In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h apte r f o u r ................................... zarathustra: transcendence here and hereafter 1. tragedy: god, freedom, and immortality Nietzsche announces the coming of Zarathustra in The Gay Science and says two things about it: it is an experiment, and in that experiment tragedy begins . What is tragedy? Nietzsche set forth an account of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy and then repudiated it. The account he repudiated justified human existence by means of deliberately living in accordance with an illusion that would provide metaphysical comfort. The content of the illusion was, thus, metaphysics , but metaphysics specified in different ways according to the subject matters Nietzsche addressed from Greek tragedy to Wagnerian opera. By 1876, however, it became clear that the metaphysics Nietzsche repudiated was a generic metaphysics he found informing world religion as such and its philosophical underpinnings. His touchstone remained the JudeoChristian tradition into which he was born and its ancient Greek heritage , but his attack on metaphysics extended into Eastern religions as well. What, for Nietzsche, is the essence of the metaphysics underlying world religion as such? The essence of religion is faith in God, freedom, and immortality insofar as the unity named in that triad holds out the hope for eternal happiness.1 That is what Kant argued in The Critique of Pure Reason, and that is the cleanest statement of the metaphysical viewpoint Zarathustra contests in his saga. The constellation of ideas at the core of Zarathustra’s teachings centers on the famous themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence, amor fati, and will to power, but there are two other sustained lines of thought intertwined with these themes that must be considered as integral to them. The first is the nobility thesis, which takes honesty or authenticity as its key value and revenge, ressentiment, or systems of reward and punishment as the focus zarathustra: transcendence here and hereafter 41 of its critique. The second is a set of paradoxes or antinomies that emerge as the famous themes are developed: the symbol of the dead god that lives on, the symbol of eternal recurrence lived in the overman’s freedom of selftranscendence , and the symbol of the self to be affirmed beyond the grammatical fiction of the ego. God, freedom, and immortality, coupled with the promise of eternal reward: whether Nietzsche consciously chose to center his attack of metaphysics on Kant’s Ideal of Pure Reason is a matter of little concern to me here; my hypothesis is simply that Kant’s Ideal is the best expression of the metaphysics Zarathustra defines himself against.2 The thought of tragedy is inseparable from the thought of life and death. Zarathustra is a saga of life and death. The beings who are destined to live and die in this saga are gods and humans. They come ceaselessly into being and they pass ceaselessly away. What makes this truly tragic is that they do not live on. The challenge posed by this truly tragic view of human existence is the question of its value, whether it can be honestly confronted and affirmed . That is the experiment Nietzsche takes up with his alter ego in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In his preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant simply states that he has “found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”3 Why necessary? Kant’s answer is, once again, simple. It is necessary to have faith in order to be happy. This looks like a hypothetical imperative because it is a hypothetical imperative, and that might make us pause because it seems like flimsy ground on which to construct an absolute deontology, but that is what Kant does. Here is what Kant writes in “The Canon of Pure Reason”: Happiness, taken by itself, is, for our reason, far from being the complete good. Reason does not approve happiness (however inclination may desire it) except insofar as it is united with worthiness to be happy, that is, with moral conduct. Morality, taken by itself, and with it, the mere worthiness to be happy, is also far from being the complete good. To make the good complete, he who behaves in such a manner as not to be unworthy of happiness must be able to hope that he will participate in happiness. Even the reason that is free from all private purposes, should it put itself in the place of a being that had to distribute all happiness to others...

Share