2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY IN LITERATURE:

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
EDOUARD SCHUR1
Translated by Alla Zayenchik and Nir Buchler

It has been said, and with great acuity, too, that for the past 100 years literature
has evolved from individualism to socialism. If by individualism, we mean the
vision of life that an individual develops without giving much thought to society
as a whole, and by socialism, a doctrine that subordinates or sacrifices the individual to the society around him, we can therefore understand how the first half of
the century is characterized by a powerful development of individualism in all its
forms, while the second half is distinguished by the gradual invasion of social
preoccupations.
Even so, considering the literary movement of the last 25 years, it can be seen
that the overall trend of the new generation has been the abdication of socialism
in proportion to the growth of individualism, even reaching a hyperacute stage of
libertarian anarchism. This generation does not proclaim with Rousseau the divine
right of feelings and passion, nor with Goethe, the human right of developing
harmoniously all the faculties.
Today, it is all about individual revolt, the individual revolt against all that
exists, a declared war on the past as a whole, on the very principles of morals,
religious feelings, philosophy, and society. The intensive cult of the self and the
proclamation of the absolute sovereignty of the individual have become general
mental habits and literary fashions. And if we look deeply enough, we can see that
the terrorist attacks that we have witnessed are not necessarily caused by social
inequality and the suffering of certain classes, but by the disintegration of the
philosophical thought that, heretofore, has led our society. To cure this evil, we see
1

Edouard Schur (18411929) was one of the first Wagnerians in France. He met Wagner in 1865 in
Munich and his article published in La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1869 marked the beginnings of
Wagnerism in France. He briefly met Nietzsche in Bayreuth in 1876, an encounter he describes in his
article in this volume.

181

EDOUARD SCHUR

novelists and moralist of the opposite camp denying the individual any independence, requiring his total abdication for the sake of charity and the social good.
But actually these two opposed conceptions can only find their synthesis in a
superior idea that applies to the essence of the individual, as well as the essence of
society. Until now, these two fought other enemies. Now they fight each other.
Better equipped, more vigorous than ever, they are grappling with each other in
such fierce struggle that one wonderswill it be a leveling socialism or the
universal anarchy that shall win?
Which brings us to our subject, Nietzsche. Not until now in contemporary
literature has there been a more convinced individualist than Nietzsche. He stands
at the opposite pole from Tolstoy. If Tolstoy claims the full immolation of the
individual to society, his antagonist claims that society is here only for the strong
individual. Nietzsche personifies individualism in its last excesses, but with an
energy and grandeur that elevate it high above the prosaic self. His individualism
resembles in no way the modern Narcissus that looks smiling into his ironically
mirrored face to say, Do as I and you will find happiness; there is no other
wisdom. Nietzsche had all the shortcomings of pride, but also its principal
feature: contempt for popularity. He sought the truth on steep and dangerous
paths. He lived the torture of a mental disease that he exacerbated with unremitting
work. He knew the intoxication of solitude and drank its bitterness to the dregs. He
swore to himself that he would find The overman in himself by denying the soul
and God and by passing over humanity. With this challenge he put his life at risk
and left behind his reason. His case can inspire in us a kind of admiration and pity
that we feel for great criminals and for extraordinary misfortunes. It is the dominant malady of the young generations. Since he had a beautiful mind and the soul
of an artist, it assumes a tragic beauty which gives to his persona both a symbolic
value and a warning. He didnt live outside of himself, and all his life was the
tragedy of his thinking, says his best biographer, Mme. Lou-Andreas Salome.
This interior tragedy, of which he was at the same time hero, executioner, and
victim, where all his thoughts became living characters and sometimes frightening
spectra, could perhaps be thought of as the intellectual pride and suffering of a
mystical atheist. By narrating it, we will have an occasion to study one of the most
disquieting moral diseases of our fin de sicle.
There are in life certain souls of abrupt changes that, taken aback by violent
hatred against their objects of worship, burn all of what they adored and adore
what they have burnt. In such cases, the overturned idol is only an occasion that
allows the bursting out of the true nature of the man and the springing out from
him of an angel or the devil. One of the turning points in Nietzsches intimate life
was his break with Richard Wagner. After that, his disease of pride evolved in
gigantic proportions and drove him not only toward a fierce form of atheism, but
to the point of intellectual suicide. In this study, I will insist on this central point
182

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

of his evolution in order to find the key of his being and the secret of his
philosophy. But before speaking of it, a few words about his beginnings.
Frederick Nietzsche was born on October 15, l844, in the small town in Saxony.
His father was a Protestant pastor and came from a noble Polish family (the
Nietzki). He showed at an early stage his various contradictory predispositions: a
subtlety of perception and an excessive sensitivity, combined with a stubborn will
and a passion for music and poetry. With a meticulous analytical taste and love of
the dialectic bordering on sophism, and capable of fanatical infatuation, he also
had the reputation of being a taciturn in deaf revolt. There laid within him a
genius, an artist, and a philosopher. But these characters could never get along,
and as none wanted to surrender to the other, they fatally wounded each other.
Nietzsche studied at Bonn. In l865, at the age of 21, he was appointed professor
of Greek philology at the University of Basel.
He received from his professors a wealth of knowledge and the demeaning art
of purely negative critique. But university education did not instill upon him any
guiding thoughts. The intellectual burdens of the second half of the 19th century
were particularly apparent to him, for he could see the human spirit threatened in
its liberty and dignity by its own creations, that is, by the excessive pretensions of
the natural sciences, and certainly by the development of industry. This included
the banal intelligence and diminished characters of its bureaucracy and military,
along with its elegant and often beautiful customs obliterated by the surging wave
of democracy. The modern world did not smile upon this refined nature, with his
aristocratic stance and transcendent ideal. At this period he read Schopenhauer
and the pessimistic idealism of the philosopher from Frankfurt took over his mind.
For Schopenhauer, life itself was negative in its essence. Tied to his unconscious
nature, man proceeds with a blind instinct and ceaseless, aimless desires. The only
refuge lay in thought and in art. Buddha declared that the only remedy for the
agony of life was the annihilation by asceticism and absolute abstinence, through
careful analysis, of the worthlessness of things, and a detached portrait of the mad
struggle of the will. Wasnt that a delightful task? Schopenhauer contented himself
with rejoicing in philosophy and art.
This philosophy responded to Nietzsches intimate needs. He sheathed himself
in this armor to protect himself against the outside world and set off on his path
like the knight of Albrecht Drer who armed himself from head to toe, impenetrable, between death and the devil. But he was still searching for his ideal. He
was inextricably attracted to ancient Greece, always yearning for it. That which
he was seekingah!it was more than the ingeniousness of marble, the
dazzle of beauty, and the rapture of harmonious songs. It was the enigma of
the Sphinx, the secret of man and of life. He suspected that in the midst of
bloody chaos and the eternal failures of history, on the Hellenic shores of great
Greece, a noble ideal had once come to life, not solely of philosophy, but of the
183

