:

“Will you not cease from the din of slaughter? Doyou not see that you are devouring each other in theheedlessness of your minds?” (KRS 414; DK 136)

Or and to the say the same—and this is by farmy favourite—

Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands frombeans. (KRS 419; DK 140)

NOTES


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1. Lucian of Samosata was translated into Latin byErasmus, into English by Charles Cotton as early as1675 as Burlesque upon Burlesque; or the ScofferScoff’d. Being Lucian’s Dialogues newly put intoEnglish Fustian London, 1675; corrected in 1686,and into German by Christoph Wieland in 1788. Al-though Lucian’s name tends to be unfamiliar to to-day’s readers, those who read him in antiquity andthroughout the era leading up to Nietzsche includedmost European authors from Erasmus to ThomasMore but also Rabelais, Voltaire, and Jonathan Swift,with Jan Kott, somewhat more recently, reprising along standing case for Lucian’s influence on Shake-speare, and in philosophy, in addition to Montaigne,we can name David Hume in particular, who alsoread the text that I discuss in this essay with referenceto its influence on Nietzsche. Writing from an ana-lytic, historical perspective on Hume, Annette C.Baier observes (not without a certain irritation on herpart) that “although Lucian was widely read inHume’s day, the overlap between readers of Humethese days, and readers of Lucian, seems to havebeen almost nil.” Baier, Death and Character: Fur-ther Reflections on Hume (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2008), 103. As Baier emphasizes, sheowes her engagement with Lucian solely to an emailinquiry raised by Emilio Mazza (110). Mazza’squestion, and hence Baier’s question, is the specifictitle of the text from Lucian that Hume was readingon his death bed. For Adam Smith, according toBaier, seems insufficiently specific in his report “thatwhen he called on Hume on August 8, Hume wasreading Lucian’s ‘Dialogues of the Dead’” (100).The specific title in question is, coincidentally, thesame dialogue to be discussed as relevant for Nietz-

sche in the present essay, i.e., Lucian’s Kataplous.For his part, Smith may well have been characteriz-ing the dialogue in general terms if only because theKataplous is indisputably a dialogue of the dead, as itis all about death and Lucian’s favorite tropes on thesame, including and foreshadowing ElizabethKubler-Ross, bargaining and stages of denial or pro-test. Baier herself has recourse to James Fieser’sSome Early Responses to David Hume, in 10 vol-umes (London: Thoemmes/Continuum Press, re-vised second edition, 2005 [1999 and 2003]).Fieser’s collection includes a letter from Hume’sdoctor, William Cullen, who offers a detailed ac-count of Lucian’s Kataplous. For the specific refer-ence to Fieser, see Baier, 103. For Baier, the diffi-culty of locating Lucian’s Kataplous deserves someremark, “as it is not always included in extant edi-tions of Lucian’s much imitated and influential ‘Dia-logues of the Dead,’ at least not in editions of Luciansuch as the Loeb, or as far as I have been able to findout, in editions Hume would have used” (Baier, 104).The dialogue is available in different forms (see fur-ther note 26 below), and the title is sometimes ren-dered one way, some times another, so that translatedas “Voyage to the Underworld,” it features as the lastdialogue in the first volume of the four volumestranslated by the brothers Henry G. and Frances W.Fowler, The Works of Lucian, complete with excep-tions specified in the preface (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1905). Still the point of extant translations ismoot because, and as Baier herself observes (101):Hume read his Lucian in Greek, as Nietzsche did.

2. Lucian is consequently characterized by the fifthcentury Eunapius as an “earnest” or truth-purposingor truth–intending liar. Cf. note 10.

© Depaul University 2011


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3. Lucian thus expounds upon his own deliberate pre-varication as a variation upon the traditional misdi-rections or lies of other historians in his True Storiesor True History.

4. Lucian, “A True Story,” Selected Satires of Lucian,ed. and trans. Lionel Casson (New York: Norton,1968), 13–57, here p. 15.

