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1934 3 June LECTURE V, Zarathustra Seminar
Dr. Jung:
Here is a question by Miss Hannah: “It seems to me so odd that Zarathustra should use the expression ‘bowels of the unknowable One,’ as one is more inclined to connect bowels with the earth?”
But this expression seems to me very apt, for “bowels” simply means contents, and in “the Unknowable One,” Nietzsche surely refers to the unknown god who, he said, was dead.
It is a funny thing, however, that throughout the whole of Zarathustra you get a feeling as if this god whom he calls dead were not absolutely dead.
He is somehow lurking in the background as the great unknowable one of whom you should not speak; you simply should not take him into consideration: he is too
dangerous to be mentioned.
So his peculiar expression that you should not be interested in the bowels of the unknowable one means that there is somebody there, only he is utterly taboo.
You see, that is explained psychologically by the fact that Nietzsche calls himself an atheist, for anybody who calls himself an atheist is a negative theist; naturally he would not deny a thing if he did not think it was there to be denied.
He would not add the a. It is an admission of God when you call yourself an atheist, because whether you assert a thing or deny it, you confirm that it is: you cannot deny a thing without giving it a certain existence.
It does exist somewhere even if you assume that it exists only in the minds of other people; that it exists in the minds of other people means that it does exist.
So Nietzsche’s God exists somewhere and has contents but he must be careful not to mention them.
That an atheist is particularly concerned with God is not understood with us because we are still unspeakably barbarous in that respect, but the East is a bit more differentiated in such matters.
They have the saving that a man who loves God needs seven rebirths in order to be redeemed or to reach Nirvana, but a man who hates God needs only three.
And why?
Because a man who hates God will think of him much oftener than a man” who loves God.
So the atheist hates God, but he is in a way a better Christian than the man who loves him; Nietzsche is a better Christian and far more moral than the Christians before and
after him.
You see that explains a great deal of Zarathustra, which is a highly moral book.
If anybody should try to live that teaching, he would have astonishing experiences.
He would certainly feel himself to be a better Christian than all those before him.
He could buy a halo for his own private use and make himself the first and only saint of his private church.
It is true of course that we use that expression “the bowels of … “rather in connection with the earth, and in a psychological sense we mean the contents of the unconscious, which we think of as below.
But to the Christian era the unconscious was by no means below; it was a fiery and luminous heaven above.
All the heavenly “powers and principalities” of the Catholic church are really the contents of the unconscious,’ but at that time they projected the unconscious into the world above, and only through the descent which has taken place in the last four hundred years, has it been brought down into the lower regions, the earth, into the real bowels, the intestinal region, the kingdom of the sympathetic nervous system.
Then there is a question by Mrs. Bailward: “Is the artist the person who can frame the here and now of the creative forces? Does the body do the same for the self?-and is the self under the law of the uniqueness of the moment in time?””
That is an exceedingly philosophic question.
The artist can of course frame the here and now of the creative forces; his creative force consists in the fact that he can express the actual creative moment because he is creative, or the instrument of the creative force, which is synonymous.
Through being creative one creates the thing that has come into existence in this moment, that was in a potential existence before.
And the body in a way does the same for the self; the body is the expression of a preexisting uniqueness.
It is as if built up by a preexisting uniqueness; it is the realization of a unit of life. naturally, that is not the biological way of expressing it.
Biological science tries to explain life through a sort of physiological causality, the causality of the chemical transformations of the body, as we try to explain the evolution of certain forms by certain climatic conditions or other physical or physiological conditions.
The success of that explanation is not very great, however, on account of our profound lack of knowledge.
Why, for instance, in a certain geological period should a certain species of animal prevail.
Of course, there has always been a certain amount of sea, but in one period we had water animals and in another land animals; and we only can assume that the water animals moved slowly out of the sea and became amphibious, and then developed into animals that preferred to be on firm ground.
But why and how they could do so remains absolutely dark.