EDOUARD SCHUR

philosophical life. At one moment he believed to have noted it in the enigmatic

figures of the Ionian school, in Thales, and, above all, in the powerful figure of
Heraclites. But those shadows faded quickly, while the great Pythagoras passed
before him without divulging the secret of numbers, of soul, and of the cosmos.
However, he was not discouraged as he left the Germanic countries and modern
times. As he approached the land of gods, of heroes, and of wise men, he
was in high hopes, heavily caught up in the shield of Kant and the sword of
Schopenhauer. Sitting directly on the Acropolis, he looked toward Bacchus
theatre. Believing as he did that tragedy, the focal point of Greek art, offered up
all the secrets of Eleusis and Delphi, he nevertheless saw, as he approached it, that
it was nothing more than the most appalling ruin of them all. How to recover
the vision of those fabulous heroes stirring within the framework of this sculptural
landscape, the divine choir personifying the voices of the tragic mystery? Here
was a mystery akin to the cadaver whose soul had fled.
It was at this exact moment that he met Richard Wagner. All those who were
surrounded by the great artist knew of his enveloping power. There was in him a
Titan and a magician. Similarly, his work displayed a marvelous synthesis of art;
he seemed to unite them in his person with the special gift of the playwright who
sees and presents everything in movement and in action. When he damned
himself, it was as if his tumultuous conversation was crossed by the lightening of
his creation and the beam of his indomitable will. It was for Nietzsche a stunning
revelation. It is the power of genius that transforms the universe for those who
approach it. The enthusiasm of the novice was unreserved. At this moment he
forgot himself; he gave himself completely as the disciple gives himself to his
master. The following years were certainly the happiest of his life.
In Wagners work Greek tragedy itself returns to life. Didnt Schopenhauer say
that music is the revealer of the soul of things and their direct expression? That
has never been truer than in Wagners drama, where the dominant motifs and the
harmonious infinite game translate the interior movements of the characters and
let their hearts beat beneath our very eyes. In this meaningful role that music holds
in the Wagnerian drama, a beam should shine on the role of the chorus in a tragedy.
Despite the gap which separates Greek theatre from the modern, Nietzsche
thought, not without reason, that in one, like the other, the tragic feeling emanates
from the same source, and this source gushes from the deepest obscurity of man,
the fundamental law of being, the mystery of life and death.
From this ferment of ideas came Nietzsches first book, The Birth of Tragedy,
which was published in l872. We find there the main qualities of the thinker and
the writer. We also feel the heavy influence of his first mentors, Schopenhauer and
Wagner. The masterpiece of Greek art is presented as the combined work of
Apollo, god of individuality, source of dreams and of poetry, and Dionysus, god
of creation and universal destruction, source of drunkenness and music. According
184

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

to Nietzsche, the essential pleasure of tragedy consists in intoxicating ourselves

with the grandeur of individualism and the force of universal life, which squanders
it after giving it life. It must lead us through terror and pity to the ravishing
Dionysus, where, abandoning our own life, we participate in a way in the indestructible power of the being of beings, the creating force of the unique being.
This book, rich in new perceptions, ripe with deep emotion and content, caused
a scandal in the university. It betrayed, to the eyes of objective science, a shocking
enthusiasm. Having bold ideas and passionate sentimentswas that allowed
when one was a professor of philology? What was most displeasing to the school
Puritans was to see one of their own interpret Greek tragedy, with the help of
Richard Wagner, who was still strongly frowned upon. No one gave Nietzsche a
legitimate criticism that could be addressed, however. If there was one weak point
in his essay, which was in itself remarkable, it was the fact that he didnt shed light
on Greek tragedy through the mysteries of Eleusis, but rather through his confusion of the fragmented Dionysus of terrestrial life with the Liberator of celestial
life, and plunging into the elements for the mystical union of the regenerated and
resuscitated being with the divine spirit. But the opponents of Nietzsche thought
only of the criticism of his texts and the dignity of science. Their protests and their
refutation added to the birth of his glory.
In the following years Nietzsche occupied himself solely with developing the
principles exposed in his essay on tragedy. He was not yet the extravagant
individualist, the violent anarchist of thought that he later became. In philosophy
he remained the faithful disciple of Schopenhauer. He did not believe in God or in
the human soul, but he admitted a sort of world soul, a transcendent reality that
manifested itself through the hierarchy of powers and ideas in nature, as well as
humanity. In the name of philosophy he declared war on positivist science that
heeded only the appearance of things and pretended to impose rules on life. In the
name of conscience and intuition, he declared war against the abuses and tyranny
of history.
We want to serve history, he said eloquently, as long as it serves life. The essential thing is not
knowledge, the mere sum of science and facts, but the material force of a man, of a people, of a
civilization, their original ability to grow, to assimilate the past and the stranger, to heal their
wounds, to replace their lost energy, recreate the broken forms from within. Without law we become
a chaotic mix, disparate and non-assimilated, whose variety hinders our organic personality. We
become the passive theatre of someones thoughts. History in this context becomes a disease.

Therefore, it is not history, but art that expresses true life. It recognizes all that
nature has willed and tried; it achieves its imperfect outlines. That is why the
world is only justified as aesthetic phenomenon. At last Nietzsche proclaimed the
sovereignty of genius, giving homage to Wagner and elevating him into a supreme
cult. Because he alone, the sublime warrior, manifested the transcendent truth.
185

EDOUARD SCHUR

He was the announcer and the sole revealer. He was the first born, except for
time, a messenger of the eternal. Calling Wagner the savior of Germanic culture,
the restorer of Dionysian and Apollonian art which he had dreamed himself, he
gave his dramatic and musical genius the following definition: Wagners drama
follows its rigorous march like an implacable destiny, and the music submits to it
with a cruel resolution, even though the fiery soul of this music wants to escape
and seek freedom. Above all, in these melodies and the passionate struggles over
the torment of contradictions, lies an all-powerful intelligence which perpetually
creates peace and war. Wagner was never more Wagner than when the difficulties
increased tenfold, so that he could reign over his grand ensemble with the joy of
a legislator. It pleased him to dominate the high-spirited and rebellious masses, to
regroup them in simple rhythms, to impose a sole will upon the troubling diversity
of varied desire and ambitions.
Ten years later, in a famous pamphlet, the same Nietzsche who once acclaimed
Wagners talent as a dramatist, calls him the prince of decadence and the corrupter
of modern music. What happened? Nietzsche has remained silent on this topic. He
contents himself with the following declaration in his preface: The greatest
experience of my life made me a healer. Wagner simply belongs to my diseases.
Poor Nietzsche! One doesnt arrive at healing Wagners wounds so easily, not after
subjecting him to all that his most illustrious disciple subjected him to. Certainly
he had succeeded in accomplishing this feat. But rest assured that in curing
himself of his master, he did not destroy him, nor triumph like those doctors who
rid a patient of his illness by killing him. In any case, Nietzsches case is no less
interesting than Wagners. If the latter addresses the crux of the aesthetic problem
and the future of art in its integrity, the former confines himself to the most
sensitive subject of the philosophical and religious problems of our time. He
makes us see the naked depth of the contemporary soul, even more dangerous than
that which hides beneath a skillfully woven literary mask.
I met Nietzsche at Bayreuth in l876, at the premiere of The Ring. If these
memorable scenic performances marked henceforth a climax in the history of
dramatic art, they were also possibly the secret of Nietzsches new evolution. At
least, it appeared to me that he then accomplished his first malicious deeds, which
pushed him onto this path.
While chatting with him, I was struck by the superiority of his wit and his
foreignness and strange physiognomy. Large forehead, crew cut, prominent Slavic
cheekbones. The heavy mustache, the coarseness of his features, gave him the air
of a cavalry officer, but one with a certain shyness mixed with cockiness. The
musical voice, the slow speech, denoted his status as an artist. His prudent and
meditative comportment was that of a philosopher. Nothing was more deceitful
than the apparent calm of his expression. The focused eye betrayed the painful
labor of thought. At the same time, it was the eye of the sharp observer and
186