5. Ibid.6. His approach to truth runs throughout Nietzsche’s

texts, but see just in near textual proximity to this of-ten discussed locus: Beyond Good and Evil §4 and§14.

7. This is by far the most common attribution and I ad-dress this further in the second half of this essay, inparticular in note 41 below. Other attributions exist,of course. See Claude Pavur, Nietzsche Humanist(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998),who reads the Übermensch in a renaissance human-ist context. And one can also read the Übermensch àla Faust or à la Ayn Rand, or indeed as RobertSoloman has suggested via Aristotle’s great-souledman, although as noted above, this is a paraphraserather than a direct rendering. The philological read-ing I explore here takes as its point of departureNietzsche’s own formation as a classicist.

8. Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen points out that as“Menschenfischer,” Zarathustra is less to be com-pared to the disciples of Christ than to the Philosoph-ical-Fisherman in Lucian’s Piscator. See Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nietzsches Also Sprach Zarathustra alsliterarisches Phänomen: eine Revision (Frankfurt:Athenäum, 1974), 127–28.

9. One usually speaks of parodies in this general sense.See for further references in English, Peter Wolfe,“Image and Meaning in Also Sprach Zarathustra,”MLN 89 (1964): 546–52, as well as, again,Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nietzsches Also SprachZarathustra als literarisches Phänomen, for usefulreferences to an array of German and French litera-ture.

10. See Graham Anderson, Lucian: Theme and Varia-tion in the Second Sophistic (Leiden: Brill, 1976), aswell as, for a discussion of Lucian and tragedy,Orestis Karavas, Lucien et la tragédie (Berlin: deGruyter, 2005), and Banham, Unruly Eloquence:Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. For discus-sions of Lucian see the contributions to AdamBartley, ed., A Lucian for Our Times (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009),as well as Heinz-Günther Nesselrath’s “Lukian und

die antike Philosophie” in addition to othe other con-tributions to Lukian, Philopseude\s e\ Apisto\n. DieLügenfreunde oder: Der Ungläubige, introducedand with commentary by Martin Ebner, HolgerGzella, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, Ernst Ribbat(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,2001), 135–52. See also for further references note41 below.

11. This dialogue can be found in the 1913 Loeb editionof Lucian, translated by A. M. Harmon, volume III,but it also appears as “The Fisher: A ResurrectionPiece” in an older translation in Henry WatsonFowler and F. G. Fowler’s The Complete Works ofLucian of Samosata: Complete with ExceptionsSpecified in the Preface (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1905), 206–30, prefaced by the prior andreferentially critical dialogue, “Philosophies forSale,” here rendered as “The Sale of Creeds,” Ibid.,190–206 (this is included as the last dialogue in Vol.II of the Loeb edition). Here p. 206.

12. Fowler and Fowler, The Complete Works of Lucian ofSamosata, 226.

13. Ibid., 221.14. Ibid., 227–28.15. See, for a discussion of this complex point, my

“Nietzsche’s Philology and Nietzsche’s Science: OnThe ‘Problem of Science’ and ‘fröhliche Wissen-schaft,’” in: Pascale Hummel, ed., Metaphilology:Histories and Languages of Philology (Paris: Philo-logicum, 2009), 155–201, and Babich, “The Scienceof Words or Philology: Music in The Birth of Trag-edy and The Alchemy of Love in The Gay Science,”in Tiziana Andina, ed., Revista di estetica. n.s. 28,55 (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005), 47–78. Seetoo for more detail, my “Hören und Lesen, Musikund Wissenschaft. Nietzsches‘gaya scienza,’” trans.Harald Seubert and Heidi Byrnes (with the author),in Beatrix Vogel, ed., Der Mensch Sein Eigenes Ex-periment (München: Allitera Verlag, 2008),487–526.

16. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II, trans. DavidFarrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 211.

