Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (review)

As commentaries on Thus Spoke Zarathustra have become common, their standard has become steadily higher. The influence of the major works of Stanley Rosen, Laurence Lampert, Robert Gooding Williams, and other writers will be felt in Nietzsche scholarship for many years to come. One consequence is that a tour guide is no longer enough: readers will look for an interpretation that sets out to throw new light on Nietzsche's text, providing a basis for further debate over its meaning. T. K. Seung's book satisfies this requirement. Its title signals the author's approach to Z: the book has a single literary form and a religious, or at least spiritual, theme as its content. Seung makes his case with some panache, backing it up with a reading of the work that displays an intensive engagement with Nietzsche's text.

The main philosophical theme of Z, Seung believes, is the conflict between two concepts: the sovereign individual and the deterministic universe. In fact, he regards the course of modern European culture as defined by the tension between these ideas, which amount to complete worldviews, designated as "Faustian" and "Spinozan." Nietzsche's protagonist Zarathustra reenacts this struggle in his own journey. Seung believes that in order to find overall coherence in Z, we need to assign the work to a literary genre. He nominates the epic as the most appropriate genre. It follows from this premise that Zarathustra's development in the work must lead to a victorious conclusion. This event, appearing as the triumph not only of Zarathustra as epic hero but also of Nietzsche as author, is in due course described and celebrated by Seung. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul is thus able to end with the satisfying sense of a "mission accomplished."

Yet Zarathustra's career is not as straightforward as this suggests. His repeated attempts to become a Faustian hero all end in failure, because the autonomous will cannot withstand the terrifying power of causal necessity. Seung frequently claims that determinism annihilates all meaning and value in life, making the point through forceful assertion rather than argument. Anyone who does not find determinism deeply threatening in this personal sense may learn from Seung's textual analyses but will probably find much of his main argument unpersuasive, given its dependence on this central theme. However, Spinoza's cosmic naturalism presents a different model of life and the world, bringing the two together in a union that enables us to identify ourselves with nature and its absolute necessity. This is precisely the end of Zarathustra's journey. A failure as a Faustian superman, he is eventually reborn as a Spinozan superman, abandoning his individual self in favor of a divine "cosmic self " (xviii). The work ends with Zarathustra's initiation into a mystery religion, a Dionysian pantheism involving ecstatic experiences and ritual worship of "Mother Nature." Philosophically, this nature-religion is a blend of Spinozan naturalism and "Buddhism naturalized" (273), to which Seung adds some of the more obscure ideas of C. G. Jung, including the positively Lovecraftian "chthonic force."

The successive stages of Zarathustra's epic journey are presented by Seung as corresponding to the four parts of Z. In part 1 the Faustian self is advanced as master of reality: Zarathustra wants humanity to transcend the banal satisfactions of secular culture and attain the higher ideal represented by the superman. His "spiritual campaign" (49) aims at a development of the spirit through the three stages symbolized by the camel, lion, and child, and by the final chapter he seems to have completed his mission. The mood of part 2, however, is far darker. A wounded and disillusioned Zarathustra now wants to defeat his enemies rather than to benefit humanity. He attributes his suffering to the imprisonment of the creative will by the immovable past, over which we have no control and yet which determines all...