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

visionary fanatic. This double character gives him the air of being both troubled
and troubling, even more so because he is always concentrated on something in
particular. In the moments of submergence, this gaze exuded the sweetness of a
dream, only to become hostile once again. Nietzsches entire manner of being had
this distant air, this discreet veiled disdain, which often characterizes intellectual
aristocrats. Madame Salome, who judges a man with a singular penetration, says,
His eyes appeared to be the guardians of mute treasures. Their gaze was turned
within; they reflected his interior impressions; they gazed far into the unexplored
regions of the human soul. In an animated conversation these eyes could seem like
flashing lightening, but in somber times, solitude spoke through them in a menacing, lugubrious expression, like an unknown depth.
During the general performances and the three premieres of the tetralogy,
Nietzsche appeared sad. He was already suffering the beginnings of this cerebral
malady with which he was struck later, but he also suffered from a deep and
inexpressible melancholy. In the presence of Richard Wagner he was timid,
annoyed, and almost always silent. Wagner, thrown into a colossal enterprise,
where he had to manage 35 main charactersgods and deities, giants, dwarfs,
men and women, heroes and Walkyries, not to mention choirs, stage machinery
and orchestrawas taking joy in his role as the young Wotan and the legitimate
triumph of having created this world and set it all in motion despite his 63 years.
In the short hours of rest which were allowed him after his Herculean workload,
he let loose with a fantastic gaiety, an exuberant humor that was the froth of
genius. Forced to let his soul and his thoughts pass through this being of flesh and
blood, and to maintain an equilibrium between self-love, the morals, and the
frivolous passions of his troupe of actors and actresses, he became an actor
himself. A subtle charmer and tamer of souls, he always accomplished his goals
with a mixture of violence and cajolery, of wild anger and sincere tenderness,
without ever losing sight of his goal. Living in this storm that he organized himself
with his director, he could give only fleeting attention to his disciples and admirers. Before the artistic marvels that he accomplished each day we all shared the
feeling of astonishment of Mime, in the face of Siegfried, who re-forged the sword
that was broken by his father, after having reduced it to iron fillings melted down
in the crucible. Was Nietzsches pride suffering from this inferiority? Was his
acute sensitivity hurt by the familiar crudeness of his master? Did his sharp moral
conscience rise up against the inevitable contrasts between human nature and the
genius of the great man? Did he not want to admit that the creator of such vastness,
who organized an aesthetic miracle considered impossible by the entire world,
could consider his best friends only as instruments of his work, above all, when he
has accomplished it in full battle against winds and floods? In his first contact with
Wagner, Nietzsche established himself as an equal with his master. He dedicated
his first book to the sublime fighter of the avant garde. Perhaps he thought of the
187

EDOUARD SCHUR

reform of Germany as a school of philosophy, aesthetic, and morality, where

Schopenhauer would be the venerated elder, Wagner the artist and the propeller,
but he himself, Nietzsche, the prophet and the supreme legislator. Certainly
Walhalla spun out of Bayreuth with his impetuous and sovereign Wotan, not at all
resembling the dream of the Schopenhauerian tradition. The author of The Birth of
Tragedy disappeared like everybody else in the glorification of the master. The
master at first mocked him a little, but was then seriously indignant and affected
by seeing his disciple so morose, not understanding why. To Nietzsche he seemed
to scream at him like Loge, the demon of fire, from the top of the rainbow that led
to the palace of the immortals. Why these complaints? Rejoice at the sum of your
new gods! Nietzsche thus participated without much enthusiasm in the grandiose
scenes of Walkyrie, Siegfried and of Twilight of the Gods, which he had expected
to bring him joy. When we left together, no critique, not a word of blame escaped
him, but he had the resigned sadness of a disappointed man. I remember the
expression of languor and cynicism with which he spoke of the next work of the
master and said, He told me he wanted to reread the universal history before
writing his poem, Parsifal! This was said with the smile and intonation of an
ironic indulgence, whose hidden meaning could have been, Look at the illusions
of poets and musicians, who believe theyre entering the universe with their ghost
stories, but dont put anyone there but themselves. Considering that Nietzsche
was pagan and antireligious down to the roots of his being, from that moment he
turned against Wagner for propagating a Christian mystery. He didnt understand
that in his master, as in every real creator, the poet was independent of all abstract
philosophy and only obeyed his private emotions; that this Christian element that
we can already see in Tnnhauser and Lohengrin came from the deepest sources
of his rich nature, and so the homage to Christ by the glorification of the Grail, far
from being a simple fantasy of the artist, was possibly the most sincere and most
serious act of his life. But for Nietzsche, being a Christian, in whichever way, even
if it is part of the symbolism of a great artist with the independence of a free and
personal faith, meant an act of hypocrisy or cowardice. The publication of the
poem, Parsifal, didnt take place until two years later. At the same time Nietzsche
published a book where he broke with his past. An irreparable break followed
between the two men. But cool relations had preceded the rupture, and I am
persuaded that the wounded ego of the disciple was the primary, yet secret, cause.
Nietzsches new book was a collection of aphorisms and random segments with
the bizarre title, Human, All too Human. It didnt take great insight to recognize the
repercussions of the personal disillusionment of the writer. Wagner was not
mentioned once, but there were a lot of questions about the vanity of genius, of art,
and of things in general. Disgust and skepticism succeeded the noble enthusiasm of
preceding works. Most surprising, once more came the complete about-face
for the philosopher. Nothing found favor in his eyes. He always supported the
188

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

opposing view to Wagners theories. He trampled upon his most cherished ideas.
Madame Salome said that Nietzsche needed to free himself from Wagner to become completely himself. Yes, surely this was so, but the injustice and lack of
gratitude toward the man to whom he owed the greatest revelation of his life showed
that he was far from free of him. Furthermore, he committed a very serious crime;
he went to war with his own ideal. Like a man who believed he had been duped, he
fought with violence and fury against all the ancient idols, art, poetry, metaphysics,
genius, love, human sympathy, morality, man, humanity. He denounced everything
that crossed his path; he did not leave anything standing. With this he placed himself
in the role of the ascetic hero in the name of truth, and he genuinely believed it,
except that in fact he was nothing more than a destroyer made desperate by the
subtle poison of intellectual arrogance. This passion, even more pernicious than all
the errors of the senses that can consume life and the soul and its source, must have
pushed him from sophism to sophism to the most appalling of all castigations.
If he had only jeered at the humans, the formidable nemesis, this infallible logic
of things, the ricochet would have hit him less harshly. But, by this iconoclastic
rage, he picked on the holiest of things, the generating ideas of life. He made
mountains crumble before what he called himself the mothers path! In the place
of the true eternals he no longer wanted to admit the reality and the logical
succession of facts. He no longer believed in the institution that perceived these
truths, but only in the dialectic that discerned this series. It was the positivist
doctrine pushed to its last stage, which made the world an undefined chain of
causes and effect, without primordial cause or any final goal. Logically, it erased
metaphysics. This sentiment was a source of error. In the place of Dionysus,
symbol of inspiration and ecstasy, he put Socrates, not the veritable Socrates who
was far from denying intuition, but a Socrates of his own fashion who represented
the scientific man. Notice here that this scientific man, according to Nietzsche,
deprived of intuition and therefore wisdom, is absent at the center of all science.
The renegade idealist attacked art and poetry afterwards, like the disloyal workers
of dangerous monsters. The Greek poets themselves, whom he had so admired, are
now no more than actors and skillful liars who disguise reality. Those whom he
had called the inspired, the seers of Dionysian truth were now insulted for being
drunk with feeling. Enthusiasm was now compared to the brandy that enervates
and wipes out entire races of savages. As for the genius, see how he speaks of him
as Oh, the discounted glory of genius! See how its crown is easily lifted and its
admiration turned into a habit! We always kneel in front of force. An old slave
custom! In the past he had seen in the genius a sort of miracle, and even a goal
of humanity, but now he sees him as nothing more than a product of heredity.
When it comes to morality, Nietzsches judgments are even more negative than
those he made about aesthetics and philosophy. He supports the positivist theory
of his friend, Ree, derived from Hobbes, according to which all moral phenomena
189