17. I follow John Curtis Franklin’s translation. See alsoFranklin,“Harmony in Greek and Indo-Iranian Cos-mology,” The Journal of Indo-European Studies30 (Spring/Summer 2002): 1–25.

18. Discussions of Nietzsche and Empedocles have beenpart of the tradition of Nietzsche interpretation fromthe outset. See, for example and among others,Johann Piatek, Nietzsches Empedokles-Fragmente



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(Progr. Gymn. Stryj 1910), and Raymond Furness,“Nietzsche and Empedocles,” Journal of the BritishSociety for Phenomenology 2 (1971): 91–94. Seetoo, again, for further references, Bennholdt-Thom-sen, Nietzsches Also Sprach Zarathustra alsliterarisches Phänomen, 151–52. For a recent con-temporary or mainstream reading, but lacking thecontextual dimensions noted here, see Glenn Most,“The Stillbirth of a Tragedy: Nietzsche andEmpedocles,” in A. L. Pierris, ed., The Empedocleankosmos: Structure, Process and the Question ofCyclicity (Patras: Institute for Philosophical Re-search, 2005), 31–44. Given the constraints ofMost’s reading, Walther Kranz’s Empedokles:Antike Gestalt und romantische Neuschöpfung(Zürich: Artemis, 1949) remains invaluable, particu-larly as it includes Hölderlin, as does KarlReinhardt’s reflection on Kranz in Reinhardt’sVermächtnis der Antike: Gesammelte Essays zurPhilosophie und Geschichtsschreibung (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966). See too: DavidFarrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensualityand Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 1986), as well as additional biblio-graphical references in Jürgen Söring, “NietzschesEmpedokles-Plan,” Nietzsche Studien 19 (1990):176–211. More recently, although without engagingthe breadth of this tradition, David Farrell Krell hasaddressed the question of the intersection betweenNietzsche and Hölderlin as well as translatingHölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play (Albany: State University of New York Press,2008). See too Véronique Foti, Epochal Discor-dance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (Albany:State University of New York Press, 2007).

19. Thus Nietzsche reminds us: “I believe in the old Ger-man saying, all gods must die.” (KSA 7, 124)

20. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans.Michael Chase (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1995), and see more broadly here, HorstHutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regimeof the Soul and its Ascetic Practices (Lanham, MD:Lexington Books, 2005), especially but not onlychapter one.

21. After Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influ-ence in Europe, citing the epigram to Aldine editionof Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (Chapel Hill: The Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1979), 191.

22. Michael Allen Gillespie, “‘Slouching Toward Beth-lehem to Be Born’: On the Nature and Meaning of

Nietzsche’s Superman,” The Journal of NietzscheStudies 30 (2005): 49–69, and see too LawrenceLambert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1989).

23. See Babich, “Ontologie,” in Christian Niemeyer, ed.,Nietzsche-Lexikon (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 2009), 257–260.

24. Like the duck that could be somebody’s mother in thechildren’s song “Be Kind to your Web-FootedFriends.”

25. Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 109.26. See for a corroborating and conventional discussion,

Glenn Most, “Pre-Socratic Philosopy and Tradi-tional Greek Epic,” in Anton Bierl et al., eds.Literatur und Religion: Band 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter,2007), 271–302, here 284ff.