We can not imagine how a fish could suddenly change into an animal that walks on four legs and breathes through lungs; an indescribable fact must have taken place that provided those animals with lungs.
Even the principles of Darwin cannot explain why they did not just die out instead.
If there was a lake or part of a sea, for example, that became more and more shallow and slowly dried up, then the water would become more and more salty and the fish would have perished because they cannot live with more than a certain percentage
of salt. In the Red Sea there are no fish, no life can exist with that concentrated amount of salt.
One can assume that the sea was continuously filled with fresh waters and so evaporated slowly, but from what we know, while the lake was drying out, the fish simply perished and they did not develop lungs.
As a matter of fact the strange thing that paleontology now teaches us is that in a new age a huge number of new species appear, perfectly finished and developed; and we can find no traces of the stages where they were half-baked.
It seems as if all those animals were suddenly there.
So, in most recent times, among the people concerned with those problems-the biologists and zoologists and so on-there is a growing inclination to assume a peculiar creativeness in life, able to produce a new species in an unknown way.
We have a certain analogy in the so-called mutation of plants, where a new plant comes into existence, finished, like those famous beeches with red leaves, for example, which suddenly sprang into existence about the middle of the nineteenth century: it just happened.
And there are other well known cases of mutation of trees.
So, such experiences have led modern biologists to think that there is a peculiar creative factor in life.
Now, if we apply that idea generally we come to the conclusion that there is a preexistent uniqueness, or a unit of life, that creates a certain body according to its own peculiar uniqueness, creating it exactly as an artist creates a work of art out of a preexisting vision.
And if the body is created by the self, and the self is called a uniqueness, then we identify this uniqueness with the uniqueness of the moment of creation.
This is substantiated in a way by the very awkward fact that the uniqueness of the particular moment in time in which a thing is created is characterized by certain qualities as is proved by the fact that the horoscope can give the character of an individual-·· If it were impossible to deduce a human character from a horoscope, then of course that whole idea of the identity of the uniqueness of the self with the uniqueness of the moment when a thing comes into existence would not be valid; but as a matter of fact you can deduce from a horoscope, you can show the character of an individual to an amazing extent.
We will now continue our text, the last part of the sermon of the Superman:
It is not your sin-it is your self satisfaction that crieth unto heaven; your very sparingness in sin crieth unto heaven!
The German word for sparingness is Genugsamkeit.
I would call it frugality: your frugality crieth unto heaven.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which ye should be inoculated?
Lo I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy.
Here again is this term “great contempt.”
He says-several paragraphs before this-that the greatest thing one can experience is the hour of great contempt.
He obviously makes rather a point of it, so he must mean some definite psychological fact.
What do you think he means by it here?
Mrs. Baynes: Does it not mean reaching a point of view where you are prepared to give up the most precious thing that you have?
Dr. Jung: We will see whether that hypothesis fits.
When I ask what they desire the most, the most precious thing, plenty of people will say, to be happy.
A whole continent believes in being happy-go-lucky, that is proverbial, we all believe in it to a certain extent.
Then, others will say they desire reason the most.
You know the Goddess of Reason was put upon the throne in Notre Dame instead of God-I think it was in 1796.
Then, virtue is the best you can desire according to certain convictions.
And righteousness is surely praised by many people as the very finest thing they can possibly possess; you also can call it respectability, because if you feel very respectable you are quite righteous.
And the most wonderful of all is pity, because pity is at the bottom of Christian love.
The pity for all things living is the very essence of Buddhism also.
It even goes so far that every morning one of the priests in the temple carefully wipes the floor with a broom, not to remove the dust but the insects that might be trodden upon, so they are invited to leave the sacred precincts to preserve themselves from possible injury to their legs or little bodies.
You see, we have here a series of very noble things which humanity has always held to be the most precious.
So the hypothesis put forward by Mrs. Baynes surely explains this contempt as the contempt of all those virtues.