EDOUARD SCHUR

are rooted in egoism and self-interest. He categorically refuses to understand

all the acts of spontaneous empathy, of well thought-out empathy, of social
construct, which are forms of self-denial, affirmations of universal law and the
solidarity of love. Human vanity becomes for this resplendence of the soul a
thing in itself. After which, transcendent, the doer of these brilliant atheist deeds
cries out, proud of his victory, Fiat Veritas! Pereat vita! Let there be truth and
may life perish! Sophism and that supreme blunder, pride, prevail, as though the
truth isnt the soul of life and life the proof of truth!
The one who reproaches the masters to whom he owes his initiation does not go
unpunished, nor do those who curse their gods. From that moment Nietzsche
enters a desert which he will never leave, filling the ardent dreams of his pride, the
troublesome phantoms of his guilty conscience. He confesses his fear to himself,
When I was on the road by myself, I tremble: Shortly after, I became ill. I was
more than ill, I was weary of my incessant illusions on everything that could still
excite us, we, modern men. Sometimes his path frightens him and his work
torments him. The following monologue, a captivating truth, gives us the main
foundation for the radically nonreligious pathological study of the self, a path that
we will follow. In this study we find the seed of disorganization, the dispersion of
the conscience into many opposing selves that want to destroy one another. First
the voice of the atheist who wakes up alone and shivers, Where did God go? Im
going to tell you! We killed him. You and I! All of us are murderers! And here,
despite himself, the soul of the atheist hears the voice of the deep conscience. It
mumbles in a low voice, as though it were afraid of its own words, Havent we
heard anything yet from the gravediggers who buried God? Dont we smell the
divine putrefaction? The Gods are decomposing! God is dead! God is dead! And
we killed him! How are we to be consoled, murderers among murderers? The
strongest and most powerful things that man ever possessed bled beneath our
knives! What water can wash us clean? Listen now to the subtle demonic
argument which responds to the voice of the conscience and suffocates it, to finish
in a satanic outburst of joy, Isnt the grandeur of this action too great for us?
Shouldnt we become gods ourselves, revealing ourselves afterwards? There has
never been so great an action, and all those to come after will belong to us because
of this very deed, so that we await a history superior to all the histories that have
passed.
But this joy isnt unfettered, nor this triumph without work. Since then, according to his close friend, his life was always wrapped in deep solitude, from which
his interior thoughts sprang. It was not the blessed solitude that merges with the
man and the soul and all things through divine love, but the solitude characterized
by bitterness, by shame, and by grasping demons. His feminine confessor says
that beneath his clear and well-reasoned philosophic diction there was an unfathomable abyss of emotion, passion, and suffering. Thus, he could have described
190

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

himself as hiding underneath of cloak of light. A cloak of light or of shadow,

depending on the day. The cloak is not enough for him; he needs a mask, too. In
his black pessimism, he believes that all men conceal themselves and take on a
borrowed identity. In all that a man allows to be seen of himself, we can ask,
What is this meant to hide? What is he trying to hide from our gaze? What
prejudice does he wish to arouse? And furthermore, how far does it go? And in
what way is the disguise itself mistaken? Deep down, Nietzsche was full of
sincerity, too passionate to avoid constantly betraying himself, too poetic not to
express himself, even despise himself. He was engraving masks under the pretext
of fleeing the foolishness and nastiness of men. In Beyond Good and Evil he
writes, Traveler, who are you? Have a rest. Me, resting? You are curious! Whats
the use of rest? Rather, give mewhat? One more mask, another mask. Notice
in this preoccupation the feverish worry of this Ahasver of thought who has no
more brothers, nor home, nor country, who doesnt find rest anywhere; who makes
a new system daily and demolishes it the next day like a poorly constructed hut to
look for new shelter, and who needs a mask and a cloak to hide from others, and
above all, to hide from himself.
Now it extends around him, always larger and more livid, the Moorish desert
beneath the low clouds, without the sun and without trees. The lonely thinker
consequently presents himself to us with a new face. He has become the Wanderer
and his shadow. He slowly makes his way, defiant and circumspect. He is going,
he is always going, looking for the light of a desire, becoming bitter and more
stubborn as the obscurity thickens around him. He wants to conquer the virile
pride and the supreme independence. He thinks he can emancipate himself by
erasing these three ideas, God, the soul and love, and he does not realize that he
has erased the organic principles of the universe and society. He does not understand that he has closed to himself the source of spiritual intelligence, energy, and
life. He doesnt understand that he has dedicated himself to the most fatal slavery,
to that inferior and personal self which Pascal calls the detestable self. The
traveler without guide and without star becomes the prey of his own shadow,
which leads him through the dusk to the wonder of waterfalls and ravines. In a
burst of exasperated optimism he believes that through suppressing metaphysical
and religious feelings and ridding himself once and for all of all the illusions and
deceptive dreams which intoxicate the masses, he can prevail. And here, in the
mist of the moor we find all kinds of ghostly forms. Some are under the perception
of the multiple self, held by their guiding principle. They are their masks
externalized, that come to life. The others are the images of his secret dreams, of
his desires, repressed by his reason, which, despite him, take form and incarnate
themselves. He says that this larva has no reality, that it is the figment of his sick,
overzealous imagination. But these forms, which have acquired their own life,
independent of his will, he finds disconcerting and irritating. Soon they will show
191