27. This citation reproduces Kaufmann’s footnote in itsentirety. See Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher,Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1974), 307n1. The footnote itself clari-fies Kaufmann’s main text: “The hyperanthro\pos isto be found in the writings of Lucian in the secondcentury AD and Nietzsche as a classical philologisthad studied Lucian and made frequent references tohim in his philologia” (ibid.). Erkme Joseph, Nietz-sche im “Zauberberg” (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-mann, 1996) duly cites Kaufmann in his notes beforegoing on to detail the earlier appearances of the termÜbermensch as such in German (271ff.). But prior toKaufmann, see the entry in Rudolf Eisler‘sHandwörterbuch der Philosophie (Berlin: Mittlerund Sohn, 1913) as well as Ernst Benz: “Das Bild desÜbermenschen in der Europäischen Geistes-geschichte“ in his Der Übermensch: eine Diskussion(Stuttgart: Rhein-Verlag, 1961), 19–16. Similar de-tails, drawn from Kaufmann, appear in KarenJoisten, cited in note 57 below, and so too with refer-ence to anthropology and the social sciences, Jyung-Hyun Kim, Nietzsches Sozialphilosophie: Versucheiner Überwindung der Moderne im Mittelpunkt desBegriffes Leib (Würzburg: Königshausen andNeumann, 1995), Note 239, pp. 198ff. See, for a po-liticized overview, Ulrich Busch, “VergesseneUtopien: Friedrich Nietzsches Vision vom Über-menschen,” Utopie kreativ 151 (Mai 2003):460–667.

28. See the mid-nineteenth century Loeb edition ofLucian now available as A. M. Harmon, K. Kilburnand M.D. Macleod (Cambridge: Harvard University



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Press, 1913-67) or else the Everyman library edition,translated by Lionel Casson, Selected Satires ofLucian (New York: Norton, 1968), “Kataplous,”175-193. Cf. the 1905 translation by the Fowlerscited above.

29. Lucian articulates this in the very same “Menippean”satiric fashion Nietzsche invokes at the conclusion ofhis Ecce Homo, “What I owe the Ancients.” Satiri-cally, ironically, Lucian would seem to span Nietz-sche’s career. But Northrop Frye had already laid theground rules or gone to the grounds, or, still better: tothe underground, for English readers, explaining in asection of his Anatomy of Criticism entitled “Theoryof Myths—just because and rhetorically and giventhe distance between our own time and Lucian andMenippus, but also Nietzsche himself, it really needsexplaining—that “whenever the ‘other world’ ap-pears in satire, it appears as an ironic counterpart toour own, a reversal of accepted social standards. Thisform of satire is represented in Lucian’s Kataplousand Charon, journeys to the other world in which theeminent (in this world) are shown doing appropriatebut unaccustomed things, a form incorporated inRabelais, and in the medieval danse macabre. In thelast named the simple equality of death is set againstthe complex inequalities of life.” Anatomy of Criti-cism: Four Essays, (Princeton: Princeton Universitypress, 1957), 232.

30. Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer,261.

31. Lucian, Kataplous, “The Journey to the Underworldor the Tyrant,”16.

32. Ibid. Cf. Lucian‘s “Menippus or the Descent intoHades” where Croesus complains to Pluto thatMenippus is giving them a hard time in hell.Menippus replies: “Pluto, it’s true, I hate them.They’re spineless good-for-nothings. . . . I enjoy nee-dling them.” Pluto replies, “But you shouldn’t. Theyleft a great deal behind. That’s why they take it toheart.” Menippus is adamant, and Croesus cries“This is terrible!” to which Menippus retorts: “It isnot. But what you people used to do on the earth was.Making people grovel before you, lording it over freemen, never giving the slightest thought to death. Wellyou can start whimpering because you’ve lost it all”(212–13). Cf. Nietzsche, Human All Too Human,Mixed Opions and Maxims (1879), §408, and ErwinRohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer(Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1900). For Lucian’sinfluence, see further Herbert Hunger, Die

hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner;Teilbd. 2: Philologie, Profandichtung, Musik,Mathematik und Astronomie, Naturwissenschaften,Medizin, Kriegswissenschaft, Rechtsliteratur(München: Beck, 1978), 151f., as well as Christo-pher Robinson, Lucian and his Influence in Europe(London: Duckworth, 1979), in addition to ManuelBaumbach, Lukian in Deutschland: Eineforschungs- und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Analysevom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart (München:Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002) and more broadly,Werner von Koppenfels, Der andere Blick: DasVermächtnis des Menippos in der europäischenLiteratur (München: C.H. Beck, 2007). A rewardingtreatment is Francis G. Allinson, Lucian: Satirist andArtist (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1926) whofor his own part refers to Rohde’s studies and toSwift’s patently “Lucianic” debt to Lucian. See too,very usefully, Branham, Unruly Eloquence.