But why should the hour of this contempt of all the noble ideals, the most desirable precious things, be the greatest moment in life?
Answer: Because these qualities are only the compensation for the shadow.
Dr. Jung: So you would conclude that Nietzsche is really looking for the dark things that lurk behind all these beautiful virtues, as if they surpassed all the good mankind could desire.
This is another hypothesis.
He says: Not your sin but your frugality, your niggardliness even in sin, crieth unto heaven.
So the contempt really comes from the fact that the shadow is so great and thick that one begins to despise all the virtue mankind has praised in the past.
For what is it?
It creates in consequence a shadow as dark as hell, so overpowering that it is really not worthwhile to praise all those virtuous qualities; the greater reality is in the darkness and not in those ideas of beauty and light.
That he says your frugality in sinning cries unto heaven means that he sees those ideals as a sort of pretext or subterfuge over against the overwhelming fact of the sin in man.
Here you see the good Christian but with the a in front of him; he sees all that as sin, which is the way the Christians would speak.
He is still under the shadow of the church; he is within the sacred precincts, and therefore he feels quite blasphemous.
You see, the dark things which are understood to be sin are only sin when you are entirely upon the standpoint of the preceding list of good qualities; if you once imagine that these are really the most wonderful ideals man could aspire to, then naturally everything which is less good seems to be dark and sinful or immoral.
So he wishes for a spark of lightning to sting people out of that idea of despicable ease, to wake them up so that they can see the real truth of man.
And he holds that this lightning which should lick people with its tongue is the Superman.
One could call that a sort of speech metaphor, conveying the idea of a situation in which everybody was more or less asleep, without realization, and then something suddenly happens which wakes them up, a terrible crash or a stinging pain, and for that lightning would be a good simile.
But there is something more in this image of the lightning.
This simile turns up, for instance, in a Chinese inscription, which surely was quite unknown to Nietzsche.
It is a verse and I cannot quote it literally, but the idea is that from time to time mankind gets into an inexplicable state of sleep or of torpor, exactly like the mood in nature
before a thunder storm.
The air is heavy and man and beast fall asleep; the trees are without movement; everything becomes like lead.
The Chinese text says that something is spread over the earth like a wonder which cannot be explained, and then follows an invocation to the dragon to rise.
He is lying coiled in the deep, but he should rise and strike with the lightning of his tail so that the whole of nature would wake up again.'”
It is exactly the same metaphor, but the symbolism is more conspicuous.
For that dragon means what?
Mrs. Crowley: If it were Hindu it would suggest the Kundalini.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but what would be the Chinese meaning?
Mrs. Fierz: The Yang principle.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that former condition is the Yin condition, where everything has taken form.
Everything is real, concrete, indubitable; and when things have become, they go to sleep.
That dormant condition means that the Yin principle has swallowed the Yang principle completely.
It is like a dark cloud spread over the earth, but within that cloud is the lightning lying coiled, ready to strike.
Then the Yang strikes and the cloud opens, the rain falls, the air becomes clear, the
rivers begin to move, new plants come up from the parched soil, and new life is created.
So that simile most certainly refers to a psychological condition underlying the symbolism, which you see very clearly in the Chinese text.
It is a close analogy, as Mrs. Crowley has just mentioned, to the Kundalini serpent which is called the coiled one; the serpent is coiled in a dormant condition in the depths of the darkness, in the cave, and when the moment comes when something has to happen, the Kundalini suddenly rises and hisses and causes something like a lightning flash, a sudden sting.
This peculiar quality of the Kundalini describes a psychological moment, the breaking up of an old order, and it starts to break up through a sort of intuitive flash; somebody suddenly has an intuition, and that is the first lightning which then dissolves
a whole complicated situation which one thought would last forever.
Nietzsche understands the idea of the Superman in that sense.
He holds that man has gotten accustomed to the idea that it is worthwhile to live for all those virtues, for all sorts of ideals and beautiful things, and would always remain the same.
