Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Promethean Pretensions and Romantic Dialectics

Abstract

On 26 August 1881, at his mountain refuge in Sils Maria, Nietzsche drafted an early schema for what would later become Thus Spake Zarathustra (TSZ). Under the subheading ‘Sketch for a New Mode of Living’, Nietzsche wrote in his Nachlass: ‘First Book in the style of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. Chaos sive natura: “On the Dehumanization of Nature.” Prometheus is fettered to the Caucasus. Written with the cruelty of [Kratos], “Might”‘ The related references here to chaos, cruelty and Prometheus immediately recall the reader to Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Prometheus myth as set out in his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (BT). In section 9 of this work, Nietzsche compares the myth of Prometheus to the myth of the Fall, portraying the first as an embodiment of the masculine virtues of heroic individualism and heroic suffering, and the second as an expression of ‘curiosity, deception, seduction, concupiscence, in short a series of principally feminine affects’. In the same gender-biased vein one could also argue that the Edenic myth imagines a feminized pre-lapsarian earth where lamb and lion nestle companionably upon Mother Nature’s fragrant bosom, whereas the Greek myth posits a harsh, brutal earth where all forms of life, especially human, necessarily suffer and perish. Similarly, while shame and submissive humility accompany Eve into the vale of tears, Prometheus curses the cruel injustice of his fate which he nonetheless bears with proud dignity and heroic courage. He does so perhaps because he is not only cognisant of but equal to what Nietzsche refers to as ‘the wretchedness at the core of things’,