33. Lucian, Kataplous, 16–17.34. Rhode, Psyche, 1:92.35. Ibid.36. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche, 168ff.37. Rohde, Psyche, 93.38. Thus perhaps we are right to read Nietzsche’s

Zarathustra, and to esteem Nietzsche above Rohde asAlan Cardew argues, per contra, that perhaps wemight invert the order. See “The Dioscuri: Nietzscheand and Erwin Rohde” in Paul Bishop, ed., Nietzscheand Antiquity (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2004),458–78.

39. See William Macintire Salter, “Nietzsche and War”in Tracy Strong, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2009), 3–26. See also Strong’s overall “In-troduction” (Ibid. xi–xxxiii) to the question of warand the political and my own discussion of Salter inBabich, “Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Politics andDestiny,” 281–96. I develop this point still further inan essay related to the current essay: “Education andExemplars: Learning to Doubt the Overman,” in:Paul Fairfield, ed., Education, Dialogue and Herme-neutics (London: Continuum, 2011), 125–49.

40. This again is the point of departure for Chitwood’sDeath by Philosophy.

41. “And he who hath to be a creator in good and evil . . .”42. Carl Gustav Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of

the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, trans., James L.Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1988), 1214. Note that although this Zarathustranpoint captures the final third of the substance of



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Kingsley’s Reality (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Cen-ter, 2003), Kingsley himself does not speak of Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra.

43. Ibid.44. There are a number of studies of this theme, begin-

ning with Eliza Butler’s Tyranny of Greece over Ger-many (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), but see for a re-cent account, Constanze Güthenke, Placing ModernGreece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism,1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2008), 70ff and Walter Seither, “Der DeutscheGriechen-Komplex,” in Julia Wagner and StefanWilke, eds.,“Die Glücklichen sind neugierig.” ZehnJahre Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche (Weimar: BauhausUniversitätsverlag, 2009), 232–53.

45. In his notes from 1881, Nietzsche praises Böcklin asan exemplar of the quality of contemporary Swiss bycontrast with German painters as a “pathbreakingpainter” (KSA 9, 536).

46. In general, when scholars say they are puzzled, theyare usually halfway to dismissing the issue. The con-ventional scholarly epoché brackets what does notmake sense. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, by con-trast, attempts to revive questions usually taken forgranted, and in this case, fairly striking questions:why tragedy? Why the delight in the tragic, that is:why the enjoyment of tragic music drama?

47. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, pp. 2116–17.48. Ibid., 2117.49. Ibid.. In his text, Jung refers to Kerner’s Blätter aus

Prevorst, a series of volumes edited by Kerner andentitled Blätter aus Prevorst; Originalien undLesefrüchte für Freunde des innern Lebens. See for adiscussion, John R. Haule, “From Somnambulism tothe Archetypes: The French Roots of Jung’s SplitWith Freud,” The Psychoanalytic Review 71/4 (1984): 648–49. This is an arena that calls for fur-ther research (Robin Small has already emphasizedthe actual historical elements of the account with re-spect to English history) particularly in connectionwith Nietzsche but also Hölderlin. The referencegiven by the compiler of Jung’s Zarathustra seminaris to Seeress of Prevorst (see following note). Al-though Jung was in the habit of citing the two to-gether, the citation here to “Volume IV, p. 57” canonly refer to the multi-volumed Blätter aus Prevorst.I am grateful to Robin Small for drawing my atten-tion to the need to clarify this. The story is also re-peated (here citing the Blätter aus Prevorst) in Jung,“Approaching the Unconscious” in Jung, ed., Man