He is in a certain order: he has his position, and it is just as if it had been ordered for eternity.
You know, no treaty is made which people don’t suppose to be forever; no state, no church, is founded which is not for eternity: everything should last forever.
It is an apparently desirable condition which has been brought about and which should always last, in spite of the fact that we know very well how long treaties usually last.
But again and again man seeks to establish something for eternity.
And that is not ridiculous because it is the essence of civilization or culture that it can and should resist time; it is the characteristic of anything man-made that it is able to resist the continuous dissolving activity of time and nature.
That is why we build houses instead of having mere shelters under trees, or tents, or any other very transitory contrivance; we make things as durable as possible in order to establish the victory of man over nature and over the transformation of things in nature.
If you should make a philosophy with the idea that it was only for the next fortnight, of course you never would make it; you make a philosophy with the assumption that you are going to bring out a truth that will last for several thousand years at least.
This tendency to create a form of civilization any form, religious, political or social-always has that claim of durability, of resistance against the onslaught of time and nature.
And it is such a condition, the tail end of the Middle Ages, into which Nietzsche was born.
You see the Middle Ages reached right up to the beginning of the great war; we still had the feudal system, we had kings and feudal princes according to the ideas of the Middle Ages-of course in a somewhat different form, but more or less as it always had been during the last two thousand years.
The best proof of that is that we still founded our religious and philosophical convictions upon the New Testament.
That is the highest authority and it has naturally created a certain social form and morality, and certain religious and philosophical convictions; even if these convictions have an a to them, even in the negation of those old beliefs, they are and have remained as they always were.
Nietzsche was born in such a period, as I said, and he felt that it was a dormant condition which had to be exploded by the idea of the Superman, which means that man is not a definite form, a definite entity that remains the same for millions of years, but that he can change, undergo a mutation as it were, and suddenly transform into
something else.
Of course, that is again a very Christian idea: it is the idea of Christian conversion.
In the early days of Christianity, they held the same conviction, that when a man had undergone the mysterium or the sacramentum (the two terms are synonymous: in the early church it was called the mysterium and later they preferred to call that old mystery ritual the sacramentum, but the process was exactly the same), he was made sacred, or mana, by a transformation into something else.
He was nearly drowned in water and pulled out of it as if out of a womb.
The baptismal fount in the church was still called the uterus ecclesiae in the Missale Romanum, and the people who had undergone the transformation were quasi modo geniti.
It was understood to be a complete and thorough change of man; he was made into something new, no longer the old Adam.
He put on Christ, the new body, and was made into a child of God, an immortal being.
Without baptism or without taking communion, one misses the pharmakon athanasias, the medicine of immortality, and is merely mortal like the animals; one has no soul.
That belief went so far that old Tertullian was convinced that if a man was baptized he could not sin any longer, and if by chance a man should sin again, something must have been wrong with the baptismal ceremony, so it had to be repeated.
He was enormously surprised to find people who went on sinning in spite of the second baptism; then he thought they were children of Satan and utterly lost: they simply had to be dropped.
Nowadays, when a person in a religious movement is not behaving according to rules and is not saved, he is called neurotic and sent to the analyst.
And then the analyst asks quite justifiably, what can he do, is he greater than God?
This belief that through a religious conversion we become quite different beings, is still alive among us.
Somebody becomes a Christian Scientist, for instance, and is supposed to be an entirely changed man; formerly, he was a rascal, and now look at him: he does not drink or
waste his money running about with women, so Christian Science must be the truth.
Then the Methodists and the Baptists and the Salvation Army and the Oxford Movement and four hundred other denominations walk upon the stage and tell you that all their members have become entirely different people.
Therefore, they all contain the truth. Now, what truth?
It is the old belief that that thing is the living truth which changes people completely; the criterion for the truth is that man is changed, proving that there is some secret magic in these forms or convictions.