EDOUARD SCHUR

him their real faces, and their monstrous sides. While waiting, still veiled, they
make gestures with their hands, they bow down their heads, and he, fascinated,
drugged despite himself, follows them without knowing where. He has moments
of weakness, tenderness, when he seems to repent for his blasphemy against
poetry and the ideal. So his mind involuntarily flies off toward unknown worlds
[. . .] But it is not there in the lost light, in the black clouds which weigh heavily
on the pale cursed moor, that the traveler in his gloomy odyssey finds his short
moments of respite. And the moment he looks at his black shadow, it whispers to
him, Didnt you promise to put an end to all those fantasies? Destroy, destroy the
absurd dream of the sky. Search for your own kingdom, where you shall be your
own master, and mock the others!
And so the traveler turns around, frantic, looking behind him for a beam of light
to guide him. He shivers. The ghosts again! But by this time they are two great
shadows all too familiar to him, those of the repudiated masters, Schopenhauer
and Wagner. There are the two men of genius to whom he owes his entire
education as a thinker and an artist. In his fierce pride, in his hallucinatory
nightmares, he now calls them the gruff philosopher and the dangerous magician. And when the two shadows rise up behind him, harsh and tall, he asks,
What do you want from me? Its been a long time since I have slain you, you
damned specters! And they replied, We are only the shadows of the masters. You
carry their seal in your flesh; thats why we follow you. No one kills phantoms; we
are the guests of your surroundings. So he gives them one lash of his whip and
continues on his way through the sands, the moor, and the mountains. But at each
stage he will find them again, and they will tell him by their gestures and looks,
We are herego no further.
One day another voice, coming from a very distant unknown sphere, tells him,
When man renounces the divine, his shadow brings him to the abyss. Doubtless
on that day Nietzsche concocted the idea for his Zarathustra. Far from changing
his path, he responded to the salutary warnings with a triumphal defiance and with
the most audacious apotheosis of self that any writer or poet has ever imagined.
From l876 to l883 Nietzsche voluntarily associated himself with the narrowest
form of positivism as a punishment and exercise. But the moment had to come
when, bored with this constraint, he would break down the doors of his prison. His
independent and imaginative nature was repulsed by the instinct of pure rationalism, but it reacted more violently against any religious or social idea. He threw
himself (and was deceived) into absolute determinism. Now he suffered tremendously; he choked on it. In his Gay Science, which is a sad science, he made this
confession, All my travels and the mountains Ive climbed have been nothing
more than the last resort of the powerless man. My entire being wants to fly, just
to fly. This eagle then attempted the flight toward the knowledge of lost things.
Not wanting to recognize that the only truly free act was the ascent of man to the
192

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

recognized universal order, he declared one beautiful day that liberty springs up
like a miracle from the sovereign will of the strong man. Thus, the new Lucifer, he
believed, would create his own happiness, justice and sky and would become
overman. With that reasoning, he rejected the doctrine of the sovereignty of pure
reason, which he had adopted just a short while ago, and intuition as the supreme
tribunal of the mind. On the other hand, he divinized instinct. This paradox is the
starting point of Nietzsches last phase. Zarathustra is the manifestation and the
gospel of this supposed revelation.
Another note on the outside circumstances that accompanied the genesis of this
strange work: Forced by his health to renounce teaching, more and more misanthropic, intolerant of all but his closest friends, Nietzsche got into the habit of
spending his winters in Genoa and his summers at Engadin. About the superb port
of Genoa he writes that he loved being in the center of such abundance, gazing
over the far seas. Thats when he believed he saw the aurora of a new world rise
from the veiled horizon. But it was surely the shadow of the tall Alps which he
felt come over him. In more than one landscape, he said, we are moved by a
delicious shiver. Its the most pleasant duplication. The nature of Engandin is the
parent of my own. We are not shocked by each other, we trust each other. This
high Alpine valley snuggled without fear under the terror of the eternal shows,
where Italy and Finland rub against each other, this land full of the silvery shades
of nature and of myself. Because at the heart of these little unmoving lakes,
solitude itself looks me in the eyes. That is where he lived his dream, where he
dared to perform his last audacious acts. No more black pessimism, but a relentless joy. No more suffocating positivism, but the freedom of mind for all his
fantasies.
Buried forever were the old illusions of God, of being, of humanity, of the
heavens, of the supernatural; they had collapsed haphazardly, these false gods in
the crepuscule of the idols. Meanwhile, the strong man, the intellectual man,
forging his ideal, is humanity taking control, without anything above him, without
any law but his own, disregarding the weak and the stupid and inviting all the
strong men to do as he did; that is the concept of this Zarathustra by which
Nietzsche pretends to reveal to his contemporaries and to posterity the Superman that he discovered. Never was a more beautiful style used for a more
murderous idea of the truth and the eternal human ideal. It is an ample and
rhythmic prose, a language composed of large building blocks, like the walls of
the Cyclopes, with words like powerful granite alliterations. Beneath these strong
foundations, the seeds of poetry, a virgin forest of images, are working, while
further underneath we find a volcanic thought that breaks through the soil like lava
during an eruption, always ready to devour all to which it gave birth. Like the
bellows of the forge, it emerges from Isaiahs angry verses, interrupted by satanic
laughter, by the railing Titan conquered by a god.
193

EDOUARD SCHUR

At 30 years old, Zarathustra withdrew to the mountains. He lived in a cave for

10 years with no one to keep him company save his two pets, an eagle and a snake,
symbols of pride and prudence, which brought him his food. For 10 years he found
joy in his own mind, without regret or lassitude, living in true happiness. But
having found himself too rich in his wisdom, he decided to return to the land of
men, to share his treasure with them. On his way down, he met an old hermit
whose prayer sounded like a monotonous growl to the ear of the prophet.
Zarathustra passed before him with a disdainful smile and said to himself, Would
it be possible that this old saint in his faith still doesnt know that God has died?
In the next city, he found a crowd assembled at the marketplace. They were
waiting for the arrival of a tightrope walker. While they waited, the prophet
announced to them the good news:
I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to
overcome him?
All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of
this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to
the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.
You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes,
and even now man is more of an ape than any ape.
The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of
the earth.
I entreat you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do no believe those who speak to you of
superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let
them be gone!
Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these
blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the
bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth.

The gospel of modern atheism has never been formulated with more assured
cynicism than in this first prediction of Zarathustra. And it never contained so
many flagrant contradictions. Should we be shocked if the flabbergasted crowd did
not understand any of the saying of the Superman who descended from the
monkey, who only believed in earth and wanted to elevate himself above it, who
denied the divinity manifested by the universe and proclaimed himself God? But
thus spoke Zarathustra. We must all bow down.
Soon after, a great light illuminated the mind of the prophet as he meditated in
the forest. What did it matter to him what that herd thought? What did they do for
him, the acrobats and corpses? It was the living he was after, real friends, the
194