and His Symbols, (New York: Random House,1968), 1–94, here p. 24, citation in the note to p. 24,on p. 389. For Jung, who included an illustration ofthe unconscious influence of advertising on the pre-vious page, the story demonstrates the actuality ofunconscious processes in Nietzsche’s recollection,as in musical compositions where a composer re-prises a folksong from his youth, “an idea or an im-age moves from the unconscious to the consciousmind” (ibid., 25). I add here that Robin Small in hisNietzsche and Reé: A Star Friendship (Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 2005), refers to Jung as well as toKerner but Snmall does not make the connectionwith Lucian or Rohde nor indeed and for that matterHölderlin/Heinse.

50. Kerner, Die Seherin von Prevorst. Eröffnungen überdas innere Leben der Menschen und über das Her-eintragen einer Geisterwelt in die unsere (Stuttgart:J. F. Steinkopf, 1963 [1829]). In English as TheSeeress of Prevost, trans. Catherine Crowe, (NewYork: Partridge & Brittan, 1855). It matters indeed,although this Jung does not mention, that as a medi-cal student, Kerner had helped care for Hölderlinduring his clinical confinement in Tübingen and waslater to be influential in arranging the publication ofHölderlin’s collected works.

51. Reading Rohde can give us insight into terminologyNietzsche took for granted and which some of us nolonger know: beginning with the language of theisles of the blest, along with a certain expression oftranslation, across the surface of the earth, as ofabove and below the earth.

52. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 1217–18.53. Ibid., 2118. In accord with the fetishism that seems to

attend the search for Nietzsche’s sources (whether toprove or disprove his originality), commentators canbe expected to be quick to wonder whether Elisabethwas lying, but the popularity of the book and the verycoincidence of which Jung speaks between his ownaccess to the book and the young Nietzsche and hissister’s access suggest that this is not something itwould have served purposes to lie about. Indeed, thecoincidence is plausible enough even without Elisa-beth’s confirmation and Bennholdt-Thomsen notes,following Jung, that Nietzsche concerns himselfwith Kerner between the ages of 12 and 15.

54. Ibid. I thank Annette Hornbacher for noting thatJung’s invocation of this color distinction and signifi-cance is itself derived from Kerner.


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55. Gary Shapiro, “Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands:Nietzsche’s Geophilosophy and the Direction of theEarth,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35–36 (2008):13. Restoring this emphasis, however, an emphasisShapiro conscientiously avoids, exposes us onceagain to what he identifies as the dangers of “readingNietzsche through the prism of Hölderlin’s Greekand German earth, in a Heideggerian mode, riskswhat Foucault called the return and retreat of the ori-gin and the nostalgia and site fetishism that marHeidegger’s thought” (10).

56. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 1224.57. In addition, again, to numerous English readings in

German studies as well as in philosophy, RudolfEisler’s Handwörterbuch der Philosophie repaysreading with regard to the question of theÜbermensch as a philosophical notion in particularconnection with Nietzsche. For a general overview,see Benz: “Das Bild des Übermenschen in der

Europäischen Geistesgeschichte,” as well as KarenJoisten, Die Überwindung der Anthropozentrizitätdurch Friedrich Nietzsche (Würzburg:Königshausen und Neumann, 1994), esp. 172ff.

58. Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers (Champaign:University of Illinois Press, 2006), 116. But see , bycontrast and alongside Heraclitus and Empedocles,KSA 11:442, and further KSA 12:304, as well asKSA 13:303 and 315.

59. Ibid.60. See Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science

(Abany: SUNY Press, 1994), 160ff., as well asBabich, “Nietzsche’s ‘Artists’ Metaphysics’ andFink’s Ontological ‘World-Play,’” InternationalStudies in Philosophy 37 (2005): 163–80.

61. Robin Small, “Nietzsche and Cosmology,” in KeithAnsell-Pearson, ed., Companion to Nietzsche (Cam-bridge: Blackwell, 2006), 203.

62. Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 116.


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