That was the belief of early Christianity, and it is the same idea which Nietzsche proclaims here: the idea that the Superman would be the lightning which would upset the dormant condition of his world, so that man could change.
It is not exactly the Christian transformation through the grace of God or baptism.
It is due to man, because when God is dead he appears next in the one who kills him:
then the divine creative faculty needs must dwell in man.
And then man has the faculty of transforming into the Superman, by which is not meant a man of greater virtue but a man who is simply beyond this man of today, a different creature obviously, a man who can deal with the darkness in human nature.
Dr. Reichstein: I think the oldest picture of this idea is the Iranian myth of the original primordial man who sleeps and must be awakened.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is a similar idea, and there are other primitive beliefs that the first couple, or the first god, was asleep and had to be awakened.
When Zarathustra had thus spoken, one of the people called out: “We have now heard enough of the rope-dancer; it is time now for us to see him!”
And all the people laughed at Zarathustra.
But the rope-dancer, who thought the words applied to him, began his performance.
To whom does the rope-dancer refer here?
Remark: To Zarathustra?
Dr. Jung: Well, I must say it is not quite clear.
We only know that there is a man who is really a rope-dancer, and when the people call for the rope-dancer he sets to work.
There is a certain confusion between the real and the symbolic rope-dancer here.
Mrs. Baumann: It might be the Superman.
Dr. Jung: Yes. You see, the ordinary man could not be compared to a rope-dancer; he lives in good houses in safe cities that are watched over by the police, and there are excellent laws, and boundaries to every country, and settled conditions.
But the rope-dancer walks on a very high rope in the air; it is an acrobatic stunt and if he falls down he is killed. It is a tremendous risk, the symbol of a dangerous transitus.
So the Superman could be man in the situation of a rope-dancer, running as great a risk as the rope-dancer who risks his life.
It is as if there were a misunderstanding here between the audience and the speaker.
The people think Zarathustra is speaking of the real rope-dancer while he is really speaking of the Superman of whom the rope-dancer would be a symbol.
Now, we have been reading the sermons or reflections of Zarathustra, and there has been very little action, but here we come upon action again, as in the descent of Zarathustra from the mountain and the meeting of the old wise man.
And whenever talk transforms into action there is a reason for it.
Do you know what it is? Why should talk suddenly become action?
Mrs. Fierz: If what is to be told is not clear, not conscious enough to be said in words, a sort of symbolical action would take the place of the word.
Dr. Reichstein: Speech is always one-sided, and this action could be the reaction from the unconscious brought out by the speech before.
He teaches more the Yang side, and the action might he the reaction of the Yin side.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that would more or less coincide with what Mrs. Fierz said.
Something is lacking in the sermon apparently; with that statement, “I teach you the Superman,” a certain culmination is reached, and for the moment he cannot go beyond.
He says he is the lightning and he is the madness, and now of course the sermon should continue and say where it starts, and of what the effect of the lightning or the frenzy consists, and how it shows.
But there he seems to have hurt himself against a snag, so the sermon goes underground.
It is like a pause in a speech: one’s thoughts suddenly leave one and one has to do something about it and then it turns into action, and the action must be expressive, symbolical of the spoken word.
Mr. Nuthall-Smith: It would be when he gets tired of talking.
Dr. Jung: Zarathustra is not easily tired of talking.
Mr. Nuthall-Smith: But the people get tired.
Dr. Jung: He pays no attention to the people, as we have evidence for in the next chapter where it says: “But Zarathustra, looking at the people, wondered, and then he spoke thus: … “You see, he continues; he is not afraid of tiring people with his talk, and it is quite a while before the rope-dancer can get to work, because Zarathustra is still speaking.
No, he has hit upon something there, he has hurt himself against an invisible snag, and that is of course the transition over to the question how that idea will work, what it means to man and what it means to himself above all.