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

creators of his species, strong and free men. He would go back to his mountain, he
would go back to his cave where his eagle and snake awaited him. There he would
call upon his disciples and teach his doctrine. The sermon on the mountain
delivered by Zarathustra begins with a parable entitled The Three Metamorphoses,
Man must become camel, lion and child. The camel is humble and patient,
carries heavy loads, climbs the highest mountains, and drinks the dirtiest water
and feeds on dry grass. Thus, the mind conquers the treasures which it needs for
its work. One beautiful day, in the heart of the desert, he becomes a lion. He wants
to seize his preyliberty, struggle with his god and kill the great dragon.
Maybe you believe that this dragon is the old sin of the theologists, or one of the
many temptations of St. Anthony. In fact, this would be too old school. The great
dragon is called, You must, but the lion of might answers, I want. He loves
duty as the most sacred of things, but he must destroy this love in order to be free.
Why does he have to become a child now? Childhood is innocence, forgetfulness,
the beginning, a game, a wheel that turns and turns. For the game of creation,
there must be a saintly affirmation. Spirit desire will, and the who has lost his
world looks for a new one. This parable would be profound and true if the camel
sought the hidden truth of everything instead of arbitrarily assembling facts
according to his egoistic vision; if the lion attacked the monsters of ignorance,
prejudice and habit instead of obsessing over the idea of duty and used it to deny
universal order; if the beautiful child, under the guise of ignorance and joyfulness,
was the child of free love and spontaneity that forgets himself because he is
capable of sacrifice and creates because he loves. Here we see very clearly
Nietzsches usual method, consisting of dressing up a sophism with an original
and poignant image, a way of seducing the simple and false minds or the pure
dilettantesso numerous todaywho take pleasure in images, admire movement, and ridicule ideas.
The following chapters develop at length the gospel of individualism and
anarchy. After having proclaimed the absolute liberty of the individual, Zarathustra declares war on his enemies. War on those who pretend to be good and just,
who he considers lazy and cowardly. War against the so-called virtuous who are
really hypocrites! Above all, war against the preachers of heaven. They are in
Zarathustras eyes the madmen or Tartuffes of the most refined kind. On the other
hand, he proclaims holy and sacred the physical body which he names a plurality
with meaning, peace on earth, the flock led by a shepherd. Nietzsche ignores that
the body is in fact sacred because it is made in the image of the soul in its diverse
faculties and is, furthermore, the instrument of the mind, and not a simple assembly of atoms. He does not realize that by taking away the mind and the soul from
man, he deprives him of his main guiding principle, thus stripping him of divine
essence and human substance. La Rochefoucault has marvelously shown how
skilled man is at deceiving himself due to his deceitfulness. In the case of
195

EDOUARD SCHUR

Nietzsche, he would have admired how man excels at ruining himself due his
arrogance. Here is a prophet who preaches the Superman and takes away the force
that could elevate him above himself. He strongly believes that by placing the soul
and the mind above and beyond the body, we must then admit that God is the cause
and the goal, the divine and the universal order. Regardless of the name that he
gives to this unfathomable power, it goes beyond man in all its immensity. This is
what he would not admit at any cost. And thus he is led the apology of the body
and the appeal to instinct. But the instinct that he invokes will take revenge. The
uprooting of the hierarchy is the curse of the perverse intellectual who has killed
his moral sensitivity and destroyed his center of gravity. The instinct erected as a
guide leads the intellectual to madness. Not only will the anti-psychological and
anti-organic teachings of Zarathustra give birth to anarchy around him, the war of
all against all will shake his own conscience and cause a war in his own brain,
heart and senses. It will be the disintegration and the collapse. A just nemesis! He
who works for life, receives it! And so the worker for death is seized by it.
Meanwhile, the new sermon of the mountain continues, bitter and incisive, its
topsy-turvy gospel. The steel arrows fly, fettered by roses, the paradoxes plumed
by rare thoughts. Zarathustra presents humility as the virtue of the slave, like the
rag of the hypocrite. He himself is the example of unrestrained arrogance that
knows no limits. The wise men and prophets of the past were all saintly imbeciles
or ceremonial pedants. Their doctrine sank because of its heavy spirit. They had
to stumble and fall. Zarathustra alone takes on everything with the subtle agility of
a dancer; he alone has wings; he alone has found truth atop his mountain.
In the drunkenness of his discovery, his mind sparkles like the foam of a young
wine. A light and pure air, the danger very close, and the mind full of joyous
cruelty: All this goes well together. I want to be surrounded by malignant spirits
because I am courageous. The courage that chases phantoms creates its own
demons. Courage wants to laugh.I feel as though I am no longer with you; this
cloud that I see lying at my feet, this darkness and this heaviness at which I laugh,
this is your stormy cloud [. . .] The one who climbs to the high mountains laughs
at all the tragedies and all the serious funerals of life. Carefree, ironic, violent, thus
we arrive at wisdom. She is a woman and does not like warriors. Amidst the
grapple of pride, beautiful thoughts shine here and there, like maxims of gold
above marble doors:
Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood:
and you will discover that blood is spirit.Once spirit was God, then it became
man, and now it is even becoming mob [. . .] And the modern state too is treated
in harsh terms: It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love
over them: thus they served life. It is destroyers who set snares for many and call
it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them. In his acrid
diatribes, Zarathustra mans the whip of satire with a youthful violence, and thats
196

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

how he employs his real power. Here for instance, a sketch of the ambitious
politicians, speculators, and journalists: Just look at these superfluous people!
They steal for themselves the work of inventors and the treasures of the wise: They
call their theft cultureand they turn everything to sickness and calamity. Just
look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call
it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves. Just
look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves
poorer with it. They desire power and especially the lever of power, plenty of
moneythese impotent people! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They
clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
So unmerciful is Zarathustra to the imitators of this kind, that he classifies them
as theatrical exhibitionists and acrobats and doesnt hesitate to borrow many of
Schopenhauers ideas, notably those on women and love. Little does this gruff
philosopher believe in idealism, in intuition, in the divine sense of the woman
who is superior in the spiritual order, in this divine something that the Germanic
tribes once attributed to her, according to Tacitus. The woman is above all a cat,
a bird, and at best, a nanny. He judges the social liberation that women have
begun in America and are now pursuing in Europe to be ridiculous and dishonorable to men. He cannot even consider her as an intellectual companion of man,
the confidante of his idea and the soul of his will. Everything about woman is a
riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: It is called pregnancy. For
the woman, the man is a means: The end is always the child. But what is the
woman for man? The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason
he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. Man should be trained for war
and woman for the recreation of the warrior: All else is folly [. . .] The mans
happiness is: I will. The womans happiness is: He will. And woman has to obey
and find a depth to her surface. Womans nature is surface, a changeable, stormy
film upon shallow waters. But a mans nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: Woman senses its power but does not comprehend it.
What will these strong men do now? You solitaries of today, you who have
seceded from society, you shall one day be a people: from you, who have chosen
out yourselves, shall a chosen people springand from this chosen people, the
superman. All the gods are dead. Now we want the Superman to live! Let this be
our last will one day at the great noontide! Here are proud words and vast
perspectives. Far be it from us to want to suppress them. And are they really so
unfeasible? It is always the beautiful hopes that inspire great actions. And if man
only has a few years to struggle with destiny, humanity has before itself endless
centuries. The preparation of an elite by the voluntary selection of the best is
possibly the future of the human race. But did Zarathustra establish in his group
the necessary conditions for this accomplishment? First of all, he marginalizes
women, or at least reduces them to the physical role of motherhood, refusing
197

EDOUARD SCHUR

them the more important role of the creator of the psychic and sensible orders. In
misunderstanding this crucial element, Zarathustra erases the matrix in which
genius incubates in a divine mystery. And by proclaiming himself the only
prophet and the only inventor of truth, he further suppresses any link between the
past and the present, and cuts the magnetic chain that, from generation to
generation, unites nations to nations, wise men to wise men, and geniuses to
geniuses. By declaring that good and evil are the arbitrary acts of strong men, he
destroys the very notion of truth. He destroys the possibility of having any serious
disciples, since they would have the right to revolt against him in the name of his
own principles. They would only be imitating their master, who wants no master,
not even God.
Zarathustra denies all founding principles. Now, he could very well have genius
and power, but he can only produce other arrogant and more ineffective than
himself. He speaks of his disciples, but we have never seen them; they are muted
shadows, ghosts of his thoughts. And so they do not suffice and he has to look for
others. But where will he find them? One night he dreams of a child giving him a
mirror. He looks in it and sees, with horror, a hideous grimace, the face of a
scornful demon laughing. I understand the dreams omen, says the prophet,
awakening. This vicious face represents the caricature that my enemies and
slanderers make of my doctrine. But the dream can be interpreted differently.
Perhaps this demonic face and laugh could be the last admonition of conscience,
interpreted in the following way: Take heed, this is what you will become if you
continue on your path! But Zarathustra is not capable of feeling remorse. He
sprang up, like a seer and a singer whom the spirit has moved. A dawning
happiness lit up his face like the dawns. He springs out of his cave and sings a
hymn in honor of the fortunate islands that he will conquer:
My impatient love overflows in torrents down towards morning and evening. My soul streams into
the valleys out of silent mountains and storms of grief.
I have desired and gazed into the distance too long. I have belonged to solitude too long: thus I have
forgotten how to be silent.
I have become nothing but speech and the tumbling of a brook from high rocks: I want to hurl my
words down into the valleys.
And let my stream of love plunge into impassable and pathless places! How should a stream not find
its way to the sea at last!
There is surely a lake in me, a secluded, self-sufficing lake; but my stream of love draws it down
with itto the sea!
I go new ways, a new speech has come to me; like all creators, I have grown weary of the old
tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn-out soles.
All speech runs too slowly for meI leap into your chariot, storm! And even you I will whip on
with my venom!

198

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

I want to sail across broad seas like a cry and a shout of joy, until I find the blissful islands where
my friends are waiting.
And my enemies with them! How I now love anyone to whom I can simply speak! My enemies too
are part of my happiness.
And when I want to mount my wildest horse, it is my spear that best helps me on to it; it is an
ever-ready servant to my foot.
The spear which I throw at my enemies! How I thank my enemies that at last I can throw it!
The tension of my cloud has been too great: between laughter-peals of lightning I want to cast hail
showers into the depths.
Mightily then my breast will heave, mightily it will blow its storm away over the mountains: and
so it will win relief.
Truly, my happiness and my freedom come like a storm! But my enemies shall think the evil one
is raging over their heads.
Yes, you too, my friends, will be terrified by my wild wisdom; and perhaps you will flee from it
together with my enemies [. . .]
My wild wisdom became pregnant upon lonely mountains; upon rough rocks she bore her young,
her youngest.
Now she runs madly through the cruel desert and seeks and seeks for the soft grasslandmy old,
wild wisdom!

This piece gives us an idea of Nietzsches powerful lyricism. His prose has the
characteristics of an ode, a gushing foam, the roar of an Alpine torrent. Notice
the strangeness of this love which ends in shame and imprecation. Notice also the
analogy of this impetuous departure, with Wotans turbulent calvacade in The
Walkyrie and Siegfried. Here, Zarathustra, the chain breaker, does not break with
the one he had formerly worshipped, for Wagners shadow lies across his mountain.
The disciple, fleeing the master, stole a piece of his mask, a scrap of his magic cloak.
We seem to be in the Fortunate Islands, at least I suppose this is so, based on the
brazen headlands, the crowns of greenery, the azure gulfs, the dark seas where the
setting sun casts its liquid gold. Because the thoughts of the prophet cleave the air,
we see this landscape only from a birds-eye view, between two lyrical scents, as
if by the gap in the clouds. Will he at least show us his group, his disciples, his
ideal city? But every day we hear the monologue of the solitary prophet, and now
these new dialogues are even more violent, bitterer against the society that he has
just left. His rage is addressed to the scum of the literary world, that is poisoning
all the sources; and to the preachers of equality, whom he calls, the tarantulas of
shame and desire; and to the famed wise men who are only venerated because
they cater to the superstition of the crowd; they are cattle who allow themselves to
be harnessed to the carriage of the people, or little donkeys to that of the politicians. His rage is also directed to the philosophers who work with their heads
199

EDOUARD SCHUR

high, with a sublime air, but whose demeanor is that of a poorly trained fawn, or
a wild boar crouching in his hideout.
He couldnt tolerate the learned men [. . .] The poets are treated even worse.
They know very little and learn badly, that is why they are force to lie. They falsify their wine and
make an indescribable poison in their cellar. And since they know little, they love impoverished
minds, especially when they are young women [. . .] A little voluptuousness and a little tedium: that
is all their best ideas have ever amounted to. And in that way they would like to show themselves
reconcilers: But to me they remain mediators and meddlers, and mediocre and unclean men. Indeed
I cast my net in their sea and hoped to catch a fish; but I always drew out an old gods head. Thus
the sea gave a stone to the hungry man. And they themselves may originate from the sea. To be sure,
one finds pearls in them: them they themselves are all the more like hard shell-fish. And instead of
the soul I often found in them salty slime. They learned vanity, too, from the sea: Is the sea not the
peacock of peacocks? Truly, their spirit itself is the peacock of peacocks and a sea of vanity! The
poets spirit wants spectators, even if they are only buffaloes!

Nietzsche excels in intellectual satire, which denounces down to the blood the
minds shortcomings. But extreme by nature, he goes overboard, and we feel in
him more hatred than indignation. Perhaps he attains a summit in the genre in his
satire of cultured people, who, being nothing by themselves, wear on the out-ofdate frocks of the past. Throughout the entire chapter Of the Land of Culture, I
see very clearly the end of a world, but I do not see the dawn of a new one. Oh,
Zarathustra, prophet, you who are merciless toward the past, merciless toward the
present, you who have closed your ears to the cries of human suffering, and who,
one would say, have never set foot in a hospital, a coal mine or the hovels of the
poor; you who have suffocated the divine voice of your own heart, you who dont
believe in celestial powers and want to be the Superman, you who bury the sources
of love and who nevertheless are called, the singer of joy and the dancer of life,
are you so sure of yourself? There is darkness around you in the small valleys of
your fortunate island. When you spend the night with your mute disciples in the
shadowy clearings of the forests, the young girls with beautiful ankles who are
dancing in the grass suddenly stop their laughter and flee, despite your amicable
salutations. Your gaze frightens them. You yourself tremble before the invading
dusk, and alone with your soul, you retreat before the darkness that thickens in the
depths.
During one of your journeys on the sea, as the sun was setting, you saw a black
island covered in tombs, emerge in the splendor of the dusk, and you recognized
the tombs of the dreams which were dear to you in your youth. But you can say
as much as you like about your unmoving will, your will that breaks the rocks is
sitting on the tombs like eternal youth. You are not relieved. Those dreams that you
continue to mourn, despite all, those dreams that nothing can bring back, theyre
not how you imagine your enemies, it is you who have killed them with the arrows
200