For instance, when somebody says a whole mouthful and then suddenly stops and cannot find the next sentence, you can be sure that he has hit upon something in himself which caused the hesitation.
If a person announces as his sacred conviction that things should always be done in such and such a way, and then doesn’t know what to say next, it is because the devil has hooked on, asking: “Do you really know your own conviction?” or “Do you really mean what you say?”
And obviously he does not know then what he has said or what his conviction was.
It often happens when people say more than they can swallow, that they are suddenly disturbed from underneath; they forget what they wanted to say because the unconscious has withdrawn it.
They were just gliding along, it was all plain sailing, and then they struck upon a shallow piece of ground where the unconscious was close to the surface: suddenly the unconscious hooked on.
In such cases, the symbolic or symptomatic action follows.
This is such a moment. Zarathustra hesitates, he looks upon the people as if he were wondering about them.
As a matter of fact he should wonder about himself, because here Nietzsche touched something that gave a spark for the time being.
He is able to go on, but in the meantime, while Zarathustra goes on talking, the symbolic action begins to work.
Now, this rope-dancer is quite obviously a relation of Zarathustra he is his symbolic action-and I think we are quite safe in assuming that he represents Nietzsche’s inferior side, because all the preoccupation with the rope-dancer in subsequent chapters shows that he is really concerned with that man and sees himself in him.
So we may assume for the time being, as when one dreams of an inferior person, that this is the shadow figure, the inferior man in himself.
And it really is the inferior man in him that has hooked on here, saying: Now what about that transition to the Superman? How can you become the Superman?
For it is expected of you, Zarathustra; of you personally, Friedrich Nietzsche.
How do you get beyond your migraines, your vomiting and sleeplessness and chloral and all the other narcotics, and your terrible sensitiveness and irritability?
You see that would happen in every one of us.
Now he starts again to speak about the Superman, because he begins to wonder what the effect or the idea of the Superman really means to him personally.
So he says in the way of reflection:
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman a rope over an abyss.
This is the answer he is giving to the doubts as to how man can get across to the Superman, by what means that change can be made, and why it should be made.
Those are the doubts of the inferior man, so this is almost in the way of an admonition.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.
In German it is Ubergang and Untergang, which would be literally a going-over or a going-beyond, and a setting like the sun.
He says:
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I would prefer to say: “I love those who live not, save as suns setting, for they are going beyond.”
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
By these words he is soothing himself or explaining to himself why the longing for the Superman or going beyond man is a greater virtue than remaining the ordinary man.
He says to himself that he loves those men who don’t remain what they were, but who live in order to change, to live beyond themselves in order to become.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
He denies the Christian idea of self-sacrifice for a thing which is beyond the world, for an extra-mundane spirituality.
He doesn’t see any merit in killing the body for the sake of the spirit, and moreover, one
would never be changed by sacrificing oneself merely to the spirit.
His idea is that it takes greater courage, greater virtue, and a greater sacrifice, to live, to sacrifice oneself to the earth, to reality; for if one sacrifices oneself to the actual concrete reality, one is changed and thus one prepares the way for the Superman.
One occasionally comes across such problems in people in analysis, particularly in cases of transference.
You see it sometimes happens to pious people that they get neurotic and unfortunately enough they have to go through an analysis, and then-Oh Lord!-they even fall in love with the analyst.
They get a transference which at times takes on a most disquieting religious aspect-the analyst takes on the aspect of Jesus: they would like to kiss his feet and call him Jesus.
Then, they develop a most formidable resistance against such a blasphemous transference.
But the more they resist it, the more they project-till he is almost overwhelmed by the negative Christian projections.
Of course he is then not only Jesus but also the devil himself. naturally, the conflict is great in such people.
The thing to which Nietzsche alludes happens to them: they get neurotic because they exaggerate their own spirituality.
They identify with the spirits in heaven and imagine themselves spirits and nothing
else.
But unfortunately they have a thick shadow.