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

of your pride. Your nemesis threw itself on you and overwhelmed you. You will
want to love again, but you cant love anymore.
One night the prophet abruptly ran away like a thief, and leaving the Fortunate
Islands, embarked on a journey back to the continent. He needed to be alone in
his cave to discuss things with his eagle and his serpent. Having returned to his
mountain, Zarathustra was haunted, despite himself, by the idea of God. He felt
it suspended over his head like an sword of Damocles. But he denied it furiously.
A good number of wise men have thought the following: Since I have a soul
and a mind, and there are many more of them, there must be an infinite source
of love and intelligence from which we come and to where we shall return. Lets
worship God. The new prophet says: If there is a God, how would I tolerate not
being one? Therefore, there is no God. This is the paroxysm of the proud
atheist. The absence of universal law seems necessary to him for human liberty.
I placed this heavenly joy on man like an azure bell, by teaching that there is
no eternal will in individual will. The supreme reason is that which is most
impossible. And he calls it the heavenly spider that grasps the world in its
web. And he rejoices that the sky is instead a stage for random accidents. The
true prayer is a spontaneous metaphysical exercise, the respiration and inhalation
through which the soul communicates with its divine source. Here is what
Zarasthustra doesnt want to admit. For him it is the last act of cowardice. Bent
knees and folded hands make him twitch. Damned are these cowardly devils
that are inside of you, who moan and fold their hands and yearn to adore. Prayer
is disgraceful! To those who speak of blasphemy, the prophet laughingly
responds, Yes, I am Zarathustra. The man without God, and from me will be
born Superman.
After thus discrediting the old commandments in this way, he spreads the news.
This news can be summarized in two ideas, the idea of life and that of morality.
For Zarathustra the point of life is the desire for power. Men and animals pretend
to love, but join others only to crush them. The slave submits to his master to take
away his power and to exercise it on his inferiors. The desire to rule is in the depths
of the soul and the goal of life. From this concept of life comes that of morality,
that is, the idea of power substituted for the idea of good and evil. Since the laws
of morality have gone through many variations in different societies and times,
Nietzsche concludes that the good is relative, arbitrary, individual and without
substance. He does not see that the good is nothing more than harmony between
man and society. We can dispute as to the means, but the idea remains the same.
The good conceived as harmony is a positive thing because it gives birth to life.
The perception of evil as nothing more than conflict, is a negative thing and has no
reality in itself. For Nietzsche, the good is merely the will of the strong imposed
on the weak. Do as you please, but know to desire, that is his morality. For him,
evil has as much reality as the good, in fact, he usually prefers evil because it is
201

EDOUARD SCHUR

more vital. I do not let your timorousness spoil my pleasure at the sight of the
wicked. I am happy to see the marvels the hot sun hatches: tigers and palm trees
and rattle-snakes. Among men too, there is a fine brood of the hot sun and much
that is marvelous in the wicked. Indeed, as your wisest man did not seem so very
wise to me, so I found that human wickedness, too, did not live up to its reputation.
Truly, there is still a future, even for evil, and the hottest South has not yet been
discovered by mankind. Your wild cats must become tigers and your poison-toads
and lizards must become crocodiles and dragons.2
Meanwhile, poisoned by sophistry, drenched in pride, Zarathustra falls deeper
and deeper under the bronze fist of his nemesis. Despite his superb impertinence,
the terror of the eternal and the infinite weighs down on him. This terror finally
takes the shape of a hallucination. He himself calls this nightmare the enigma or
the specter of proud solitude [. . .]
There is a powerful nemesis and an impeccable logic in Nietzsches work. The
idea of the divine, or of an original creator, and a final end, anterior and posterior,
to the visible world, superior to time and space, imposes itself on reason without
being able to embrace it. But the intuition and the mind see in God their source and
the reason for all things. The soul goes back to him in an act of love and timeless
goodness that is at the same time an affirmation of itself and acquisition of all the
spiritual knowledge. By denying, due to his arrogance, God, the soul and the
divine love, Zarathustra shut down in himself the superior sphere of the conscience, where man has found, until now, his refuge and his sanctuary. By this
voluntary denial, both hateful and obstinate, he mutilated his own nature. Having
destroyed in himself the paradise of the soul and the Olympia of the pure idea, he
condemns himself to turn for all eternity in the elemental world, la buffera
infernal che mai non resta, and dives into the hell that he has created. He
blasphemously pushes aside the veiled angel of spiritual eternity, but the black
snake of material eternity bites and strangles him.
From this point, Zarathustra thoughts grows blurry. His internal harmony is
destroyed; henceforth he no longer perceives the harmony of the universe. He
wanted to topple the hierarchy of forces in the world; but the hierarchy of his
thought collapses instead, and he loses his reason. Delirium takes over him and the
abyss consumes him. He pushes on in horror with his madness. But until the end,
pride will give him hope. He will persuade himself that his own dissolution will
turn out to be The Superman. The end of the poem carries with it the visible
signs of madness and hallucination. Zarathustra gathers at the fringes of his
kingdom a group of superior men who represent the most distinguished of current
2

Schur virtually always modifies Nietzsches texts to suit his own arguments. The passage just
quoted, in the Hollingdale translation, ends with: Your wild cats must have become tigers [. . .],
which has an entirely different meaning than Schurs quote [ed.].

202

INDIVIDUALISM AND ANARCHY

society. Among them are two kings disgusted by their position, an unemployed
pope, a shoddy magician and a few other eccentric characters. He invites them all
to a banquet in his cave. This rustic meal, seasoned with the caustic maxims of the
master, seems to be both a parody of Platos banquet and Christs final supper.
There we savor a lamb brought by the eagle to remind us that the weak are only
good to be eaten. The prophet, having stepped out for some air, returns to find
his guests in prayer before a donkey, which they praise in lieu of another god.
Zarathustra then understands that these supposedly superior men, despite all, still
need to adore something and divinize someone, even a donkey. They are despicable and unworthy of his attention. He needs the strong men who fear none and
would not bend their wills. At this instant Zarathustra sees a magnificent lion lying
at his feet. This formidable creature is laughing. While terrible to others, he is
gentle with his master and amicably licks his hands. His stands up and roars. All
the terrified guests immediately scramble and run down the mountain in full
speed. The prophet understands that his pity for the superior men had been his
lasts sin. But he declares the his true children will come and shine like the rising
sun.
Such is the conclusion of this famous poem and the anarchic gospel of
Nietzsche. Complete madness was just about to break over him. What is really
tragic and striking in the story of this man is that the peak of his imaginary hero
was the sign of his own defeat. The face of Zarathustra, the ghost that grew out of
himself, was the last hallucination through which he wanted to flee from the
unavoidable abyss, but an abyss which now opened even more widely. Just
consider the interior drama which plays out in the poem. Can one not see the face
of the man wearing the mask of the hero, but with the despair dormant beneath the
apparent triumph? Then we read his next to last writing entitled: Dithyramb of
Dionysus. This entire confession shows the hidden pains behind Nietzsches
fanatical, and how the most daring thinkers can end in darkness if they extinguish
the light of sympathy in their own hearts.
In this study, I have shown the extraordinary qualities of Nietzsche so that the
extent of his fall could be compared to the heights reached by his mind.
A writer of the first order, a penetrating moralist, a deep thinker, a satirical
genius, and a powerful poet of his time, his marvelous talents were destined to be
the great reformer of thought for his generation. But it all drowned in the excess
of self and the furious madness of atheism. Even so, here is the man that a great
number of our youths have adopted as a model and whom superficial minds quote
daily as the prophet of the future. Even if they are willing to accept his conclusions, they should at least learn by his example where certain intellectual practices
can lead. The history of the moral ideas of our times will doubtlessly see in
Nietzsche the great tragedy of a man who had the courage to follow his ideas to
the end, and who gave, by his spiritual suicide, the most impressive proof of his
203

EDOUARD SCHUR

error. As for Zarathustra, he deserves to remain in literature as a unique monument, for he shows us the depths of the soul of the atheist. We can only pity those
who look for a philosophy there. It is a magnificent tomb sculpted in marble, but
it is a tomb that containsnothingness.

204