They have a body underneath all that show which won’t agree with the spiritual show on top; it revolts against such spirituality, and that causes the neurosis.
Then, in analysis, naturally they become aware of the fact that there is such a thing as body, that the spirit does not pay for the whole performance.
The body has to pay the damage too.
The unconscious insists very much then upon the physical presence of the analyst; and
transference has the meaning that they should be brought to recognize the projection of their religious contents into as ordinary a human being as an analyst.
Of course, they are mighty glad if he is not quite ordinary. “Such a great man!”
His great mind excuses the fact that they have a transference, for if it were on any ordinary human being, it would be insupportable.
But mind you, it is not his mind at all, I have known that for many years.
At my last lecture at the University, I walked downstairs behind some girls and I overheard their remarks:
“I didn’t understand a word of what he said today.” “You did not understand? It was as clear as a bell.”
Then can you explain such and such a thing?” “Oh well, I did not quite get it, but I know he is right, he is so strong and so healthy!”
So it is an awful thing to find all your values projected into an ordinary human creature with a body, particularly all your religious values.
And mind you, if that figure has a mind, it is an obstacle, by no means an asset, because you have then to cast away all that mind business in order to see that it is a body.
To see great religious values in the body is a very horrible discovery for a good Christian.
It is just that to which the Lord himself alluded when he spoke of the possibility that he
might be seen in the shape of the lowest of our brethren, that in the lowest of our brethren we would be able to recognize the Lord.
A very wise word, but of course a more loathsome word to a Christian.
It is not accepted, because they only want to pity the lowest of our brethren; the idea of seeing anything of high religious value in them is much too dangerous.
I explained that once to a conference of theologians in Strasbourg and they all averted their eyes and walked round it.
It was too hot a stew; they would not put a finger into it.
Yet, it is of course a most important point; it is the problem of our time, in which of course Nietzsche also was concerned.
He understands the acceptance of the man of earth as the self-sacrifice of greater merit than any sacrifice for the sake of spirit.
He sees that acceptance of the real concrete man, identical with his body, as the greatest meaning of our time, for such a sacrifice would put modern man before a problem of almost unsurmountable difficulty.
We would rather accept anything in the world, any devil or any hell, than accept ourselves in our particular concreteness.
That is the thing of which we are most afraid.
You see, that being is not even very sinful, not even superb in its sins-just hellishly banal and of a low order, not interesting at all.
We would prefer superb sins than to be ourselves with all the banality which we represent.
Therefore, he says:
I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live.
Thus seeketh he his own down-going.
Here is again the famous Untergang the setting of the sun of all his ideals about himself; it is an extraordinary disillusion and an increase of knowledge.
Without disillusion you never acquire knowledge, and without knowledge you never acquire a new consciousness, and without consciousness you never change: living unconsciously you remain forever the same.
I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the Superman,
That is the new man who knows, whose consciousness is exceedingly individual if he can once swallow the fact of himself.
and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant, for thus seeketh he his own doing-going.
He goes down into the concrete reality.
He becomes again man and disidentifies with his ideals.
In other words, he creates a new ideal which is coincident with the real man, with man as he is in the body.
I love him who loveth his virtue; for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
Again the virtue of the doing-going, the approach to the earth, to man as he is.
And the arrow of longing is the changing, going beyond, because by accepting oneself as one is, one gets a longing to be different and that moves the whole world forward.
We don’t want to be ourselves, because we cannot stand ourselves; therefore, we never make progress.
We remain as we are because we don’t accept the only thing which can be motive power enough to bring it about.
Only when we accept the thing which is loathsome to us, have we a real will to change, not before.
I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.
That means that he loves the one who has the intuitions of such virtue, who at least intuitively grasps the meaning of that virtue, and thus in spirit crosses over the bridge.
I love him who maketh his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
This shows that it is really a self-sacrifice because you risk living on or you risk dying.
It is an enterprise which has all the risks of a real enterprise, which includes its specific dangers.
It is amor fati.
This is the attitude now prevailing in Germany.
It is the inner meaning of National Socialism. They live in order to live on-or to die.
When you hear the really serious people talk, you realize that Nietzsche simply anticipated that style.
They praise the attitude of being ready, and naturally any rationalist asks, for what?
That is just the point-nobody knows for what.
Therefore, they have no program; they have no mapped-out scheme which should be fulfilled.
They live for the moment. They don’t know where they are going.
Very influential and competent people of that party acknowledge that they don’t know, but one thing is certain: they are going, there is no return, they must risk it.
Then, the rationalist asks: “Risk what?” The answer is, “Risk it.”
They don’t know what they are risking; they simply take it as a matter of course that they must have this attitude, that one risks it, whatever it is.
This is of course pure madness from a rationalistic standpoint, and that is what
Nietzsche means.
Therefore, he says the Superman is the lightning or the madness.
One can say it is all pathological, or that it is a divine or a demoniacal madness, but that is exactly the madness Nietzsche means.
So Nietzsche is in a way the great prophet of what is actually happening in German.
I love him who desireth not too many virtues.
One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling to.
This is a very wise word because the more virtues you are looking for, the more you get away from your real task.
There is only that virtue which makes you live what you are.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wanteth no thanks and doth not give back: for he always bestoweth, and desiretl1 not to keep for himself.”’
This is again the idea of the down-going, pouring life out.
You see, we always try to retain, to economize our lives, but he preaches an attitude
that is wasteful, that wastes oneself So it means giving the whole of oneself without restriction, again a self-sacrifice to fate, to the things that have to happen from dark reasons-a complete surrender to life and fate.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asketh: “Am I a dishonest player?”-for he is willing to succumb.
To perish. That is clear.
I love him who scattereth golden words in advance of his deeds,
and always doeth more than he promiseth: for he seeketh his own down-going.
Again this attitude of out-doing oneself, of doing more than one really meant to do.
It means following the impulse which is always behind everything we do, the organic instinctive impulse which has the character of a natural reaction, as all instinct has.
It means to go the whole length of the way; you meant to go for two miles, but it carries you along for fifty miles, and you let it happen.
Otherwise, there is no going clown.
You cannot manage fate; you never wind up with yourself if you can manage yourself, if you can say to God, “This and no more.”
I love him who justifieth the future ones, and redeemeth the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
That complete surrender to the present necessities means of course a fulfilment, a redemption of the past generations, and of the unfulfilled lives that are waiting to be fulfilled.
If we live completely, we surrender to their lives and redeem them.
Also, we prepare for a future generation, because we have lived out our own lives; we have fulfilled them, and we leave no curse for the following generations-the curse of economized life.
I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
You see he is at it again, without the a this time.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfed that he forgetteth himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
That would mean going down into reality in the sense of downfall.
For he gets entangled; he easily gets wounded; fate takes hold of him and so he becomes complete.
This is a complete, very perfect acceptance of what one is, drawing the last conclusion from the fact of being what one Is.
Question: From one’s own doing?
Dr. Jung: Well, it is a sort of religious teaching: it is very absolute.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart; thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causeth his downgoing.
That is a confession. The heart is speaking through Zarathustra, not the mind.
This is again exactly what is happening in Germany now, their heart is speaking through their head.
And this heart desires destruction, because a world full of old ideas must be destroyed.
It is not because the heart has invented the idea of destruction, but because in the heart is the secret source of a will that speaks through the head.
But that is taboo to Nietzsche. He doesn’t touch it.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: Here we have the image of the dark cloud spread over the earth, in which the lightning is hidden.
They herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Superman.
That means the coming man of course.
A coming attitude, a new spirit, should fill the human form and make over our hitherto prevailing world and culture.
In Nietzsche’s mind, the Superman is a new type of man with such an attitude. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 72-90
